Thomas Stearns Eliot novels

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)
- Born in St Louis, Missouri, from a family of English descent. Though an American by birth, his cultural background was at first English and then European. In fact he learned Italian by studying Dante.
- At the outbreak of the First World War he settled in London. In 1915 he married the British ballet dancer Vivien Haigh-Wood, despite her mental instability.
- Vivien was in poor health and Eliot was under emotional strain. He spent some time in a Swiss sanatorium, in Lausanne, undergoing psychological treatment and here he finished The Waste Land; poetry was, in fact, his only refuge where he expressed all his horror at his unhappy home life. This long poem was published in 1922 after the American poet Ezra Pound had contributed to reduce it to its final form, and Eliot later dedicated it to Pound himself, "il miglior fabbro - the better craftsman", a quotation from Dante's Purgatory.
- In 1927 he became a British citizen and in the same year he joined the Church of England, finding the answer to his own questionings and to the despair of the modern world lacking faith and religion.
- He wrote religious poems, Ash-Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1935-1942) and two important plays, Murder in the Cathedral (1935) on the assassination of Thomas Becket, and Family Reunion (1939).
- Eliot finally decided to separate from his wife, who was committed to a mental asylum, where she died nine years later in 1947.
- In 1948 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
- He died in London in 1965.
The Waste Land (1922)
- An amazing anthology of indeterminate states of mind, of impressions, hallucinations, situations and personalities.
- There’s one voice relating to a multiple personality beyond the limits of space and time: there’s Tiresias, the Theban prophet from Sophocle's plays who experienced blindness and the life of both sexes, and there’s the knight from the Grail legend who moves through London and a post-war Middle Europe, which has been deprived of its spiritual roots.
- The Waste Land consists of five sections.
The sterility of the present
- All these fragmentary parts have one main theme: the contrast between the fertility of a mythical past and the spiritual sterility of the present world. This poem reflects the breakdown of a historical, social, and cultural order destroyed by the war and by those forces operating under the name of modernity.
The new concept of history
- The mythical past appears in the references and quotations from many literary works belonging to different traditions and cultures, and religious texts, like the Bible and Hindu sacred works. This use of quotations reflects the concept Eliot had of tradition and history, that is, the repetition of the same events, and of "classicism", that is, the ability to see the past as a concrete premise for the present and "the poetic culture" as a "living unity" of all the poems written in different periods. Thus present and past exist simultaneously in The Waste Land, just as they do in the mind, and the continuous shifts of time and space are caused by the free associations of ideas and thoughts.
The innovative stylistic devices
- The style of The Waste Land is fragmentary because of the mixture of different poetic styles, such as blank verse, the ode, the quatrain, the free verse, thus reproducing the chaos of present civilisation: the meaning is not in the single fragment but in the whole.
- Metaphor and symbol replace direct statement; to this purpose, Eliot adopted the technique of the objective correlative, that is the attempt at communicating philosophical reflections and feelings by means of a simile, of a description or a monologue by a character in order to provide a vision of the world or a feeling of the lyrical "I". For example in The Fire Sermon the objective correlative of the squalid, passionless present age is the banal and loveless scene of the seduction of a typist by her lover.
- From the French Symbolists Eliot derived the technique of juxtaposition: squalid elements are juxtaposed with poetic ones, trivial elements with sublime ones. Another device widely used by Eliot is the repetition of words, images and phrases from page to page: they all give the impression of the increasing musicality of the poem.
The mythical method
- Eliot contrasts the meaninglessness of life with allusion to the Arthurian legend and the Quest for the Holy Grail, a metaphor for man's search for spiritual salvation.
- "It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history

Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)
The Waste Land (1922)
The Hollow Men (1925)
Ash-Wednesday (1930)
Four Quartets (1935-1942)

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5) Modernist Poetry: Thomas Stearns Eliot – Critic, Poet and Playwright. The Auden Generation

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)

Biography
- no official biography, poet, playwright, literary critic, editor, publisher
- 1914 – Ezra Pound
- originally American citizen, born in St. Louis, Missouri, best schools, Harvard, doctorate in philosophy
- 1927 – conversion, British citizen and member of the Anglican Church – self-definition: “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion”
1948 – Nobel Prize for literature

His Art in General

transition: late 1930s → theatre
conservative; religion
complex themes, conflict in thought and emotion
means of expression: antithesis, paradox, incompatible metaphor, irony, depending on the association of ideas; humour, irony, wit
allusive technique (“Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal”), their structural function; sources: Jacobean stage verse, Dante, Shakespeare, Metaphysical poetry, Browning, Henry James, Baudelaire, French Symbolism, influence of Ezra Pound; !!!conspicuously absent from his tradition: Milton, the Romantics, Tennyson and Whitman; “mythical method”
technique – free verse, loose verse forms with a blank verse basis → regular stanza forms; mask lyric, dramatizing tendency, dramatic monologue

