WORLD UNIVERSITY OF BANGLADESH

BA (Hon’s) in English

Date of Submission: 05.03.20

Name: S.M Sakib Ullah

Id: 1365

Batch: 41(A)

Name of Department: English

Course Name: 20 Century English-I

Course Teacher Name: A T M Sofiul Azam

Course Code: 413

 Answer to the question no-2

W.B. Yeats like many other poets noticed the contrast between youth and old age. A young
man is active and energetic and full of wonderful dreams. But an old man lacks vitality and
energy, although he has desires like that of a young man. This problem of old age concerned
Yeats very much even in his early years. His earlier poem When You are old deals with this
problem. This rage and revolt against the limitations of old age occurs again and again in
Yeats's poetry. Sailing to Byzantium shows the passionate old man "sick with desire ".but he
can no longer sing sensual songs.Here Yeats faces old age with the wish to forget his
decaying body and educate his soul for immortality. He makes it clear that the world of
senses is not a fit place for an old man .In this world the young men and women are found
in close embrace, birds in the trees ,singing out of the excitement of the mating season and
fish like salmons and mackerel swimming in the waters of the seas and copulating as they
move about .Thus fish , fish and fowl are all caught in the sensual urge of the generation
which is only a process ending in death .In this universal pre-occupation with sex and
complete inversion in the flux of life. They can spare no thought for those masterpieces of
art which are the product of ageless intellect.Under these circumstances an old man is
scarcely a man. He is an empty artifice ,an effigy merely of a man ; he is "a tattered coat
upon a stick".In such a situation the soul must clap its hands and sing, and its songs must
grow louder as the outer garment gets more and more tattered. This means , if an old man
can free himself from sensual passion , he may rejoice in the liberation of the soul ; he is
admitted into the realm of the spirit, and his rejoicing will increase in accordance with his
realization of the magnificence of the soul. But the soul can best earn its own greatness
from the great works of art .That is why the poet turns to those great works of art , but in
turning to them he finds that these are by no means mere effigies or monuments but things
which have souls also. These live in the noblest element of God's holy fire free from all
corruptions.So he prays for death, for release from his mortal body.Since the insouled
monuments exhibit the possibility of the soul's existence in some other matter than flesh ,
he wishes reincarnation, not now in a mortal body, but in the immortal and changeless
embodiment of art. Similarly the poems such as Among School Children, The Wild Swans at
Coole , A Dialogue of Self and Soul, The Spur, An Acre of Grass Speak of the problem of old
age and youth.

To sum up, W.B. Yeats sees old age as a time when the continuing vigour of the mind
revolts against the increasing feebleness of the body. On the one hand he seems to suggest
that one should shake off the sensual desires in old age . On the other hand, he commends
the value of desire and vigour of mind even if the body is decaying , because in that lies the
spirit of action and ability of man.

Answer to the question no-4

Day and night or light and dark are long-standing metaphors for life and death, and while
Thomas merely adopts the tradition, he also breathes new life into it. The four middle
tercets describe the acts of four kinds of men—“wise,” “good,” “wild,” and “grave”—
employing words associated with light and dark. In the second tercet, the words of wise
men “forked no lightning,” presumably in the darkness of the foolish. In the third tercet, the
deeds of the last tide of good men were not “bright” enough to “dance” (sparkle) on the
“green bay,” or what might here be thought of here—since the water is green instead of
blue—as the darker, more dangerous world. The wild men of the fourth tercet “who caught
and sang the sun in flight,” only “grieved it on its way,” that is, made matters worse,
perhaps by being partially blind to the darker side of human wildness. Finally, in the fifth
tercet, grave men near death, despite their “blinding sight,” that is, their presumed ability to
see more clearly because they are dying, can “blaze like meteors and be gay,” being gay or
happy as itself as a state of lightness.

