Comparing TS Eliot and Charles Dickins The poetry written by Thomas Stearns Eliot, Portrait of a Lady has a strong connection with the novel by Henry James. Both deal with almost the same issues. In the poem Eliot talks about how a person will live his or her life during the 19th century. How they would always do exactly what was considered right during that era in society. Eliot mention how rare and strange it is to find true friends. In the novel everyone pretend to be your best friend and was only using the person to benefit something for his or her own convections (Lozano, 2). You do not know how much they mean to me, My friends, and how, How rare and strange it is, to find In a life composed so much, So much of odds and ends (Eliot 19-21). Many people during the 19th century really made friends so that they can have more people coming to their tea parties, one of the things that are mention in the poem as well as in the novel (Lozano, 3). Isabel Archer was considered to be a very innocent lady; she was being taken advantage so that others can get what they wanted when all she wanted was a real friend. Madame Merle was a clever woman who used her to get money for her daughter (Henry, 181). Repeatedly saying in this poem that he will serve tea to his “friends”. He is saying that in this era there was no such thing as a real friend even though everyone wanted one of his or her own. For everybody said so, all our friends, They all were sure our feelings would relate So closely! I myself can hardly understand. We must leave it now to fate.
When creating his famous poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", T.S. Eliot was inspired by a character depicted in the novella known as Daisy Miller, written by Henry James. This character, Winterbourne, was intertwined and considered when creating the timid character of Prufrock. It is evident that both men share similar personalities and characteristics that link them together, both being prime examples of emptiness and despair told through theses writings.
The life of a lady in the 19th century is painted in a romantic light. Pictured in her parlor, the lady sips tea from delicate china while writing letters with a white feathered quill. Her maid stands silently off in the background, waiting for orders to serve her mistress. What is not typically pictured, is the sadness or boredom echoed on the lady’s face. Perhaps the letter is to a dear friend, not seen in ages, pleading with the friend to visit, in hopes that the friend will fill the void in the lady’s life made from years spent in a loveless marriage. Possibly the lady isn’t writing a
T.S. Eliot had very philosophical and religious meanings behind this poem, and that helped me relate personally very well with this work of his. He used allusions to other poems, letting me make connections with works I have read before. He also used inclusive language and had the same opinion as me portrayed in this work. Based on these, T.S. Eliot has convinced me of his messages in this poem, as well as made this by far my favorite of his.
T.S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats portray their characters as two men, who are trying to deal with the idea of loneliness. Both men are presently depressed with their existing lifestyles and crave to become a part of an entirely different state of affairs. As these authors present their characters desires to live a separate life from their recent one, Prufrock and the narrator (Yeats) take a different approach to expressing their ideas of loneliness. Eliot chooses to depict his character as an overly educated man, whose mental state is deteriorating because he longs for companionship, while Yeats chooses to depict his character as a man, who wants to live-out his childhood dream in solitude. Both authors show their characters as men who are trying to cope with their feelings toward seclusion.
...hoices, Eliot shows the opposite outcome of depression and regret from a lifetime of indecision. Whether it is a far-away land of fantastical beings, the woods down the street, or perhaps the nearest city, a journey will always yield a different experience, and indecision is just as much a decision as any other. Choosing to remain inactive in a world that calls for action is to choose to grow old and have nothing of substance to look back on, since nothing was ever done.
by a few close friends and his immortal poetry. This essay is founded around one
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.
Many people in this world have no true friends and those that do have very few. A true friend could have seen that something was not right with this man. Perhaps the first speaker in the poem thinks that he was closer to the second then he actually was.
There are several other places and occurrences in these novels that show how much people unknowingly care for eachother and desire to socialize with one another. Although T.S. Eliot believed that modern society in the 1920’s lacked a vital sense of community and a spiritual center, character interactions, events, and places in Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Great Gatsby prove otherwise.
Alfred Prufrock, ample details about the settings are described to reflect the speaker’s emotions. For instance, the first stanza paints the scene that an innocent and unconfident middle age man hesitates to propose to a woman. For one thing, the speaker of the poem is afraid that time will go wasted. On the other side, he feels powerless to the reality. Apparently, Eliot directly tells the reader the internal conflict of the speaker of the poem, who is greedy of love but fears for the responsibility that comes with it. What this setting in the poem reflects is the emptiness and weakness of folks in modern
Moody, Anthony David. The Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 121. Print.
“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go,” T.S. Eliot is basically trying to say that only people who push their limit can actually see how much they can really accomplish. T.S. Eliot made poetry that showed his negative views on life, people, and world. T.S. Eliot took poetry to another level by the way he writes and uses symbolism.
Within the context of this historical epoch, characterized by its reverence for "earnestness, moral responsibility" and "domestic propriety," the function of art as a device to both commemorate and conserve societal ideals makes it an effective instrument for the delineation of the Victorian individual. Those operating within the domain of literature, therefore, attempted to recreate their experience of the issues challenging Victorian society. The efforts of poets in this period to identify and explore these issues, including the position of women in society, are reflected in their works. Nineteenth century poets Tennyson and Rossetti endeavored to confront the prevalent social issues within England at the time. Amy Roxana in her writing explains that their texts, The Lady of Shallot and Goblin Market respectively, engage in “literary discourse with one another on the Victorian Era's perception of women in society, presenting dissimilar views on the idea of women's need for male protection, but mutually concluding that the place of women is indeed within the domestic sphere”.
In T.S Eliot's poem, Portrait of a Lady, he gives a glimpse into the upper class of post war society- something rather dispirited and forlorn. It is filled with people from the higher social standings and they are as soulless and empty as the lady in the poem. The upper class was also represented by the main character himself, who is truly unable to connect as a whole to his surroundings. He initially describes the world in the poem as dark, covered in smoke and haze – the scene that is in and of itself a mere half life, the individuality of the characters already swallowed by the abyss of ritual that has devoid of meaning. The truly shocking part that links this poem to the author’s previous poems is the underlying brokenness and the soullessness that the characters seem to inhabit. The main character of t...
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri, the seventh and last child of Henry Ware Eliot, a brick manufacturer, and Charlotte (Stearns) Eliot, who was active in social reform and was herself a not-untalented poet. Both parents were descended from families that had emigrated from England to Massachusetts in the seventeenth century. William Greenleaf Eliot, the poet's paternal grandfather, had, after his graduation from Harvard in the 1830s, moved to St. Louis, where he became a Unitarian minister, but the New England connection was closely maintained--especially, during Eliot's youth, through the family's summer home on the Atlantic coast in Gloucester, Massachusetts.