THEORY:

Life of T.S. Eliot:

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on September 26, 1888. He
lived in St. Louis during the first eighteen years of his life and attended Harvard
University. In 1910, he left the United States for the Sorbonne, having earned both
undergraduate and masters degrees and having contributed several poems to
the Harvard Advocate.

After a year in Paris, he returned to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in philosophy, but

returned to Europe and settled in England in 1914. The following year, he married
Vivienne Haigh-Wood and began working in London, first as a teacher, and later for
Lloyd’s Bank.

It was in London that Eliot came under the influence of his contemporary Ezra Pound,
who recognized his poetic genius at once, and assisted in the publication of his work in
a number of magazines.

Themes and Style:

THE DAMAGED PSYCHE OF HUMANITY

Like many modernist writers, Eliot wanted his poetry to express the fragile
psychological state of humanity in the twentieth century. The passing of Victorian ideals
and the trauma of World War I challenged cultural notions of masculine identity,
causing artists to question the romantic literary ideal of a visionary-poet capable of
changing the world through verse. Modernist writers wanted to capture their
transformed world, which they perceived as fractured, alienated, and denigrated.
Europe lost an entire generation of young men to the horrors of the so-called Great
War, causing a general crisis of masculinity as survivors struggled to find their place in
a radically altered society. As for England, the aftershocks of World War I directly
contributed to the dissolution of the British Empire. Eliot saw society as paralyzed and
wounded, and he imagined that culture was crumbling and dissolving.

THE POWER OF LITERARY HISTORY

Eliot maintained great reverence for myth and the Western literary canon, and he
packed his work full of allusions, quotations, footnotes, and scholarly exegeses. In
“The Tradition and the Individual Talent,” an essay first published in 1919, Eliot praises
the literary tradition and states that the best writers are those who write with a sense of
continuity with those writers who came before, as if all of literature constituted a stream
in which each new writer must enter and swim. Only the very best new work will subtly
shift the stream’s current and thus improve the literary tradition. Eliot also argued that
the literary past must be integrated into contemporary poetry. But the poet must guard
against excessive academic knowledge and distill only the most essential bits of the
past into a poem, thereby enlightening readers. The Waste Land juxtaposes fragments
of various elements of literary and mythic traditions with scenes and sounds from
modern life. The effect of this poetic collage is both a reinterpretation of canonical texts
and a historical context for his examination of society and humanity.

THE CHANGING NATURE OF GENDER ROLES

Over the course of Eliot’s life, gender roles and sexuality became increasingly flexible,
and Eliot reflected those changes in his work. In the repressive Victorian era of the
nineteenth century, women were confined to the domestic sphere, sexuality was not
discussed or publicly explored, and a puritanical atmosphere dictated most social
interactions. Queen Victoria’s death in 1901 helped usher in a new era of excess and
forthrightness, now called the Edwardian Age, which lasted until 1910. World War I,
from 1914 to 1918, further transformed society, as people felt both increasingly
alienated from one another and empowered to break social mores. English women
began agitating in earnest for the right to vote in 1918, and the flappers of the Jazz Age
began smoking and drinking alcohol in public. Women were allowed to attend school,
and women who could afford it continued their education at those universities that
began accepting women in the early twentieth century. Modernist writers created gay
and lesbian characters and re-imagined masculinity and femininity as characteristics
people could assume or shrug off rather than as absolute identities dictated by society.

Motifs

FRAGMENTATION

Eliot used fragmentation in his poetry both to demonstrate the chaotic state of modern
existence and to juxtapose literary texts against one another. In Eliot’s view, humanity’s
psyche had been shattered by World War I and by the collapse of the British Empire.
Collaging bits and pieces of dialogue, images, scholarly ideas, foreign words, formal
styles, and tones within one poetic work was a way for Eliot to represent humanity’s
damaged psyche and the modern world, with its barrage of sensory perceptions. Critics
read the following line from The Waste Land as a statement of Eliot’s poetic project:
“These fragments I have shored against my ruins” (431). Practically every line in The
Waste Land echoes an academic work or canonical literary text, and many lines also
have long footnotes written by Eliot as an attempt to explain his references and to
encourage his readers to educate themselves by delving deeper into his sources.
These echoes and references are fragments themselves, since Eliot includes only
parts, rather than whole texts from the canon. Using these fragments, Eliot tries to
highlight recurrent themes and images in the literary tradition, as well as to place his
ideas about the contemporary state of humanity along the spectrum of history.