Though, while living, these four types of enlightened men or people—the wise, good, wild,
and grave—failed to lighten the dark world they lived in, at times even unwittingly darkened
it with their brave and clear vision, or obscured its misery with their overly bright outlook,
they must not fail to blaze and rage against the darkness of death. They must rebel against
“the dying of the light” and “close of day” no matter what the role light played in their life.
In this sense, Thomas asks us to see rage as a kind of beam of light shooting through the
darkness of death, light which refuses death’s pacification or darkening. Such a light yields a
vision which exposes death in the way Thomas comprehends it: the ultimate horror.
Therefore, Thomas counsels his father to make the ultimate refusal by refusing the ultimate,
urges his father toward futile rebellion against what is and cannot be stopped. One may ask
themselves whether or not the horror attached to death is primarily natural and therefore
unavoidable (as Thomas seems to believe), or whether the horror of death arises from
particular cultural viewpoints of death as horrible.

' Answer to the question no-3

Segments of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” often called “the first Modernist poem,”
appeared in the Harvard Advocate in 1906 while Eliot was an undergraduate. He later read
the poem to Ezra Pound in England and Pound arranged to have it published in the
prestigious American journal Poetry in June 1915. It was included in Prufrock and Other
Observations, Eliot’s first book of poetry, in 1917.

In this poem, the speaker’s poor ability to relate to other people, especially women, has him
playing out a long dialogue in his mind, consisting of fragments of his past that are so
intensely personal that he does not bother to connect them into a logical flow. The “us” he
refers to in the first stanza is himself, which tells us that he is a person who is accustomed to
being alone, to addressing another part of his mind in the way a more social person would
talk to a friend. One of the strongest indications of his loneliness is the repeated use of
questions to himself: he is so desperately alone in his thought that he examines every little
aspect about his behavior, so curious about what people will think of him that he asks the
only person he can talk to about it, the one person who knows no more than himself. This is
a sign of social inexperience. In the eighth stanza, he imagines that the stares of others will
pin him to the wall for inspection, the way an insect is held in place, “pinned and wiggling.”
He is so deeply immersed in his loneliness, so tragically alienated, that he fears even the first
basic action that would bridge the gap between another person and himself: eye contact.

The main cause of his alienation is his low selfesteem, causing him to shrink in
embarrassment from other people at the same time that he is wondering if he might not
deserve better, if he is not setting his aims too low. Critics have pointed to the lines “I should
have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of the silent seas” as an
indication of Prufrock’s attitude toward women, exploring it in dozens of ways, from literary
allusions to the sexual practices of crayfish in Eliot’s native St. Louis. Regardless of the lines’
origins, it is clearly an image that isolates the speaker, and the use the words “ragged” and
“scuttling” define a fantasy in which the speaker clearly does not think well of himself.

According to Vincent Miller, “By 1914 the age of the heroic achiever was over. That was ...
the truth [this] love song pinned down in a startlingly new and creative way for an entire
generation.” Indeed, American poet John Berryman declares that “Modernist poetry begins”
in the simile “like a patient etherised upon a table.” He recognizes, however, that even the
title manifests a decidedly Modernist “split” in its juxtaposition of the full romance of the
term “love song” against such a highly formalized name as J. Alfred Prufrock. This is a
technique Eliot discovered in reading the French Symbolist poets Jules Laforgue and Charles
Baudelaire. He declared that his early free verse was “more ‘verse’ than ‘free,’” adopting
Laforgue’s practice of “regularly rhyming lines of irregular length, with the rhyme coming in
irregular places.” This creates the music of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and
inspired American poet Delmore Schwartz to theorize that “[t]here is [a mode of] poetry
whose chief aim is that of incantation, of inducing a certain state of emotion.” It is clearly
the intent of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to involve the reader at an emotional
level, and Eliot’s use of the second person “you” in the opening line is an expert strategy
toward this. But whether the “you” Prufrock is speaking to begins as the poet Eliot or as
some imaginary companion, it is evident that, as Northrop Frye maintains, Prufrock
ultimately is talking to himself, and that “[i]n addressing a ‘you’ who is also himself the
pattern is set for a division between Prufrock and the world he contemplates—until he
stands irrevocably separated from that world.

