Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)
Vers de société: Prufrock
Eliot's fame began to grow. Prufrock and Other Observations (i.e. poems) was published in 1917 and was followed by Poems, which was hand-printed by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press. These early poems are mostly vers de société on the vacuity of modern upper-class life and the difficulty of communicating, and they owe much to the French Symbolist school.
The difficult years
The years 1915-25 were a great strain on Eliot. Money problems, having to work full-time in a bank, poor relations with his wife, his own nervous instability, and a general dissatisfaction with modern life common to most artists of the period, all concurred to bring him to the verge of a nervous breakdown by November 1921. He obtained three months' paid leave from the bank and went for rest and medical treatment first to Margate, Southern England, and then to a Swiss sanatorium in Lausanne. During this time he finished the first draft of The WasteLand. On his way back to London he stopped in Paris to submit the manuscript to Ezra Pound, who made extensive cuts and helped him give the poem its final shape.
The first phase: cultural and spiritual sterility
The Waste Landis considered by many as the most important poem of this century. It successfully expresses the modern artist's disillusion with the modern world and, at the same time, his desperate need and search for a new tradition. It also represents the culmination of the first phase in Eliot's career, which may be called nihilistic. The poet sees only ruins and desolation around him and is concerned with aspects of thedecay of Western culture. The central metaphor of this phase - which also includes Gerontion and The Hollow Men - is one of sterility, aridity, impotence.
The second phase: religious hope
Eliot's way out of nihilism was religion. His gradual acceptance of theChristian faith- he was officially received into the Anglican Church in 1927, the year in which he also became a British subject - is reflected in the poems he wrote during the late 1920s: The Journey of the Magi and Ash Wednesday. In them we find a penitential note, a gentle but relentless questioning, a quiet and hopeful searching for a higher truth and values. This reached its culmination with Four Quartets, the first of which, Burnt Norton, came out in 1935, though all four were published together in 1943.
Eliot's religious drama
Eliot's new faith was also clear from the choruses he wrote for The Rock, a church pageant play which he never finished, and Murder in the Cathedral, a play based on the life and martyrdom of Thomas Becket. Eliot was an important dramatist, reintroducing verse drama to the English stage after the predominance of prose in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - despite exceptions such as W.B. Yeats.
The first modernist poet
Eliot's achievement cannot be over-exaggerated. He and Ezra Pound were the first great modernist poets of the English language. His anti-romanticism was by no means iconoclastic; to the “waste land” of the modern world he opposed Western culture, the Middle Ages, theRenaissance, the great rhetorical and philosophical schools, non-European culture (Indian philosophy),new techniques (those of French Symbolism, or of modern music including jazz) and, finally, theChristian religion.
Eliot's style
Like much poetry in the modernist tradition Eliot's is difficult. He himself considered it inevitable that in our time art should be difficult.
Eliot's own poetry presents two kinds of difficulty: the poems of his first, or nihilistic, phase, up to The Hollow Men,are difficult mainly because he deliberately does without connective and transitional passages, putting disparate images or half-disguised quotations side by side; the poems of his second, or 'Christian' phase, are more traditional in their syntactical and image structures, but their philosophical background is quite complex and Eliot often plays on the etymology of his words.
Eliot's sources
Some of the major influences on Eliot's work have already been hinted at above. A synthesis may be useful:
- he learned from theImagists, Pound and T.E. Hulme in particular, the necessity for clear and precise language and images, as well as an economy of words;
- from the French Symbolists Eliot took free verse. From Baudelaire in particular he learned to consider the sordidness and ugliness of modern city life as fit subjects for poetry, especially in Prufrock or The WasteLand;
- of earlier poets in the English tradition he was deeply influenced by John Donne and the Metaphysicals, whom he helpedto re-evaluate, Theiruse of wit and high rhetoric, of daring images taken from different traditions, the philosophical cast of their mind was what he especially admired in them;
- perhaps the single greatest influence on Eliot, though, was Dante, as he himself acknowledged. In the Italian poet he found the expression not of an individual sensibility – a Romantic trait which Eliot thoroughly disliked - but of a whole civilisation, that of the medieval Christianity.
Moreover, Dante in his Divina Commedia had shown that the poet could express a complete range of emotion, from hell's despair to heaven's beatitude. It is precisely this that Eliot believed thepoet should aim at in the difficult modern times.