MYTHIC AND RELIGIOUS RITUAL

Eliot’s tremendous knowledge of myth, religious ritual, academic works, and key books
in the literary tradition informs every aspect of his poetry. He filled his poems with
references to both the obscure and the well known, thereby teaching his readers as he
writes. In his notes to The Waste Land, Eliot explains the crucial role played by
religious symbols and myths. He drew heavily from ancient fertility rituals, in which the
fertility of the land was linked to the health of the Fisher King, a wounded figure who
could be healed through the sacrifice of an effigy. The Fisher King is, in turn, linked to
the Holy Grail legends, in which a knight quests to find the grail, the only object capable
of healing the land. Ultimately, ritual fails as the tool for healing the wasteland, even as
Eliot presents alternative religious possibilities, including Hindu chants, Buddhist
speeches, and pagan ceremonies. Later poems take their images almost exclusively
from Christianity, such as the echoes of the Lord’s Prayer in “The Hollow Men” and the
retelling of the story of the wise men in “Journey of the Magi” (1927).

INFERTILITY

Eliot envisioned the modern world as a wasteland, in which neither the land nor the
people could conceive. In The Waste Land, various characters are sexually frustrated
or dysfunctional, unable to cope with either reproductive or nonreproductive sexuality:
the Fisher King represents damaged sexuality (according to myth, his impotence
causes the land to wither and dry up), Tiresias represents confused or ambiguous
sexuality, and the women chattering in “A Game of Chess” represent an out-of-control
sexuality. World War I not only eradicated an entire generation of young men in Europe
but also ruined the land. Trench warfare and chemical weapons, the two primary
methods by which the war was fought, decimated plant life, leaving behind detritus and
carnage. In “The Hollow Men,” the speaker discusses the dead land, now filled with
stone and cacti. Corpses salute the stars with their upraised hands, stiffened from rigor
mortis. Trying to process the destruction has caused the speaker’s mind to become
infertile: his head has been filled with straw, and he is now unable to think properly, to
perceive accurately, or to conceive of images or thoughts.
Works

Criticism: Eliot also made significant contributions to the field of literary criticism,
strongly influencing the school of New Criticism. He was somewhat self-deprecating
and minimising of his work and once said his criticism was merely a "by-product" of his
"private poetry-workshop" But the critic William Empson once said, "I do not know for
certain how much of my own mind [Eliot] invented, let alone how much of it is a
reaction against him or indeed a consequence of misreading him. He is a very
penetrating influence, perhaps not unlike the east wind."
In his critical essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent", Eliot argues that art must be
understood not in a vacuum, but in the context of previous pieces of art. "In a peculiar
sense [an artist or poet] ... must inevitably be judged by the standards of the
past."] This essay was an important influence over the New Criticism by introducing the
idea that the value of a work of art must be viewed in the context of the artist's previous
works, a "simultaneous order" of works (i.e., "tradition"). Eliot himself employed this
concept on many of his works, especially on his long-poem The Waste Land.
Also important to New Criticism was the idea—as articulated in Eliot's essay "Hamlet
and His Problems"—of an "objective correlative", which posits a connection among the
words of the text and events, states of mind, and experiences. This notion concedes
that a poem means what it says, but suggests that there can be a non-subjective
judgment based on different readers' different—but perhaps corollary—interpretations
of a work.
His 1922 poem The Waste Land also can be better understood in light of his work as a
critic. He had argued that a poet must write "programmatic criticism", that is, a poet
should write to advance his own interests rather than to advance "historical
scholarship". Viewed from Eliot's critical lens, The Waste Land likely shows his
personal despair about World War I rather than an objective historical understanding of
it.