Eliot as Critic
The Sacred Wood (1920)

“Tradition and the Individual Talent” → Eliot’s personal concept of tradition, based on a sense of history, which is “a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.”
“Impersonal theory of poetry”, poet’s mind = catalyst →
objective correlative formulated in “Hamlet and His Problems”: “The only way of expressing emotion 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 of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”

“The Metaphysical Poets” (1921) - dissociation of sensibility
- major criteria for authentic poetry: 1) vital relation to tradition 2) poetry should affect us as a direct sensation –
After Strange Gods (1934)–moralist
The Idea of a Christian Society (1939)– behind tradition, culture a unified religious background of Christianity, orthodoxy; social criticism; exclusionary, prescriptive cultural judgments; valuable diagnostic cultural judgments

Poetry
Prufrock and Other Observations (1917, written 1909-11)
- observer, detachment, depersonalisation, impersonality; Prufrock as a mask ↔ Sweeney in Poems 1920

- dramatic monologue – “A species of lyric poetry in which the speaker is a persona created by and clearly distanced from the poet; the speaker's character is revealed unintentionally through his or her attitudes in the dramatic situation. Furthermore, the speaker may address and interact with silent listeners, usually not the reader. Fine examples of the dramatic monologue are Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess" and T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

epigraph: Dante, Inferno – Guido’s soul is asked his name in hell, his answer is the epigraph – “If I thought my answer were to one who ever could return to the world, this flame should shake no more; but since none ever did return alive from this depth, if what I hear be true, without fear of infamy I answer thee.”

The Waste Land (1922)

L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance – Fisher King myth, Grail story, Tarot cards; Frazer’s The Golden Bough – fertility/vegetation myth, the dying and reviving god, vegetation rites
parts: The Burial of the Dead, A Game of Chess, The Fire Sermon, Death by Water, What the Thunder Said)
What the Thunder Said DA – Sanskrit “give”, “sympathise” and “control”
“I, Tiresias”
epigraph: Petronius, Satyricon – Sybil

“The Hollow Men” - Lord’s Prayer (1925)
Ariel Poems andAsh-Wednesday - “The Journey of the Magi” (1930)
Four Quartets (originally four separate poems, published individually)
1935 – Burnt Norton
1940 – East Coker
1941 –The Dry Salvages
1942 – Little Gidding

T. S. Eliot as a Playwright

- innovation: the poetic drama
- Murder in the Cathedral (1935) ← historical subject matter, moralities and miracle plays, allegorical form, Greek drama, e.g. the Chorus, topic – martyrdom, sainthood, religion; specific social purpose – Canterbury Festival
- plays in modern setting: The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1949), The Confidential Clerk (1953) – Greek plays, myth, religious topics

War Poetry
Background and Definition

War Poetry = the poetry of WWI, war poets = poets whose career was determined by poems on war; Robert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden, Siegfried Sassoon, Herbert Read, Robert Graves also started his career as a war poet, John Silkin

The Auden Generation

poetry of the Thirties in general: any poetry written at that time, including Eliot, Dylan Thomas, etc.; poetry of the Thirties in a narrower sense = the Auden generation or the Oxford Group, : MacSpaunday = Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, Cecil Day Lewis

General Characteristics

political poetry
Great Depression, Spanish Civil War (1936-39), WWII
Marx and Freud; literary predecessors: G. M. Hopkins, Wilfred Owen, T. S. Eliot (most important) → traditional and experimental, innovative qualities

Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973)
General Features

poet, playwright, essayist, writer of opera librettos, film techniques
in line with the Romantic tradition in the 20th century (Yeats, Auden, Dylan Thomas)
free verse, but also regular forms

Life and Poetic Career

1907 - born in York, moved to Birmingham = centre of the “Black Country”
started to write poetry at 16, loss of faith, homosexuality
Oxford
major influences: Keats, Thomas Hardy’s poetry, Edward Thomas, Carl Sandburg, Rainer Maria Rilke; Marx, Freud → “Miss Gee”; → “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” (1939); → “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (1939) – elegy; occasional poem in conversational style
1930, Poems – first volume, hand-printed, limited number →T. S. Eliot, The Criterion

- 1930s –Isherwood, plays, influence of expressionism, the poems he is most often remembered for were written in this period, closing with the volume Another Time (1940)
- 1937 –Spain, an ambulance driver in the Civil War

1939 – permanent move to the U.S.A. → 1946 – U.S. citizen
1940s – returned to Christian faith
the role of art: “Musée des Beaux Arts” and “The Shield of Achilles”

→“Musée des Beaux Arts” - Breughel’s Icarus, also: The Numbering at Bethlehem, The Massacre of the Innocents
→ “The Shield of Achilles” (1955 – The Shield of Achilles) - intertextuality: Homer, Iliad; Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”; Hephaestos, Tethis, Ariel (beauty) ↔ Prospero (truth)

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Thomas Stearns Eliot novels

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