[ON and tne al TS. Eliot’s life ‘Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He studied at Harvard, the Sorbonne in Paris, and Oxford, thus giving a cosmopolitan bent to his education. At the outbreak of World War | (13.3), he settled in London, where he started to work first as a clerk at Lloyds Bank, then as a director for the publishers Faber & Faber. His first important work was the collection of poems Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), which established him as an important avant-garde poet. Unhappily married, he suffered from a nervous breakdown soon after the war. He wrote most of his masterpiece, The Waste Land, while recovering in a sanatorium in Lausanne, Switzerland, at the age of 33. Poetry was, in fact, his only refuge, where he transcended his personal situation in order to represent the general crisis of Western culture. 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 with ‘il miglior fabbro — the better craftsman’, a quotation from Dante's Purgatory. In 1925 he published The Hollow Men (@Text Bank 95), a poem read as a sequel to The Waste Land's philosophical despair, even if the seeds of his future faith could be found. In 1927 he became a British citizen and in the same year he joined the Church of England, finding the answer to his own uncertainties and to the despair of the modern world’s lack of faith and religion Eliot was also an influential literary ct critical essays on authors, both ancient and modern, as well as on the theory of poetry and on the foundations of literary criticism are both numerous and of primary importance. Most of them are collected in such well-known books as The Sacred Wood (1920) and Selected Essays (1932). In these essays, he concentrated on specific problems of style and technique; he shared with the modern novelist James Joyce (14.9), the view about the importance for the artist to be impersonal and to separate ‘the man who suffers’ from ‘the mind which creates’. In his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ from The Sacred Wood, Eliot declared: ‘the poet has, not a personality to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality [...] The emotion of art is impersonal.’ Thus the characters of his first works are archetypes of 20"-century human beings who turn their own subjective experience into a universal form with which anyone can identify. In 1948 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in London in 196s.The Waste Land (1922) The structure Woste Lond consists of 434 lines divided into the following, Sections: |. "The Burial of the Dead’, which centres on the basic ©Pposition between stenlity and erility, hfe and death. N'A Game of Chess’, which juxtaposes the present squalor to 4 past ambiguous splendour. ML “The Fire Sermon’, where the theme of present alienation 's rendered through the description ofa loveless, mechanical, ‘squalid sexual encounter. IV. "Death by Water, which reinforces the idea of spuritval shipwreck, \. ‘What the Thunder Said’, which evokes teligions ftom East and West. A possible solution is found in a sort of sympathy with other human beings; however, such a solution does not ‘modify the general atmosphere of utter desolation. Fragmentation ‘The poet uses fragmented images of historical narratives such as the quest for the Holy Grail, the Bible, Dante and Shakespeare to mirror his society's reliance on old traditions, customs and aesthetic styles when creating the new Europe. Eliot's fragmentation and reassembly of historical narratives create a Poem with new meaning out of something old, All the fragmentary parts of the poem are connected by ‘one main theme: the contrast between the fertility of a mythical Past and the spiritual sterility of the present world, peopled by alienated characters. 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 Allusion and a new concept of history ‘The mythical past appears in the allusions to and quotations from many literary works belonging to different traditions and ‘cultures, and religious works, lke the Bible and Hindu sacred texts. This use of quotations reflects the concept Eliot had of tradition and history, which he saw as the repetition of the same events, of ‘classicism’, which he saw as the ability to see the past as a concrete premise for the present, and 'the poetic culture’ as a ‘living unity’ of ll the poems written in different periods. Thus the present and past exist simultaneously in The Waste Land — just as they do in the mind ~ and the continuous shifts in time and space ‘are caused by the free associations of ideas and thoughts, as in Ulysses by James Joyce (145). The mythical method In his evaluation of Western culture, Eliot went back to its when legends and myths were symptoms of spiritual attitudes which he regarded as extremely important. In modern society, gins, ication 13 | The Drums of War * however, old myths are present, but they have lost their deep meaning and itis especially through the mythical allusions that the contrast between the present and past appeats. Eliot contraus the meaninglessness of ife with allusions to the Arthurian legeng and the quest for the Holy Grail, a metaphor for mans search for spiritual salvation. He makes references to the May festivities celebrating the rebirth of nature, and the Celtic myth, linked tothe paradigen of ferilty, ofthe Fisher King, who is awaiting a hero to break the curse of impotence put upon his kingdom. in the essay ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’ (1923) Eliot explaineg the mythical method which Joyce also employed in Ulysses: "tis 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’ Eliot's innovative style “The style of The Waste Land is fragmentary because of the misture of different poetic styles, such as blank verse, the ode, the quatrain and free verse, thus teproducing the chaos of modern Cevilisation. The most effective analogies can be found in some ‘Cubist images or in some seemingly unconnected cinematic sho used to express a certain emotional state: the meaning is notin the single fragment but in the whole. Eliot requires the active participation of the reader/public, ‘who experiences the same world as that of the speaker/poet, by employing the technique of implication. Metaphors and symbols replace direct statements; to this purpose, Eliot adopted the technique of the ‘objective correlative’, thatis, the attempt at ‘communicating philosophical reflections and feelings by means of a simile, a description or a monologue by a character in order to provide a vision of the world or a feeling of the lyrical‘. For example, inthe text ‘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 Symbolist poet (13.5), Jules Laforgue (1860-87), Eliot derived the technique of juxtaposition: squalid elements