Poetic Drama: With the important exception of Four Quartets, Eliot directed much of
his creative energies after Ash Wednesday to writing plays in verse, mostly comedies
or plays with redemptive endings. He was long a critic and admirer
of Elizabethan and Jacobean verse drama; witness his allusions to Webster, Thomas
Middleton, William Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd in The Waste Land. In a 1933
lecture he said "Every poet would like, I fancy, to be able to think that he had some
direct social utility . . . . He would like to be something of a popular entertainer, and be
able to think his own thoughts behind a tragic or a comic mask. He would like to convey
the pleasures of poetry, not only to a larger audience, but to larger groups of people
collectively; and the theatre is the best place in which to do it."
After The Waste Land (1922), he wrote that he was "now feeling toward a new form
and style". One project he had in mind was writing a play in verse, using some of the
rhythms of early jazz. The play featured "Sweeney", a character who had appeared in a
number of his poems. Although Eliot did not finish the play, he did publish two scenes
from the piece. These scenes, titled Fragment of a Prologue (1926) and Fragment of
an Agon (1927), were published together in 1932 as Sweeney Agonistes. Although
Eliot noted that this was not intended to be a one-act play, it is sometimes performed
as one.[
A pageant play by Eliot called The Rock was performed in 1934 for the benefit of
churches in the Diocese of London. Much of it was a collaborative effort; Eliot accepted
credit only for the authorship of one scene and the choruses. George Bell, the Bishop
of Chichester, had been instrumental in connecting Eliot with producer E. Martin
Browne for the production of The Rock, and later commissioned Eliot to write another
play for the Canterbury Festival in 1935. This one, Murder in the Cathedral, concerning
the death of the martyr, Thomas Becket, was more under Eliot's control. Eliot
biographer Peter Ackroyd comments that "for [Eliot], Murder in the Cathedral and
succeeding verse plays offered a double advantage; it allowed him to practice poetry
but it also offered a convenient home for his religious sensibility." After this, he worked
on more "commercial" plays for more general audiences: The Family
Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1949), The Confidential Clerk, (1953) and The
Elder Statesman (1958) (the latter three were produced by Henry Sherek and directed
by E. Martin Browne). The Broadway production in New York of The Cocktail
Party received the 1950 Tony Award for Best Play. Eliot wrote The Cocktail Party while
he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Regarding his method of playwriting, Eliot explained, "If I set out to write a play, I start
by an act of choice. I settle upon a particular emotional situation, out of which
characters and a plot will emerge. And then lines of poetry may come into being: not
from the original impulse but from a secondary stimulation of the unconscious mind."

 Sweeney Agonistes (published in 1926, first performed in 1934)

 The Rock (1934)

 Murder in the Cathedral (1935)

 The Family Reunion (1939)

 The Cocktail Party (1949)

 The Confidential Clerk (1953)

 The Elder Statesman (first performed in 1958, published in 1959)

Poetry: For a poet of his stature, Eliot produced a relatively small number of poems.
He was aware of this even early in his career. He wrote to J.H. Woods, one of his
former Harvard professors, "My reputation in London is built upon one small volume of
verse, and is kept up by printing two or three more poems in a year. The only thing that
matters is that these should be perfect in their kind, so that each should be an event."
Typically, Eliot first published his poems individually in periodicals or in small books or
pamphlets, and then collected them in books. His first collection was Prufrock and
Other Observations (1917). In 1920, he published more poems in Ara Vos
Prec (London) and Poems: 1920 (New York). These had the same poems (in a different
order) except that "Ode" in the British edition was replaced with "Hysteria" in the
American edition. In 1925, he collected The Waste Land and the poems
in Prufrock and Poems into one volume and added The Hollow Men to form Poems:
1909–1925. From then on, he updated this work as Collected Poems. Exceptions
are Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939), a collection of light verse; Poems
Written in Early Youth, posthumously published in 1967 and consisting mainly of
poems published between 1907 and 1910 in The Harvard Advocate, and Inventions of
the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, material Eliot never intended to have published,
which appeared posthumously in 1997.
Cleo McNelly Kearns notes in her biography that Eliot was deeply influenced by Indic
traditions, notably the Upanishads. From the Sanskrit ending of The Waste Land to the
"What Krishna meant" section of Four Quartets shows how much Indic religions and
more specifically Hinduism made up his philosophical basic for his thought process. It
must also be acknowledged, as Chinmoy Guha showed in his book Where the Dreams
Cross: T S Eliot and French Poetry (Macmillan, 2011), that he was deeply influenced
by French poets from Baudelaire to Paul Valéry. He himself wrote in his 1940 essay on
W.B. Yeats: "The kind of poetry that I needed to teach me the use of my own voice did
not exist in English at all; it was only to be found in French." ("Yeats," On Poetry and
Poets, 1948)