M. L. Rosenthal contends that “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Prufrock” projects “an
actual inner state ... of one type of cultivated American psyche of Eliot’s generation.” He
further notes “a strongly adolescent flavor,” asserting that the poem “positively sweats
panic at the challenge of adult sexuality and of living up to one’s ideal of what it is to be
manly in any sort of heroic model.” Ann P. Brady says that Eliot was aware of this,
maintaining that the poem reflects Prufrock back “from the world in which he moves” in a
“clinically hard” way, and that this contrast with romantic aspirations—the “juxtaposition of
lyricism with the tone of satire”—creates the Modernist tension. She finds the satire
unusually effective in Eliot’s coupling of rhyme words that “are absurd,” particularly “ices
crisis, platter-matter, flicker-snicker,” producing what she calls “deflation by association.”

English novelist May Sinclair notes Eliot’s concern with reality.

Answe to the question no-1

The Relationship Between Art and Politics

Yeats believed that art and politics were intrinsically linked and used his writing to express
his attitudes toward Irish politics, as well as to educate his readers about Irish cultural
history. From an early age, Yeats felt a deep connection to Ireland and his national identity,
and he thought that British rule negatively impacted Irish politics and social life. His early
compilation of folklore sought to teach a literary history that had been suppressed by British
rule, and his early poems were Odes to the beauty and mystery of the Irish countryside. This
work frequently integrated references to myths and mythic figures, including Oisin and
Cuchulain. As Yeats became more involved in Irish politics—through his relationships with
the Irish National Theatre, the Irish Literary Society, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and
Maud Gonne—his poems increasingly resembled political manifestos. Yeats wrote
numerous poems about Ireland’s involvement in World War I (“An Irish Airman Foresees His
Death” [1919], “A Meditation in Time of War” [1921]), Irish nationalists and political activists
(“On a Political Prisoner” [1921], “In Memory of Eva Gore Booth and Con Markiewicz”
[1933]), and the Easter Rebellion (“Easter 1916” [1916]). Yeats believed that art could serve
a political function: poems could both critique and comment on political events, as well as
educate and inform a population.

The Impact of Fate and the Divine on History

Yeats’s devotion to mysticism led to the development of a unique spiritual and philosophical
system that emphasized the role of fate and historical determinism, or the belief that events
have been preordained. Yeats had rejected Christianity early in his life, but his lifelong study
of mythology, Theosophy, spiritualism, philosophy, and the occult demonstrate his profound
interest in the divine and how it interacts with humanity. Over the course of his life, he
created a complex system of spirituality, using the image of interlocking gyres (similar to
spiral cones) to map out the development and reincarnation of the soul. Yeats believed that
history was determined by fate and that fate revealed its plan in moments when the human
and divine interact. A Tone of historically determined inevitability permeates his poems,
particularly in descriptions of situations of human and divine interaction.

The Transition from Romanticism to Modernism

Yeats started his long literary career as a romantic poet and gradually evolved into a
modernist poet. When he began publishing poetry in the 1880s, his poems had a lyrical,
romantic style, and they focused on love, longing and loss, and Irish myths. His early writing
follows the conventions of romantic verse, utilizing familiar rhyme schemes, metric patterns,
and poetic structures. Although it is lighter than his later writings, his early poetry is still
sophisticated and accomplished. Several factors contributed to his poetic evolution: his
interest in mysticism and the occult led him to explore spiritually and philosophically
complex subjects. Yeats’s frustrated romantic relationship with Maud Gonne caused the
starry-eyed romantic idealism of his early work to become more knowing and cynical.
Additionally, his concern with Irish subjects evolved as he became more closely connected
to nationalist political causes. As a result, Yeats shifted his focus from myth and folklore to
contemporary politics, often linking the two to make potent statements that reflected
political agitation and turbulence in Ireland and abroad.