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Essay on modernism in english literature
Essay on modernism in english literature
Literary period modernism
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The Importance of Modernist Writing on American Society Many interpretations can be inferred after reading T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land. At the time the short story was written, the Modernist Movement and Stream-of-Consciousness style narrative was a growing trend in early twentieth-century American writers. In more ways than one, Eliot’s writing style targets the roots of early American modernism with regard to depersonalization, outlining the extremes of fragmentation, despair, and separation; this focus directly relates to the insecure nature of the speaker, J. Alfred Prufrock. Similar themes of American modernism are revealed within The Waste Land when Eliot illustrates there is no true narrator; …show more content…
In The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Alfred is a man who seems to have no control on his mentality and succumbs to misery; he perceives his surroundings as muddled and tremendously fragmented. He mentions the state of his age repetitively, “With a bald spot in the middle of my hair”, “I grow old...I grow old…” (823, 40), (825, 120). I relate the idea of muddled mentality to the age to Prufrock: with old age comes confusion. Furthermore, he later states, “No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;”, when he clearly is very similar to him, such that he cannot decide on courses of action (824, 111). The man practically has no self-confidence; as he is a man of old age attempting to have relations with sophisticated women “talking of Michelangelo” (823,36). He further expresses this by comparing himself to “the Fool”: a jester in the Royal Court that nobody gives the time of day to (825, 119). Throughout trying to depict a streamline narrative of the depressing life of J. Alfred Prufrock, the poem is extremely fragmented leaving the reader …show more content…
They encompass royal thrones, a bar in London, and even a desert; there seems to be no sense of organization for locations the poem is written. A reason behind such extreme settings could be these stories are more mental landscapes in one single observer, which make the understanding of The Waste Land a bit more realistic. Eliot depersonalizes Tiresias, the spectator in The Waste Land. “I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see” (832, 219-218). Tiresias is given no defined sexual identity and is blind to all things around, thus has a lost sense of identity in society. However, Tiresias is blind to the materialistic world, thus the person can see. This voice is merely an observer successful in seeing what the modern world has come to: a Waste Land. Eliot states, “Here is no water but only rock, Rock and no water and the sandy road” (835, 331-332). I believe Eliot refers this dry landscape to the mentality of modern men and how the blind Tiresias can see its true wickedness. Later, Eliot states, “There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home. It has no windows, and only the door swings” (836, 389-390). This could possibly suggest that this dry mentality of modern man influences cultural religious abandonment. The “wind’s home” further depicts the idea of desertion and that nobody inhabits the building; the only way into it is
One of the most monumental poetic works of T.S Eliot is ‘The Waste Land’. The poem emerges as a gigantic metaphor for melancholy, loneliness, solitude- the unavoidable companions of human existence. Similar kinds of feelings are evoked by Robert Frost in ‘Desert Places’.
There are those who claim with reference to ‘ The Waste Land,’ that ‘its mere fineness of detail constitutes direction,’ or that it’s a ‘filigree without pattern,’ both of which quotations suggest to the reader, what the Formalists claimed, which is that it’s valuable for its form. Eliot himself said eventually that his poem was ‘rhythmic grumbling.’
Suddenly, the reader understands that the poet intends to deliver a specific message, luring his audience to delve into the poem in search of it. Half of Eliot’s message is indeed clear with his title: we are living in the waste land now. The bulk of the poem he spends showing his audience how we have established for ourselves this waste of a land and the manners in which we continue to waste it- and consequently humanity- primarily with our ennui. Everything builds to the dramatic, and highly ambiguous, conclusion presented in meditation V, “What the Thunder Said”. This conclusion is the other half of Eliot’s message in which the poet expresses man’s only hope for salvation, leading ultimately to life in a land restored to its natural state, and not the atrophied world we now inhabit.
The text itself however, points towards the idea that Prufrock lies on an immaculately woven edge between a will to act and his frightened introspection. Prufrock himself believes that “there will be time” - he is does not think that he has no chance, only that “They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!” or “But how his arms and legs are thin!”. This facet of his character is not futility, but self consciousness and doubt for he had been thinking only on the side of his
suggests that heaven is not real. Another way Eliot makes us think. life is futile is that we feel nothing for the hollow men, they are. emotionally detached from us and we don't care about them or their lives and this suggests that one in the distant future will even know of our existence as many of us make no impression on the world.