Prufrock:a modern dramaticmonologue
The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock is best described as a dramatic monologuein the Browning tradition, but of arather special kind. Its persona is not a realistic personality like Browning's Duke of Ferrara or evenTennyson's Ulysses. Prufrock is a voice only, and there seems tobe no coherent mind behind that voice. The things he says, the images that are produced, have no apparent logic; no hidden narrative can be reconstructed from them. As such, the poem is representative of thedisgregation not only of the human personality but also of traditional verse and prose narrative, that took place during the first decades of the twentieth century.
Images of urban decadence
A few scenes, however, can be identified in the apparently incoherent flow of images. They show:
- outdoor scenes of urban degradation and squalor: badly-lit city streets, cheap dirty restaurants and hotels, yellow fog and smoke enveloping the houses, open drains;
- indoor scenes of shallow social intercourse: middle-class interiors, tea and cakes, commonplaces about art, concern about one's clothes, interrupted conversations.
The "objective correlative"
These vivid images are not chosen simply for their strength or because they seem 'picturesque', but because they have an ordering and meaningful function. They give full sense and coherence to a host of disparate images and sensations, and provide what Eliot in an essay on Hamlet (1919) called "an objective correlative", a term which has become current in critical idiom since. In the essay he says:
“The only way of expressing emotions in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative", in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for that particular emotion; such that, when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”
Futility and sterility of everyday life
The poem is about the futility of everyday life, cultural sterility, and spiritual and emotional apathy, but these elements are not narrated. The images of the poem are as fragmented as thedecadent culture they illustrate, and are held together only in the mind of the reader.
Thus, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock presents many of the problems that will be dealt with by Eliot at a deeper level in The Waste Land and the other poems of the 1920s - the main difference being that Prufrock falls into thevers de société genre, while The Waste Land is built on myth and anthropology.
THE WASTELAND (1922)
A modernist poem
The Waste Land is perhaps the central work in the modernist tradition and the one which most decidedly carries poetry into the twentieth century, leaving late Victorian modes behind. As soon as it came out in 1922 it became clear that this was a revolutionary work. Its influence on contemporary and future poets has been immense and even those writers who have not followed Eliot's method have had to come to terms with it, if only to deliberately choose other themes and techniques.
The structure of the Waste Land
The structure of The Waste Land is modernist, its five unequal sections showing no logical continuity. The lines vary in length and rhythm, and would seem to be a form of free verse, although there are some regularities and rhymes.
The contents of the poem
The poem is divided into five sections:
The Burial of the Dead (lines 1-76). This section opens with the coming of spring as a "cruel thing". The fundamental contrast expressed in the poem, aridity-fertility, is thus established from the beginning, in a series of images and scenes which describe a sterile world and culminate in the London crowd crossing London Bridge on a foggy winter morning, looking like the souls of the damned in Dante's hell.
A Game of Chess (lines 77-172). Here the contrastis expressed in two main scenes: the first is one of opulence and decadence, in a richly decorated interior, showing a woman, whose state of frustration and sexual repression come out in her monologue; the second repeats the same ideas on a popular level, being set in a London pub.
The Tire Sermon (lines 173-311). This opens with the River Thames shown in its modern state of squalor and filth, to which is contrasted the mythical Thames of Elizabethan times (the poems of Edmund Spenser are alluded to). The central episode is the seduction of a London typist by a City clerk, typical of modern sex without love or without even physical passion. The central figure here - and, as Eliot suggested, in the whole poem - is that of Tiresias, the blind seer of Greek myth who embodies both sexes. He moves through theWasteLand seeing everything.
In this central section there are also allusions to mystical experiences: Saint Augustine and Buddha (the "Fire Sermon" is a sermon preached by Buddha against the fires of lust). Fire seems thus to have a double connotation: it is the fire of lust but also of regeneration.
Death by Water (lines 312-321). Opposing the fire of the previous section, images of drowning introduce the idea of purification by water which is present in the last section.
What the Thunder Said (lines 322-433). All the themes and motifs of the poem are united here. At the beginning the thunder claps without bringing rain, which the land is waiting for, and the men of the waste land are also waiting. There are clear allusions to the death of Christ, but the god (the poem is centred on the pagan god of the ancient fertility rites) is not yet resurrected to bring a new spring to his land. In this part references and quotations range from Dante to St Luke's Gospel to the medieval romances of the Grail Quest (the legend of Parsifal), and they all point to the breakdown of civilisation: London Bridge is falling, and so are Jerusalem's towers, Athens, Vienna. On these ruins, the poet says, he must support himself. The poem ends with the words of an Upanishad, a poetic commentary on the Hindu scriptures.
