The multitude of underlying notions central to the all-encompassing human condition, as portrayed and delved into within a wide variety of literary and visual texts, are just as crucial to an exploration of humanity as the numerous vivid emotions and feelings they evoke. Love’s proclivity for overriding ordinary sane instincts, the nature of social connections or lack thereof amongst people in a community, and the persistent impacts of profoundly bitter regret are all particular concepts of the human condition regularly examined by authors of creative works. Through an examination of T.S. Eliot’s poem The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Michael Leunig’s cartoon The Life You Lead, and Guy de Maupassant’s short story All Over, it is evident that the various fundamental interpretations of collective human existence are truly intertwined with their associated thoughts and attitudes.
No critical analysis of the instincts and desires innate to the human condition, as depicted by countless creative composers and universally contemplated by individuals within society, would be complete without a consideration of love both as a concept of humanity and in terms of its accompanying emotive effects. The undeniable romantic inclinations attributed to fellow human beings have been presented throughout time from a multitude of varying perspectives, with the common ubiquitous implication that love’s sheer power can invalidate all rational human tendencies and lead to certain fundamentally correlating emotional consequences. Such evocative impacts are evidenced in T.S Eliot’s The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock through a recurring motif in “There will be time, there will be time”, demonstrating Prufrock’s indecisive uncertainty as he procrasti...
... middle of paper ...
...tain aspects of humankind’s collective existence that are undoubtedly applicable across an almost endless array of situations and manifestations, destined to pertain to every single individual within society during at least some point in their lifetime. Particularly relevant facets of the human condition in this respect incorporate the sheer dominating irrationality of potent love, interpersonal social relationships between human beings as a framework upon which society is built, and the irrepressible tendency to ponder regretfully over one’s position as a result of significant decisions. A consideration of T.S. Eliot’s The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Leunig’s The Life You Lead, and Guy de Maupassant’s All Over conclusively imparts the notion that the aforementioned concepts of humanity are inextricably and directly linked to our accompanying emotional condition.
The Romantic period in American literature is different than what it initially sounds like. There is a lot of talk of evaluation and judgement of human life as we know it to be. In works like “The Devil and Tom Walker”, “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment”, and “The Pit and the Pendulum” humanity seems to be put on trial and assessed to the fullest degree. This paper will further analyze humanity as a whole, based on the representations of these works above.
... us all. We can all relate to it. Thus, drawing not only upon his personal experiences and emotion but also universal emotion as well as elegiac and pastoral traditions, Roethke reveals himself as not only a warm, caring instructor but also as an outstanding, and perhaps instinctive, poet.
Many hearts are drawn to history's greatest love stories, such as Romeo and Juliet, Bonnie and Clyde, and Helen and Paris to name a few. One could argue that humanity’s way of finding happiness is to seek love. Pure, unadulterated love is one of the hardest feelings to acquire, but when one does, they’d do anything to keep it. Through Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and his characters, Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, readers discover that this innate desire to be accepted and loved is both our most fatal flaw and our greatest virtue.
If I were asked who the most precious people in my life are, I would undoubtedly answer: my family. They were the people whom I could lean on to matter what happens. Nonetheless, after overhearing my mother demanded a divorce, I could not love her as much as how I loved her once because she had crushed my belief on how perfect life was when I had a family. I felt as if she did not love me anymore. Poets like Philip Levine and Robert Hayden understand this feeling and depict it in their poems “What Work Is” and “Those Winter Sundays.” These poems convey how it feels like to not feel love from the family that should have loved us more than anything in the world. Yet, they also convey the reconciliation that these family members finally reach because the speakers can eventually see love, the fundamental component of every family in the world, which is always presence, indeed. Just like I finally comprehended the reason behind my mother’s decision was to protect me from living in poverty after my father lost his job.
T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” tells the speaker’s story through several literary devices, allowing the reader to analyze the poem through symbolism, character qualities, and allusions that the work displays. In this way, the reader clearly sees the hopelessness and apathy that the speaker has towards his future. John Steven Childs sums it up well in saying Prufrock’s “chronic indecision blocks him from some important action” (Childs). Each literary device- symbolism, character, and allusion- supports this description. Ultimately, the premise of the poem is Prufrock second guessing himself to no end over talking to a woman, but this issue represents all forms of insecurity and inactivity.