In 2015, a scholarly edition of The Poems of T. S. Eliot was published in two volumes,
and was Book of the Year of the Times Literary Supplement. The edition published
many poems for the first time, including newly discovered love poems to Eliot's second
wife, Valerie. Edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue, it won the Pegasus Prize for
Poetry Criticism from the Poetry Foundation, the Richard J. Finneran Prize for textual
theory from the Society for Textual Studies, and the Award for Best Scholarly Edition
from the Modernist Studies Association.

 Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)

 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

 Portrait of a Lady

 Preludes

 Rhapsody on a Windy Night

 Morning at the Window

 The Boston Evening Transcript (about the Boston Evening Transcript)

 Aunt Helen

 Cousin Nancy

 Mr. Apollinax (a sketch of Bertrand Russell)

 Hysteria

 Conversation Galante

 La Figlia Che Piange

 The Waste Land (1922)

PRACTICE

1. Number of sections: Brief summary of the content and main themes.

The poem's structure is divided into five sections. The first section, The Burial of the
Dead, introduces the diverse themes of disillusionment and despair. The second, A
Game of Chess, employs vignettes of several characters—alternating narrations—that
address those themes experientially. The Fire Sermon, the third section, offers a
philosophical meditation in relation to the imagery of death and views of self-denial in
juxtaposition influenced by Augustine of Hippo and eastern religions. After a fourth
section that includes a brief lyrical petition, the culminating fifth section, What the
Thunder Said, concludes with an image of judgment.

2. Modernist aspects in the poem.

The Waste Land is notable for its seemingly disjointed structure, indicative of
the Modernist style. Eliot jumps from one voice or image to another without clearly
delineating these shifts for the reader. He also includes phrases from multiple foreign
languages (Latin, Greek, Italian, German, French and Sanskrit), indicative of Pound's
influence.

3. Examples of symbolism.
He drew heavily from ancient fertility rituals, in which the fertility of the land was linked
to the health of the Fisher King, a wounded figure who could be healed through the
sacrifice of an effigy. The Fisher King is, in turn, linked to the Holy Grail legends, in
which a knight quests to find the grail, the only object capable of healing the land.
Ultimately, ritual fails as the tool for healing the wasteland, even as Eliot presents
alternative religious possibilities, including Hindu chants, Buddhist speeches, and
pagan ceremonies.

In Eliot’s poetry, water symbolizes both life and death. Eliot’s characters wait for water
to quench their thirst, watch rivers overflow their banks, cry for rain to quench the dry
earth, and pass by fetid pools of standing water. Although water has the regenerative
possibility of restoring life and fertility, it can also lead to drowning and death, as in the
case of Phlebas the sailor from The Waste Land. Traditionally, water can imply
baptism, Christianity, and the figure of Jesus Christ, and Eliot draws upon these
traditional meanings: water cleanses, water provides solace, and water brings relief
elsewhere in The Waste Land and in “Little Gidding,” the fourth part of Four Quartets.
Eliot also makes extensive use of Scriptural writings including the Bible, the Book of
Common Prayer, the Hindu Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, and the Buddha's Fire
Sermon, and of cultural and anthropological studies such as Sir James Frazer's The
Golden Bough and Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance (particularly its study of
the Wasteland motif in Celtic mythology).
Elsewhere Eliot uses lyrics as a kind of chorus, seconding and echoing the action of
the poem, much as the chorus functions in Greek tragedies.

4. Use of narrative and dramatic devices: characters, voices, etc.

Eliot is using the dramatic monologue technique. The work is made up of a wide variety
of voices (sometimes in monologue, dialogue, or with more than two characters
speaking).
Like most modernist writers, Eliot was interested in the divide between high and low
culture, which he symbolized using music. He believed that high culture, including art,
opera, and drama, was in decline while popular culture was on the rise. In The Waste
Land, Eliot blended high culture with low culture by juxtaposing lyrics from an opera by
Richard Wagner with songs from pubs, American ragtime, and Australian troops.

