T.S. Eliot:

1. T.S. Eliot: Points of Departure

2. Some difficulties with T.S. Eliot's poetry  (taken from Robert DiYanni's essay,"T.S. Eliot" in Modern American Poets: Their Voices and Visions) • The heavy use of allusion • borrowings from foreign languages • The structural mode of juxtapositon • mystical and paradoxical ideas about time, death, and spirituality • references to history, philosophy, and literature    --especailly medieval and Renaissance drama, classical literature of Greece  and Rome • utilizing those references within the context of the poetry

3. Difficulties, 2 • fragmentary nature of the poetry with its lack of connection between sections, stanzas, lines, and sentences--unity and coherence must in many ways be supplied by the reader. • highly imagistic • the poems often assume musical structures • juxtaposing crude and disgusting details of the present with the more wholesome images of the past. • poetry should reflect the complexities and ambiquities of experience

4. Difficulties, 3 • the poetry, like music, doesn't always require rational understanding; a poem can be apprehended emotionally if not comprehended intellectually • Eliot's belief that poetry should be difficult and that great poetry need not be understood in every line and detail to be appreciated

5. Eliot Pro or Con • The poem has been described as THE modernist masterpiece. • DiYanni claims it is the “single most widely read and most frequently analyzed American poem of the twentieth century. • “It is, for many, the most challenging poem of the century, and probably the most important.” • “The Wasteland is important not only as a poetic achievement in its own right, but also as a remarkable influence on an entire generation of poets. . . . “ • Perkins claims the poem is endowed with “imaginative intensity and suggestion” “almost visionary intensity.

6. Eliot Pro and Con, 2 • Has been described as a “mad medley” • Amy Lowell called it a “piece of tripe” • Parasitic on past styles • Formless • Academic • Anti-democratic • Defeatist

7. Some Points of Departure • “. . . No previous poem gave so vivid an impression of the contemporary, urban metropolis.” –Perkins • The technique resembles avante-garde cinematic montage • Fragmentation, juxtaposition, use of vignettes • The use of memory to contrast past with present—Grail Legends, The Golden Bough and fertility rituals

8. Points of Departure, 2 • Modern Sexuality • Cultural Decay/Cultural Exhaustion • Possibilities for regeneration/Hope • Experimental Poetry