A poem with no story but a meaning
The Waste Land is difficult to read, containing many references to stories and myths which are not always known to the average reader, and with words, sentences and quotations in foreign languages, from German to Sanskrit.
Though it has no 'story' in a traditional sense, the poem is about thespiritual dryness and sterility of modern life, the death of culture through lack of any belief, religious or other, that can give meaning to everyday existence.
A Game of Chess
A Game of Chess- the second section of The Waste Land -examines the theme of cultural and emotional sterility in two widely different contexts, one upper-class and the other lower-class. The scene opens in an richly-decorated interior, whose obsessive atmosphere is conveyed first through a lavish description of the furniture and then through the neurotic questions of a female speaking voice. She may be actually speaking to someone, though this is not clear (the words that fill her pauses are not in quotation marks, that is in direct speech); what is certain is that this voice can only express her own incapacity to speak, think, act.
Then the scene moves to a pub, where a woman is talking about a friend of hers, Lil, who has problems with her husband and is not happy with her life. The situation here is different - the scene is lively enough and people do act - but it betrays lack of love and emotions all the same. The last words of the section echo Ophelia's words in Shakespeare's Hamlet and take the reader, by contrast, to the world of tragedy, where love is such a strong emotion that people got mad and commit suicide because of it.
THE MAKING OF A MODERN EPIC
The dedication to Pound
The WasteLand's dedication reads: "For Ezra Pound il miglior fabbro" (the tribute Dante pays to the Provencal poet Arnaut Daniel in Purgatorio, Canto XXVI, line 117). Eliot wanted to indicate his indebtedness to his friend. Pound read Eliot's manuscript carefully, and made many corrections and changes, cutting out single lines and whole episodes. In the end the poem was reduced from its original thousand lines to 433. Though he did not accept all of Pound's suggestions, Eliot fully acknowledged the fact that he had not only eliminated less successful passages but had also helped give the poem a shape and internal coherence. He remarked that Pound's ability had "done so much to turn The Waste Land from a jumble of good and bad passages into a poem".
A difficult poem
In The Waste Land, Eliot furthers the techniques of impersonality and illogical dissociation of images that are present in Prufrock. It cannot be reconstructed into a coherent, logically ordered narrative or message - even the single speaking voice of Prufrock is absent here. The images are juxtaposed, not logically ordered. The fragmentation of the poem is a reflection of the fragmentation of contemporary culture, in which each individual must try to find a personal ordering or interpretation. a
The difficulties of the poem can be summed up as follows:
- the absence of any narrative order, or of any narrative at all;
- the absence of an ordered time sequence: past and present are juxtaposed: throughout the poem, with the past usually used to highlight the present -such a method is also used by Ezra Pound in his Cantos and James Joyce in Ulysses;
- the time shifts and the lack of a narrative sequence reveal Eliot's stream-of-consciousness technique, based on free association of thoughts in man's mind, as in James Joyce's or Virginia Woolf’s novels;
- a partial lack of syntax and, occasionally, punctuation, which render the passage from one scene of the poem to the next even more abrupt;
- quotations from or allusions to 35 writers, in six languages, as well as frequent allusions to various philosophical and religious traditions.
The mythical structure of the poem
The Waste Land contains many references to sterility and fertility which provide a framework for all the various fragments of the poem. Eliot himself referred his readers to a book by Jessie Weston called From Ritual to Romance, and to Sir James Frazer's monumental study of pagan myths and fertility rites called The Golden Bough.
Jessie Weston relates ancient fertility myths and rites to the rituals of Christianity, and then to the medieval romances of the Holy Grail. In these romances we see a waste land whose ruler, the Fisher King, has brought sterility to the land because of his impotence or death - depending on which of the many versions of the myth we are reading. Nothing in the waste land can reproduce itself, and life cannot continue, until a knight appears who goes to the Chapel Perilous in the waste land and correctly asks a set of ritualistic questions about the Holy Grail (a grail is a cup) and the Holy Lance - Weston connects them back in time to ancient symbols for female and male sexuality. When these questions are asked, the Fisher King is cured or restored to life, and the waste land becomes a fertile country again.
Myth as an ordering of experience
The poem is a kaleidoscope of passages and references with no immediate order but, as in Joyce's Ulysses, the fragmentary nature of life as we experience it can be given an imaginary or psychological order by myth. The order of myth is thus projected on to thechaos of modern life.