are juxtaposed with poetic ones, trivial elements with sublime ones. Another device widely used by Eliot isthe repetition ‘of words, images and phrases from page to page; they all give the impression of the increasing musicality of the poem. 3° REVISE your knowledge about TS. Eliot's The Waste Land and expla 1. how many sections there are in the poem; 2 what the main theme of the whole poem 3 what concept of history is developed and how reality is presented; 4 what the mythical method employed by Eliot in this poem is; 5. what innovative techniques characterise the style of, this poem.The Burial of the Dead (Il) ords and TS. Eliot The Waste Land (1922) Section I, The Burial of the Dead The following extract is the end of the first section of The Waste Land. ‘details oh) [...] Unreal City', ‘lity of 1.10 | Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, ty? A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, resent? Thad not thought death had undone so many’. cate 5 Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. ° Flowed up the hill and down King William Streets, it To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours’ With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine®. 10 There I saw one I knew’, and stopped him, crying: ‘Stetson! “You who were with me in the ships at Mylae®! s to ‘That corpse? you planted last year in your garden, ‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? tha ‘Or has the sudden frost" disturbed its bed? e 1s ‘Okeep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men”, ‘Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again! ‘You! hypocrite lecteur! - mon semblable, — mon frére!” 6 nine. ora d'inizio del lavoro nella City. 11 frost. Brina. . 7 There I saw ... knew, La vidi uno che conoscevo 12 keep ... men. “Tien lontano di qui il cane, chee amia (il poeta riconosce amici tra la folla, come Dante del uomo” (citazione da The White Devil, x6u, il nell'Infrno). ' : ae aa simile -m° Mae: Benagie navale nella prima guerra punica 13 Tot fctarione dls refine di ews i0 8 9 corpse. Cadavere (allusione al rito della sepoltura di Baudelaire). immagini del dio della fertilita). 10 Has ... sprout? Ha cominciato a germogliare?iy a 14.5| Literature The modern n J 8), with its DISCUSS. Could the Victorian novel (10.8), wit! ' Protas on plot development and logical order interes, Gratedern writer and the modern public? Why or why not? 2. READ the Q8A text. © what caused the shift way from the Victorian novel? Q It was caused by a gradual but ‘substantial transformation ef Biitish society, from the comfortable world ofthe Victorians to the inter-war years, marked by unrest and ferment, @ What was the new role of the: novelists? @ Their role consisted in mediating between the solid and unquestioned values ofthe past and the confused present. © what new factors contributed to the modern novel? Q They were Freud's new theory of the psyche (@14.2) and anew concept of time introduced by the philosopher William James (1842-1910) and Henri Bergson (1859-1949). @ What did james state? James, in his Principles of Psychology mind records every single experience as a continuous flow of ‘the tleady? into ‘the not yet. However, it was Bergson who rade a distinction between historical time and psychological time, Q How do they differ? Historical time is external, linear and measured by the hands of a clock, Psychological time is internal, subjective and measured by the relative emotional intensity of a moment Bergson also suggested that a thought or feeling could be t in terms of the number of perceptions, memories |, and associations attached tt | © What did the modern novel reject? | @ The novelist jected om i | experimented with new methods to portray individual (1890), held that our consciousness; the viewpoint shifted from the external |}. world to the character's mind. The analysis of a character's | consciousness was influenced by theories about the |. Simultaneous existence of diferent levels of consciousness ‘and sub-consciousness, where past experience is retained and the existence of the past in the present determines the whole personality of each human being. | @ What was the treatment of time like? | @ Time was subjective and internal: if the distinction between | pastard presen was meanings npychologil terms {then there was sein building a wellstuctred pot, with ovel 7% Milestones a | 1922, Ulysses |i on ‘2 February 1922, James Joyce turned forty. He chose his birthday asthe publication date For Ulyses for good luck The | amour following the fist publication of| ‘Ulysses, in Paris, and | | the subsequent court action in the US t0 determine wate the subsea raphe, brought Joyce an unwelcome notre. or ed in the USin 34nd Bain 936 Syst fe Famous for many things, For ts complex stucure tote dificult, rom its briliantl realised characters tots | eesenities, but what realy marks It sits evolutionary prose | [ter Joyce combined several methods to presenta variety of | oe nete the stream of consciousness technique; the cinematic technique; question and answer, dramatic dialogue; and the | jownpostion of events, This enabled the writer to render is |, mate iner if, creating the so-called ‘collage technique’, | in ulyss Joyce brought to perfection the interior monclogue, rhe two levels of narration ~ one ‘external to the ‘employing both t Ghavacter's mind, and the other internal ~ and only the mind level Gf narration, with the character's thoughts flowing free! ‘a chronological sequence of events. It was not necessarily the passing of time that revealed the truth about characters. It fright unfold inthe course of a single day, as in James Joyce's (14.9) Ulysses and in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (14.13), by observing the character performing a common action, or by what Joyce called ‘epiphany, that is, the sudden revelation of lan interior ceality caused by trivial events of everyday life. Q What narrative technique was used by modern novelists? © The stream of consciousness technique, or the interior ‘monologue, was introduced to reproduce the flow of thoughts {quite similar to the mind's activity. Q What did the psychological novelists concentrate on? Q They centred their attention on the development of the character's mind and on human relationships. The most | important were: Joseph Conrad (@14.6), David Herbert } Lawrence (@143) and Edward Morgan Forster (@14.8)- | © What narrative techniques did Joyce and Woolfemploy? | © Both James Joyce (14.9) and Virginia Woolf (14:3) experimented with narrative techniques, exploring the rind of characters and giving voice to their thoughts. 3 IN PAIRS cover the answers (Gs) in the text. Take turns asking and answering the questions (@)s) using the information that you have read. © "