Important Features of T.S. Eliot's Poetry | Eureka Study Aids

Important Features of T.S. Eliot's Poetry

Introduction

     When T.S. Eliot died, wrote Robert Giroux, "the world became a lesser place." Certainly the most imposing poet of his time, Eliot was revered by Igor Stravinsky "not only a great sorcerer of words but as the very key keeper of the language." For Alfred Kazin he was "the mana known as 'T.S. Eliot', the model poet of our time, the most cited poet and incarnation of literary correctness in the English-speaking world." Northrop Frye simply states: "A thorough knowledge of Eliot is compulsory for anyone interested in contemporary literature. Eliot attracted widespread attention for his poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", which was seen as a masterpiece of the Modernist movement. It was followed by some of the best-known poems in the English language, including The Waste Land, "The Hollow Men", "Ash Wednesday", and Four Quartets. Important features of his poetry are as following; 

1. The Damaged Psyche of Humanity

     Like many modernist writers, Eliot wanted his poetry to express the fragile psychological state of humanity in the twentieth century. The passing of Victorian ideals and the trauma of World War 1 challenged cultural notions of masculine identity, causing artists to question the romantic literary ideal of a visionary-poet capable of changing the world through verse. Eliot saw society as paralyzed and wounded, and he imagined that culture was crumbling and dissolving. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" demonstrates this sense of indecisive paralysis as the titular speaker wonders whether he should eat a piece of fruit, make a radical change, of if he as the fortitude to keep living. Humanity's collectively damaged psyche prevented people from communicating with one another, an idea that Eliot explored in many works, including "A Game of Chess" and "The Hollow Men."

2. The Power of Literary History

     Eliot maintained great reverence for myth and the Western literary Canon, and he packed his work full of allusions, quotations, footnotes, and scholarly exegeses. In "The Tradition and the Individual Talent," Eliot praises the literary tradition and states that the best writers are those who write with a sense of continuity with those writers who came before. Eliot also argued that the literary past must be integrated into contemporary poetry. But the poet must guard against excessive academic knowledge and distill only the most essential bits of the past into a poem, thereby enlightening readers. The Waste Land juxtaposes fragments of various elements of literary and mythic traditions with scenes and sounds from modern life. The effect of this poetic collage is both a reinterpretation of canonical texts and a historical context for his examination of society and humanity. 

3. The Changing Nature of Gender Roles

     Eliot lauded the end of the Victorian era and expressed concern about the freedoms inherent in the modern age. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" reflects the feelings of emasculation experienced by many men as they returned home from World War 1 to find women empowered by their new role as wage earners. A disdain for unchecked sexuality appears in both "Sweeney Among the Nightingales" and The Waste Land. The latter portrays rape, prostitution, a conversation about abortion, and other incidences of non-reproductive sexuality. Nevertheless, the poem's central character, Tiresias, is a hermaphrodite - and his powers of prophesy and trans formation are, in some sense, due to his male and female genitalia. With Tiresias, Eliot creates a character that embodies wholeness, represented by the two genders coming together in one body. 

4. Fragmentation

    Eliot used fragmentation in his poetry both to demonstrate the chaotic state of modern existence and to juxtapose literary texts against one another. In Eliot's view, humanity's psyche had been shattered by World War 1 and by the collapse of the British Empire. Collaging bits and pieces of dialogue, images, scholarly ideas, foreign words, formal styles, and tones within one poetic work was a way for Eliot to represent humanity's damaged psyche and the modern world. Every line in The Waste Land echoes an academic work or canonical literary text, and many lines also have long footnotes. These echoes and references are fragments themselves, since Eliot includes only parts, rather than whole texts from the Canon. Using these fragments, Eliot tries to highlight recurrent themes and images in the literary tradition, as well as to place his ideas about the contemporary state of humanity along the spectrum of history. 

5. Mythic and Religious Ritual
     Eliot's tremendous knowledge of myth, religious ritual, academic works, and key books in the literary tradition informs every aspect of his poetry. He filled his poems with references to both the obscure and the well known, thereby teaching his readers as he writes. In his notes to The Waste Land, Eliot explains the crucial role played by religious symbols and myths. He drew heavily from ancient fertility rituals, in which the fertility of the land was linked to the health of the Fisher King, a wounded figure who could be healed through the sacrifice of an effigy. The Fisher King is, in turn, linked to the Holy Grail legends, in which a knight quests to find the grail, the only object capable of healing the land. Ultimately, ritual fails as the tool for healing the wasteland, even as Eliot presents alternative religious possibilities, including Hindu chants, Buddhist speeches, and pagan ceremonies.
6. Infertility
     Eliot envisioned the modern world as a wasteland, in which neither the land nor the people could conceive. In The Waste Land, various characters are sexually frustrated or dysfunctional, unable to cope with either reproductive or non-reproductive sexuality: the Fisher King represents damaged sexuality, Tiresias represents confused or ambiguous sexuality, and the women chattering in "A Game of Chess" represent an out-of-control sexuality. In "The Hollow Men," the speaker discusses the dead land, now filled with stone and cacti. Corpses salute the stars with their upraised hands, stiffened from rigor mortis. Trying to process the destruction has caused the speaker's mind to become infertile: his head has been filled with straw, and he is now unable to think properly, to perceive accurately, or to conceive of images or thoughts.
7. Music and Singing
     Like most modernist writers, Eliot was interested in the divide between high and low culture, which he symbolized using music. He believed that high culture, including art, opera, and drama, was in decline while popular culture was on the rise. In The Waste Land, Eliot blended high culture with low culture by juxtaposing lyrics from an opera by Richard Wagner with songs from pubs, American ragtime, and Australian troops. Eliot splices nursery rhymes with phrases from the Lord's Prayer in "The Hollow Men," and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is, as the title, implies a song, with various lines repeated as refrains. That poem ends with the song of mermaids luring humans to their deaths by drowning - a scene that echoes Odysseus's interactions with the Sirens in the Odyssey. Music thus becomes another way in which Eliot collages and references books from past literary traditions.
8. Objective Correlative
     T.S. Eliot defines objective correlative as "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion" that the poet feels and hopes to evoke in the reader. He constantly employs objective correlative in his own poetry (although Smidt complained that Eliot often resorted to private memories which had meaning for him alone). The Waste Land is based on an externalized structure of parallel myths which, though they differ in appearance, stress the dilemma of the human situation as Eliot perceived it. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is the best example of this literary device. Prufrock is supposed to embody the general identity of the modern man i.e. weak, over-educated and unexciting etc. Therefore the way Eliot describes him is a sort of objective correlative for that particular archetype.
9. Eliot's Style
     Eliot's diction shows a high level of erudition, and he makes no attempt to lower it to reach a wider audience. He is particularly fond of using phrases and verses quoted from works in languages other than English - many verses in "The Waste Land" are in German. While the opening verses of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" are the original Latin version of verses from Dante's Inferno. Eliot wrote in free verse form. Overall, Eliot's style is lengthy and laden with literary devices of one sort or another. He uses his knowledge of literature and of the English language expertly to develop poetry with an amazing flow despite its length and use of elevated diction, and his figurative language has a profound effect on the reader.

I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. 

                                                        (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock) 

Notes Prepared By: Prof. Shahbaz Asghar