With full diction such as “violent and aggressive “and “feelings of exclusivity” he appeals to our deepest emotions for the sake of conveying the importance of humanism and the things we are able to feel. However, with feelings as options instead of something everyone has whether liked or not, society would overlook the importance of experiencing these emotions because of the invincibility we would have above the sense of heartbreak or grief. Although we would all love to skip the arduous times, enduring them is not only what makes us human, but also what makes us grow. We may not realize that feeling makes up society today, which is why the author reaches out at these emotions to show how Transhumanist views may make us feel better as individuals but as a whole, the social aspects of the world will
¬The human condition fundamentally embodies the experience of what is essentially considered vital to ‘being a person’, including not only the physique of a human, but more specially their behaviour and mentality. Due to the immense number of perspectives and variations of ideologies texts can demonstrate, a responder’s comprehension of the human condition can be substantially developed to create a broader understanding of society. These traits are particularly established in Samuel Wagan Watson’s poems itinerant blue (2002) and the finder’s fee (2002), as well as Fyodor’s Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment which delve most into mortality, insight and uncertainty respectively. Thus, these texts predominantly examine the psychological aspect of the human condition and mark it as the most significant.
Some may say love is just an emotion while others may say it is a living and breathing creature. Songs and poems have been written about love for hundreds and thousands of years. Love has been around since the beginning of time, whether someone believes in the Big Bang or Adam and Eve. Without love, there wouldn’t be a world like it is known today. But with love, comes pain with it. Both William Shakespeare and Max Martin know and knew this. Both ingenious poets wrote love songs of pain and suffering as well as blossoming, newfound love. The eccentric ideal is both writers were born centuries apart. How could both know that love and pain work hand in hand when they were born 407 years apart? Love must never change then. Love survives and stays its original self through the hundreds and thousands of years it has been thriving. Though centuries apart, William Shakespeare and Max Martin share the same view on love whether i...
“I am nothing special, of this I am sure. I am a common man with common thoughts and I've led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I've loved another with all my heart and soul and to me, this has always been enough.” That is a quote from The Notebook, a famous book written by Nicholas Sparks in 1996. This quotation inspires people to have faith that love is the only thing in the world that they need. They need not have prosperity or fame. They simply need an individual to love with all their hearts for all eternity. The world is a place where love seems to somehow find its way through in the most difficult of times. Nicholas Sparks is a dedicated author, father, husband, and donor who sees that clearly and demonstrates that in his novels. To understand the genuine significance of Nicholas Sparks and his novels, one must know his background, the truth about what the critics think about his novels and his influence on today’s society.
T.S. Eliot has been one of the most daring innovators of twentieth-century poetry. His poem“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, is different and unusual. He rejects the logic connection, thus, his poems lack logic interpretation. He himself justifies himself by saying: he wrote it to want it to be difficult. The dissociation of sensibility, on the contrary, arouses the emotion of readers immediately. This poem contains Prufrock’ s love affairs. But it is more than that. It is actually only the narration of Prufrock, a middle-aged man, and a romantic aesthete , who is bored with his meaningless life and driven to despair because he wished but
Topic: Human nature and relationships between people –focusing on the idea of love in literary works: “Lady with the Pet Dog”, Anna Karenina, Pride and Prejudice.
Authors use poetry to creatively present attitudes and opinions. “A Man’s Requirements,” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and “A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment” are two poems with distinct attitudes about love that contain different literary approaches. In both of the poems, love is addressed from a different perspective, producing the difference in expectation and presentation, but both suggest the women are subservient in the relationships.
Franz Kafka’s character Gregor Samsa and T.S. Eliot’s speaker J. Alfred Prufrock are perhaps two of the loneliest characters in literature. Both men lead lives of isolation, loneliness, and lost chances, and both die knowing that they have let their lives slip through their fingers, as sand slips through the neck of an hourglass. As F. Scott Fitzgerald so eloquently put it, “the loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly”. Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” are both exceptional examples of such lonely moments. Both authors use characterization, imagery, and atmosphere to convey the discontentedness and lack of fulfillment in the life and death of both Samsa and Prufrock.
It is accurate to suggest that an interdependent relationship exists between the individual and society. It is also accurate to state that in order for both the individual and society to flourish, the two entities must complement one another in values, beliefs and needs. It may be perceived that through carefully constructed characterisation throughout his eighteenth century novel ‘The Sufferings of Young Werther’, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe holistically depicts the way in which the relationship between society and the individual can shape the individual, how the individual, having been rejected from society, can become a body of self destruction and the way in which relationships throughout society can be shaped in response to conflicting perspectives of the individual and society as a whole.
With time poems may have lost their voice, but not their importance. Up to this day, poetry is still one of the greatest forms of artistic expression; Poems speak to emotions and capture feelings. There is no right format of a poem, but yet a world of possibilities. Instead being unchangeable poems are innately open to interpretation; they should be spoken out loud in order to be “heard”, convey truth and cause impact. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot is an extremely meaningful poem; it is one of Elliot’s best-known works and without a doubt a masterpiece (Hillis). T.S. Eliot introduces the poem with a quote from Dante's Inferno (XXVII.61-66), and with that sparks our curiosity. He then makes statements and questions that perhaps everyone has done, or will do at some point in life (Li-Cheng, pp. 10-17). The poem is a legitimate work of the modernist movement, the language used is contemporary; the verses are free and the rhythm flows naturally.