Murder in the Cathedral is a two-part, verse drama, tragedy play written in 1935 by Thomas Stearns Eliot, also known by his pen name as T. S. Eliot. It joined many similar writings in the year of 1170 when Archbishop Thomas á Becket was assassinated in the cathedral at Canterbury by four knights ordered by King Henry II following Becket’s rejection of the King’s new marriage (Trudeau 2). Eliot’s most famous works including The Waste Land (1922) and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) were in the past, and a new style of writing would emerge from the more pensive, older Eliot. This type of writing revolved around Christianity and religion, and included mostly plays that lacked the quality of his world-renowned poems. Eliot’s impact on twentieth-century literature is undeniably one of great magnitude; however, Murder in the Cathedral, while still laudable and celebrated among its peers, marked the beginning of the end of his reputable and impressive career.
T. S. Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1888 as the youngest of seven children. His father was president of the Hydraulic Brick Press Company, his mother a teacher, social worker, and writer (Trudeau 1). Despite his family’s strict religious beliefs, Eliot grew up a skeptic and an agnostic. Soon he left his hometown to attend Harvard University, studying French literature and philosophy. After a graduate school at several universities, a failed marriage, a nervous breakdown, and the publishing of his most famous work The Waste Land, Eliot made some major changes. He transferred to Anglicanism and became a British citizen, both possibly being big reasons for his change in writing style (Trudeau 1). Eliot died in 1965 of emphysema.
Eliot’s grandfather was a Unita...
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(1970): 83-101. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski. Vol. 13.
Detroit: Gale, 1980. 192-96.
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Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Eds. Sharon R. Gunton and Laurie Lanzen
Harris. Vol. 15. Detroit: Gale, 1980. 206-10.
Spender, Stephen. “Poetic Drama.” Penguin Modern Masters: T. S. Eliot (1975). Rpt. in T. S.
Eliot’s ‘Murder in the Cathedral.’ Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. 87-94.
Goode, John. "Adam Bede: A Critical Essay," in Ed. Barbara Hardy, Critical Essays on George Eliot, (1970).
“Murder on a Sunday Morning” directed by the documentary filmmaker Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, is a documentary film based on the false conviction of an innocent 15-year-old black African-American teenager, Brendon Butler, who got arrested when he was on his way to a job interview. The case originated from the assassination of a tourist from Georgia, Mary Ann Stephens, who at the time of the incident was 65 years old and was shot dead while she was on vacation in Jacksonville, Florida in May of 2000 with her husband. This film emphasizes multiple errors made by the police and witness during the arrest and trial of Brendon. Also displays the erroneous eyewitness identification, the non-orthodox interrogations, moreover the false confession written
Eliot, T.S.. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." An Introduction to Poetry. 13th ed. of the year.
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:
Scholars have long endeavored to identify the sources of various images in T. S. Eliot's work, so densely layered with literary allusions. As Eliot himself noted in his essay "Philip Massinger" (1920),
...s, Colleen. The love song of T.S. Eliot: elegiac homoeroticism in the early poetry. Gender, Desire, and Sexuality in T. S. Eliot. Ed. Cassandra Laity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. p. 20
"T.S. Eliot: Childhood & Young Scholar." Shmoop.com. Shmoop University, Inc., 11 Nov. 2008. Web. 30 Jan. 2014.
Written in two different literary periods “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning and T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” share various similarities with one another. While Browning can not be credited for inventing the dramatic monologue himself it was his fondness and skill for it that raised it to a highly sophisticated level. He also helped increase its popularity both with poets and the general public. His huge success with dramatic monologues served as inspiration for Eliot years later. Based on his work, Eliot was clearly influenced by the dramatic monologue style used by Browning. However, despite their similarities there are stark differences between the poems by Browning and Eliot. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” shows a clear movement away from the Victorian style found in “My Last Duchess” and goes towards Modernism.
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
T.S. Eliot was a poet, dramatist and he was also a literary critic. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The...
Southam, B.C. A guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1994.
T.S Eliot, widely considered to be one of the fathers of modern poetry, has written many great poems. Among the most well known of these are “The Waste Land, and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, which share similar messages, but are also quite different. In both poems, Eliot uses various poetic techniques to convey themes of repression, alienation, and a general breakdown in western society. Some of the best techniques to examine are ones such as theme, structure, imagery and language, which all figure prominently in his poetry. These techniques in particular are used by Eliot to both enhance and support the purpose of his poems.
...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.