‘For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.’ – A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf
Eliot’s philosophical view point on modern literature takes a platonic standpoint in relation to imitation, or more so the art of imitation. Eliot states that ‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.’ His poem ‘The Waste Land’ echoes this idea of imitating a piece of art to produce something new, seemingly a text such as The Waste Land ‘is fundamentally dramatic in character’; (pg 11 Macmillan) and within the notion of modernity the reader faces a complex task of connecting with any authorial intention. However, a key aspect of modernist literature was to imitate daily life, essentially the roles are reversed as daily life, particularly in the modernist era, often imitated art.
Eliot references a vast amount of literature and language within his work, and ironically finds his originality through his extensive imitation ‘in which impressions an experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways.’ (pg 18 Macmillan) If one agrees with the notion of art imitating life and vice versa, then it is arguable that originality is not the main objective, rather ones subjective individuality assigned to the text. Critical theorist Frank Kermode, found the art of imitation a pleasing one, on analysis of the canon Kermode states that canonical texts ‘completely locked in their times, their texts as near frozen as devout scholarship can make them, their very language more and more remote’(Kermode: p 29) . Yet he goes on to say that paradoxically, writers works, ‘by this same fact, are set free of time’. Kermode...
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...e his classification of beauty. Again there is a direct link to religion and the Virgin Mary whereby Eliot is drawing a connection between the physical beauty of this women (‘Belladonna’) and the moral beauty encapsulated in the story of Mary within the Bible. The importance of this reference can be noted in Eliot’s essay, ‘Tradition and The Individual Talent’, in which he describes how history is a timeless influence over any author or artist, this is not a form of plagiarism, rather an inescapable notion of influence bound in the authors bones. ‘This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional.’ (ref) Indeed, Eliot does show his appreciation for ‘the dead poets and artists’ by often referencing the likes of William Shakespeare and Dante Alighieri.
Despite the similarities between these two poems, Corso and Eliot shared little in common. Corso spent much of his early life between foster parents and prison, the latter being where he was introduced to poetry. Now credited as a key member of the “Beat Generation”, a group of poets who were opposed to social conformity and the traditional forms of poetry, Corso typically wrote poetry “on serious philosophical issues” (Olson 53). On the other hand Eliot’s upbringing was more traditional where he attended Harvard and went on to become a figure of immense influence in the literary world. Eliot’s first major poetic publication: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock bares many resemblances to Corso’s postmodern poem Marriage, a poem written to criticize the philosophical issues associated with marriage.
The most obvious stylistic device used by Eliot is that of personification. She uses this device to create two people from her thoughts on old and new leisure. The fist person is New Leisure, who we can infer to be part of the growth of industry in the 19th century. He is eager and interested in science, politics, and philosophy. He reads exciting novels and leads a hurried life, attempting to do many things at once. Such characteristics help us to create an image of New Leisure as Eliot sees him.
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.
Williamson, George. A Reader's Guide to T.S. Eliot; a Poem by Poem Analysis. New York:
In order to accomplish this goal Eliot incorporated allusions into his work. These references added historical context and depth to his poetry. On the other hand Wallace Stevens opposed Eliot’s large reliance on allusion, calling it overly intellectual and a hindrance to the sound and rhythm of the poem. While Stevens’s portrayal of the desolate present was similar to Eliot’s imaginings, Stevens chose to focus on an American future rather than a European past.
...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.
Other images of Eliot’s, in contrast, are much larger than Shakespeare, but again succeed in making Eliot’s character look small and insignificant in comparison. Eliot describes the enormous amount of adornments around the room, including her ‘vials of ivory and coloured glass’, which contain many perfumes, which are described as ‘drowning the sense in odours’ and again it is the lack of subtlety t...
Both Browning and Eliot seek to improve upon the nature of the dramatic monologue. Browning emphasizes structure and a separation between the poet and the character which is reiterated by Eliot’s poem. Browning’s influence on Eliot can be seen by the form and structure of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” adding working intrinsically with the theme and subject of the work. However, Eliot deviates slightly from Browning by the portrayal of his characters, and the amount of information that he is willing to share with the reader. The intended message of Browning’s poem is much more apparent than Eliot’s who creates an open ended poem that can be interpreted differently by each reader.
The Modernist era of poetry, like all reactionary movements, was directed, influenced, and determined by the events preceding it. The gradual shift away from the romanticized writing of the Victorian Era served as a litmus test for the values, and the shape of poetry to come. Adopting this same idea, William Carlos Williams concentrated his poetry in redirecting the course of Modernist writing, continuing a break from the past in more ways than he saw being done, particularly by T.S. Eliot, an American born poet living abroad. Eliot’s monumental poem, The Waste Land, was a historically rooted, worldly conscious work that was brought on by the effects of World War One. The implementation of literary allusions versus imagination was one point that Williams attacked Eliot over, but was Williams completely in stride with his own guidelines? Looking closely at Williams’s reactionary poem to The Waste Land, Spring and All, we can question whether or not he followed the expectations he anticipated of Modernist work; the attempts to construct new art in the midst of a world undergoing sweeping changes.
Kenner, Hugh. T.S. Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1962.
...tradition and believes that it can not be inherited,it could be obtained by great labour.According to Eliot a poet should write through his own experiences so he could create a masterpiece.(Tradition and the Individual Talent)
T.S. Eliot was a poet, dramatist and he was also a literary critic. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The...
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.
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.