In his poem, “The Hippopotamus,” T.S. Eliot asserts doubts about the institution of the Church and its apparent corruption resulting from its basis in a tainted world. T.S. Eliot composed many works concerning the despondent state of theology and faith, but as a result of his “lifetime of conflicting attitudes” (Bush 32), “The Hippopotamus” has remained obscured and somewhat insignificant to his legacy. Written before he converted to Christianity, Eliot’s uses his knowledge of religion from his family’s Unitarian background (Bush 6 and 12) to challenge the position of the Church and its accredited spirituality. He proposes the speculation that although the Church is blessed and receives support, funds, and praise from its spiritual patrons and volunteers, a man indifferent to the issues of faith struggles without reward in life before the same God. By implementing the literary devices of symbolic imagery, allusion, and paradox in his theological ode, Eliot states that the corrupted institution will remain trapped in a material world filled with sin while a man facing redemption will rise up from the insignificant tribulations of life to a kingdom in Heaven.
Apparent foremost in “The Hippopotamus” is the rich array of symbolic imagery used to sarcastically imply doubt and misgivings in the Church at the beginning of the work and later to glorify and illuminate the hippopotamus as it ascends into the afterlife. Eliot states, “Flesh-and-blood is weak and frail / Susceptible to nervous shock / While the True Church can never fail / For it is based upon a rock” (5 – 8). The lines present a visual condition in which the institution is solid and infallible as it is founded on stone or firm ground, while the hippopotamus is expose...
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...aith as well as a circumstance for followers of the Church. Approaching multiple audiences simultaneously with singular messages, T.S. Eliot alerts a diverse community to the masquerade presented by the corrupted institution and the result of a lifestyle unassociated with such impurity. Truly, “Eliot remains one of the twentieth century's major poets” (Bush 132).
Works Cited
Bush, Ronald. "T.S. Eliot's Life and Career." Welcome to English « Department of English, College of LAS, University of Illinois. Web. 10 Mar. 2011. .
"The Hippopotamus, by T.S. Eliot." Poetry Archive | Poems. Web. 10 Mar. 2011. .
Western Connecticut State University. "Better Look Twice: Eliot's Hippo in a Poetic Parade." Beyond the Margins. Department of Enlgish. Web.
...f course, this analysis leaves me with a glaring question. Why does Eliot hold onto the morality defined by Christianity after surrendering its God? Why doesn't she re-evaluate that structure as well, rather than holding onto it by transferring authority? Why bother dismissing God if the visible fabric remains static? Perhaps she's being pragmatic -- perhaps she fears anarchy in the wake of a passing God.
examines the effects of Eliot’s first marriage on his views of love and time. She
... with in every page make George Eliot’s Middlemarch a timeless classic that can cross over many boundaries.
Joseph Goebbels once said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it” (Goebbels). Joseph Goebbels along with the Communist Party used this to describe their propaganda scheme to draw a whole nation into their control. This action shows a lapse of responsibility and the ability to escape a problem. Like Goebbels, the characters of The Sun Also Rises and The Hollow Men use excuses to get away from the problem. The characters in The Sun Also Rises are also considered Hollow Men as the group continually refuses to care or make a choice because the characters constantly turn to escapism to forget their problems, seemingly cope with changes in their lives but fail to do so, and regularly flashback to the past show a focus on a life already lived.
Form often follows function in poetry, and in this case, Eliot uses this notion whe...
Eliot, T.S. The wasteland. In The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume II. Edited by Paul Lauter et al. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1991: 1447-1463.
T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th ed. Vol. 2. ed. M. H. Abrams New York, London: Norton, 1993.
Williamson, George. A Reader's Guide to T.S. Eliot; a Poem by Poem Analysis. New York:
This essay will argue that the eschatology of the Book of Revelation forms an integral part of John’s attempt within the pages of his book to form a literary world in which the forms, figures, and forces of the earthly realm are critiqued and unmasked through the re-focalization of existence from the perspective of heaven. It will attempt to show that, in response to the social, political, religious, and economic circumstances of his readers, the Book of Revelation forms a counter imaginative reality. Through drawing upon an inaugurated sense of eschatology and evocative imagery, John is able to pull the reader in and show them the true face of the imperial world and consequences of its ideology, forcing the reader allegiance to fall with either ‘Babylon’ or the New Jerusalem.
...In "The Waste Land," Eliot delivers an indictment against the self-serving, irresponsibility of modern society, but not without giving us, particularly the youth a message of hope at the end of the Thames River. And in "Ash Wednesday," Eliot finally describes an example of the small, graceful images God gives us as oases in the Waste Land of modern culture. Eliot constantly refers back, in unconsciously, to his childhood responsibilities of the missionary in an unholy world. It is only through close, diligent reading of his poetry that we can come to understand his faithful message of hope.
T.S. Eliot was a poet, dramatist and he was also a literary critic. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The...
The various critics of Hopkins' "The Windhover" find woven throughout its diverse levels expressions of Hopkins' central theme: all toil and painful things work together for good to those who sacrificially love God. The research of Alfred Thomas provides an interesting place to begin a study of the major critical approaches to the dominant theme in "The Windhover. " Thomas chooses to view the poem's theme through what he feels are its sources, citing as the major source Hopkin's life as a Jesuit. Thomas' articulation of the central paradox of the poem, then, is in the terms of the ascetic life which the Jesuit poet would have experienced: Hopkins, the priest, desires to obtain spiritual glory/gain through sacrificing a secular life for one of religious tasks.
...mpossible to overstate Eliot's influence or his importance to twentieth-century poetry. Through his essays and especially through his own poetic practice, he played a major role in establishing the modernist conception of poetry: learned, culturally allusive, ironic, impersonal in manner (but, in his case, packed with powerful reserves of private feeling), organized by associative rather than logical connections, and difficult at times to the point of obscurity. But, despite the brilliance and penetration of his best essays, Eliot could not have accomplished so wholesale a revolution by precept alone. First and last, it was through the example of his own superb poetry that he carried the day, and the poetry will survive undiminished as his critical influence waxes and wanes, and as the details of his career recede into literary history.
T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is an elaborate and mysterious montage of lines from other works, fleeting observations, conversations, scenery, and even languages. Though this approach seems to render the poem needlessly oblique, this style allows the poem to achieve multi-layered significance impossible in a more straightforward poetic style. Eliot’s use of fragmentation in The Waste Land operates on three levels: first, to parallel the broken society and relationships the poem portrays; second, to deconstruct the reader’s familiar context, creating an individualized sense of disconnection; and third, to challenge the reader to seek meaning in mere fragments, in this enigmatic poem as well as in a fractious world.
...required a reinvention of poetics and the very use and meaning of language. Since the modern period is said to extend to this day (it's debated whether it's post-modern or not, since both elements survive), any final say on the matter is difficult. What can be said is that Eliot's poetry, as misinterpreted, misread, and misunderstood as it may be, is a quintessential cornerstone in modernist thought, a fragment in the puzzle, which may yield an emergent whole, though it may not be fully grasped.