Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) and Ezra Pound (1885-1872) were two Americans who lived in Europe and altered the manner and form of English poetry. Pound urged a conscious modernization of verse, and, in Eliot he believed he found a poet who had modernized himself already; though Pound still made revisions to Eliots work and cut almost half the lines of 'The Waste Land', Eliots most famous poem.
Pound might have grumbled that Eliot had got all the breaks. T. S. Eliot was born into a wealthy patrician family in St. Louis, Missouri, and had all the educational chances that money can pay for. He attended Harvard and the Sorbonne and admired the French Symbolist poets, especially Jules Laforgue who influenced his early flippant style of writing. He came into contact with Rimbaud, Corbire and Laforgue through Ar thur Symons Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899).
Listening to the many recordings he made of his own verse, there is little of the trans-Atlantic in Eliots dry voice - wry, with a rasp of humour, and very English. He arrived in London in 1914 and decided to stay. Through Pound he met a vivacious and unstable ballet dancer whom he married possibly, as a recent commentator has suggested, to disguise his homosexuality.
Eliot began work on his best known early poem 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' in 1910. He was a graduate student at Harvard, immersed in Sanskrit and Buddhism at the time, and wrote a number of light verses in a similar voice. Ezra Pound helped him finish the poem in London and it was published in Chicago in 1915. Prufrock is not a person but a style of living. Eliot was a deeply serious and scholarly man who was afraid of sounding so and hid behind facetiousness and his facility with words. Later he was to be taken very seri ously indeed. To contemporary readers, Prufrock did not look like a poem at all: in 1915 poetry was what Rupert Brooke had written before he died.
The United States entered the war in 1917 and Eliot was liable for military service. He was found to be medically unfit but refused to appear idle or disdainful of ordinary working life so took a clerking job with Lloyds Bank that he held for the next eight years apArt from a period of convalescence following a nervous collapse in 1919. During World War II he was to serve as an air raid warden and firewatcher in London while completing the Four QuArtets.
'The Waste Land' and James Joyces Uly sses both appeared in 1922. Leonard and Virginia Woolf hand-printed the early work of Eliot at the HogArth Press and also accepted Ulysses for publication; however, the latter appeared in Paris because English printers refused to set it. 'The Waste Land' did not meet with any moral objections: it was simply regarded as weird. It was published originally in Eliots own journal The Criterion; but what was not known at the time was that Ezra Pound, who had moved to Paris, cut 400 lines from the work with Eliots agreement.
The poem has received much critical and scholarly attention. It was erudite. It drew on references to European and Indian culture with odd juxtapositions of the classical and colloquial. Eliot appeared to be exploring the possibilities of regeneration after the collapse of a culture that had lost its certainties and values. The Quest for the Holy Grail is a motif along with figures from Sir James Frazers anthropological work The Golden Bough (191115) that examined the role of myths in the progress of cultures. To embrace myth and readmit primitive behaviour was not, for C. G. Jung, to flee modernity but to face up to it: and Eliot agreed with Jung rather than Frazer for whom myth was superstition. The Great War had shown Europe to be more primitive than the great and the good cared to admit. 'The Waste Land' is a poem of moods in which the past foreshadows the present and the future waits in hope of grace descending. It even came with its own set of notes.
Eliot rekindled interest in the Metaphysical poets, especially John Donne (1572-1631) and George Herbert (1593-1633). He also attempted to recreate modern verse drama, with less success; the most memorable example being Murder in the Cathedral (1935) which concerns the assassination of Archbis hop Thomas Becket on 29 December 1170 in Canterbury Cathedral. It recalled the original foundation of the English church by Augustine at Canterbury and the mArtyr whose tomb was an object of pilgrimage for four centuries until the Reformation the goal of Chaucers pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales.
To Eliot it was an affirmation of his adopted Englishness: an affirmation that found an enduring place in the English literary consciousness through 'Four QuArtets' 'Burnt Norton', which appeared in Collected Poems (1936), 'East Coker' (1940), 'The Dry Salvages' (1941), and 'Little Gidding' (1942) published together in 1943. The last three poems we re composed during the Blitz when Eliot nightly observed the blacked-out city of London in fireflash silhouettes of searchlights and anti-aircraft fire and incendiary bombs falling about the dome of St Paul's; and 'Little Gidding' contains the aftermath of an air raid and a strange meeting with the shade of William Butler Yeats and Stphane Mallarm before the All Clear sounds.
Read the full version of this essay at: http://www.literature-study-online.com/essays/TS-Eliot.html
Stephen Colbourn has published many Articles about literature on Literature-study-online at http://www.literature-study-online.com. He is a freelance writer. He has written widely on English Language Teaching and has published Articles on literature, linguistics, and computers in various journals together with many Readers for Heinemann and Macmillan Education. He has contributed Articles on literature to The Essentials of Literature in English post-1914, published by Hodder Arnold in 2005.
Author:: Stephen Colbourn
Keywords:: T. S. Eliot,The Waste Land,English Literature,The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,Four QuArtets
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