Emily Galvin Photo history Essay November 4, 2015 There is a closely knitted relationship between rise of American modernism and photography classified as fine art. These two movements were conceived around the same time, and began to be introduced and intertwined within each other, into the web of ‘what is art’. While there was the rapid quest to push American Modernism throughout New York city, Alfred Stieglitz’s had a vision of pushing photography as a medium of expression.
In the first section of The Waste Land, “The Burial of the Dead,” Eliot offers a criticism of London, a center of modern life, and its people. He describes London as an “Unreal City” which suffers “[u]nder the brown fog of a winter dawn” (7), which suggests that London is dirty, cold, and uninviting. The people, too, are unhappy and discontent, as many sigh frequently and keep their eyes “fixed” on their feet (7). That each person is focused on his own space suggests that each person is isolated, despite being surrounded by a crowd. Eliot also writes of the crowd, “I had not thought death had undone so many…There I saw one I knew, and stopped him” (7); these references to Dante’s journey through hell in the Inferno link the people in the crowd to the dead and London to hell. The imagery and wording that Eliot uses present the reader with the overwhelming sense that London is a place of depressing and dirty isolation.
Prufrock lives his life like a passerby and while Hamlet takes action both suffer as neither feel a sense of belonging within their homes. Both feel like strangers in a strange and foreign world, but they both also share bad relationships with women. Prufrock doesn’t understand woman and cannot summon up the courage to talk to them. Because of this he lives his life waiting for the proper time to talk to them only for it to have passed him by. Prufrock cannot ever find the courage to ask his overwhelming question and lets it go unanswered.
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.
In his poem "The Waste Land," T.S. Eliot employs a water motif, which represents both death and rebirth. This ties in with the religious motif, as well as the individual themes of the sections and the theme of the poem as a whole, that modern man is in a wasteland, and must be reborn.
Alfred Prufrock” is used in expressing the speaker’s insecurity and self-doubt in a changing and a modernized society. Primarily the poem will focus on the inability of the speaker in talking to women, and how this is having a relation to his weak self-esteem. It is important to note that throughout the poem, the speakers demonstrate repetition, words like “In the room, the women come and move talking Michelangelo” (Wei, 12-14). Through such observation of women going and coming, it serves as a disruption of the hypothetical dialogue of the speaker, with the lady he was in love with. He didn’t have the confidence in approaching ladies since they could intimidate him more so in the society where women are independent and are so
For symbolism, the underlying messages are presented through a series of specific words and details written such as color: “The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes / The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes” (15-16) or creatures, comparable to the crab Prufrock yearned to be: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas” (73-74). Throughout “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” these symbols reveal more about Prufrock’s character. The heavy description of “yellow fog” and “yellow smoke” resemble much of his mind: cloudy. As well as the use of the color yellow, a color a part of “the secondary group” described as “derivative and restrictive” (Ryan 141), links to cowardice, thus enhances the notion perceived by Prufrock’s character. Such words related to “silent” make it clear that Prufrock longs to be alone, isolated from the rest of the world, wishing to escape it all. Overall, the idea of symbolism displays the character’s life which in turn showcases that the poem is indeed related to
Such images as these are like those seen by Eliot when he once lived in St. Louis. Due to Eliot’s obsession with certain scenery and negative outlooks on life, he is able to project moods into his work.
Different speakers in "The Waste Land" mirror the disjointedness of modern experience by presenting different viewpoints that the reader is forced to put together for himself. This is similar to the disassociation in modern life in that life has ceased to be a unified whole: various aspects of 20th-century life -- various academic disciplines, theory and practice, Church and State, and Eliot's "disassociation of sensibilities," or separation of heart and mind -- have become separated from each other, and a person who lives in this time period is forced to shore these fragments against his or her ruins, to borrow Eliot's phrase, to see a picture of an integrated whole.
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.