5. Time-space representation: cinematic technique, changes of seasons, future

visions, etc.
The setting actually seems to fly all over the place, from a fancy chalet in the Swiss
countryside to a pub in London, from the banks of the Thames River to some
unnamed, desert-like place. But the setting of this poem is not just a physical place, but
a mental and spiritual landscape that is dry, infertile. In this setting, you can picture the
blind prophet Tiresias groping his way around the barren desert and picking up the
fragments of classic culture while he keeps being assault by gross ‘’visions’’ of sex. We
have to bear in mind that although the setting’s places tent to take place in London,
they form part of a larger spiritual landscape which Eliot sees as being all of Western
civilization in the 20th century.

6. Intertextuality: Biblical and literary references in the text.

Sources from which Eliot quotes, or to which he alludes, include the works
of Homer, Sophocles, Petronius, Virgil, Ovid, Saint Augustine of Hippo, Dante
Alighieri, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Gérard de Nerval, Thomas
Kyd, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Middleton, John Webster, Joseph Conrad, John
Milton, Andrew Marvell, Charles Baudelaire, Richard Wagner, Oliver
Goldsmith, Hermann Hesse, Aldous Huxley, Paul Verlaine, Walt Whitman and Bram
Stoker.

7. Tone and feelings of the poetic persona in the text.

The tone is foreboding – Eliot seems to be writing as a type of Tiresias himself,
prophesying the end times that have already come to pass. There is irony everywhere,
particularly in the way that the world tries to disguise its emptiness.

8. Depiction of the modern world and analysis of the lines 60-76.

The final episode of the first section allows Eliot finally to establish the true wasteland
of the poem, the modern city. Eliot’s London references Baudelaire’s Paris (“Unreal
City”), Dickens’s London (“the brown fog of a winter dawn”) and Dante’s hell (“the
flowing crowd of the dead”). The city is desolate and depopulated, inhabited only by
ghosts from the past. Stetson, the apparition the speaker recognizes, is a fallen war
comrade. The speaker pesters him with a series of ghoulish questions about a corpse
buried in his garden: again, with the garden, we return to the theme of regeneration
and fertility. This encounter can be read as a quest for a meaning behind the
tremendous slaughter of the first World War; however, it can also be read as an
exercise in ultimate futility: as we see in Stetson’s failure to respond to the speaker’s
inquiries, the dead offer few answers. The great respective weights of history, tradition,
and the poet’s dead predecessors combine to create an oppressive burden.

9. What are the functions of line 76 (“You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—

mon frère!”)? Give your opinion.
Calling for lecture’s attention in order to involve us with what the author is expressing.
(V. Baudelaire, Preface to Fleurs du Mal.)

10. Explore the notions of fragmentation and unity throughout the poem:
nations, war, humanity, religion, etc.
Eliot used fragmentation in his poetry both to demonstrate the chaotic state of modern
existence and to juxtapose literary texts against one another. In Eliot’s view, humanity’s
psyche had been shattered by World War I and by the collapse of the British Empire.
Collaging bits and pieces of dialogue, images, scholarly ideas, foreign words, formal
styles, and tones within one poetic work was a way for Eliot to represent humanity’s
damaged psyche and the modern world, with its barrage of sensory perceptions.

Practically every line in The Waste Land echoes an academic work or canonical literary
text, and many lines also have long footnotes written by Eliot as an attempt to explain
his references and to encourage his readers to educate themselves by delving deeper
into his sources. These echoes and references are fragments themselves, since Eliot
includes only parts, rather than whole texts from the canon. Using these fragments,
Eliot tries to highlight recurrent themes and images in the literary tradition, as well as to
place his ideas about the contemporary state of humanity along the spectrum of
history.

In ‘’A Game of Chess’’ the idea of Humanity’s collectively damaged psyche prevented
people from communicating with one another is presented.

As yo gon on, you get a sense of the historical and cultural ground this poem is trying
to cover, since it suddenly includes lines in other languages that constantly reminds
you of the fractured and disconnected nature of modern society.