Mod B: T.S.

Eliot

T.S. Eliot explores an era of uncertainty within the early 20th century Modernist epoch, as his poetry
questions humanity’s salvageability, and prompts readers to forge through a fractured utilitarian landscape
in search of a means of fulfilment. By establishing the inorganic cycle of action and inaction imposed
upon individuals by a superficial Modern landscape in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Eliot
questions whether a means to break this unfulfillment exists. He initially denounces spirituality as this
medium through The Hollow Men, depicting how Modern man’s lack of conviction and pessimism has
disintegrated their connection with the Divine. However by joining Eliot on his allegorical search for
meaning, The Journey of the Magi, readers are prompted to conclude that faith, despite being unable to
provide an all comprehensive understanding of the world, acts as a medium to disparage the superficial
and pessimistic Modern condition and attain salvation through suffering.

Eliot’s use of the dramatic monologue form in Prufrock, forces readers to journey into the titular
protagonist, Prufrock’s subconscious and understand the tension between desire for action and reality of
stasis that entrapped Eliot’s modern society into an inorganic, unfulfilling cycle. Prefacing his poem with
an intertextual allusion to Dante’s inferno in the epigraph, an allegorical telling of the descent down the
nine circles of Hell, Eliot invites us into his personal hell; a post-Industrial Revolution urbanised society
which prioritised materialism and scientific advancement over social connection. Anticlimactic repetition
‘in the room the women come and go’ symbolises the cyclic and superficial nature of such a world and
establishes Prufrock’s crippling anxieties concerning his position within what he perceives to be a
judgemental society where this inability to escape from his own predicament and act upon his desires is
redolent of Dante’s evocation of hell’s inescapability. The recurring motif of time, ‘indeed there will be
time’ establishes Prufrock’s false reassurance of endless time, a justification of his inaction which traps
him in his own subconscious. Literary critic Seamus Perry (2016) likens this mindset to “a consciousness
that is destined to go nowhere very much” highlighting that Prufrock’s conception of always having time
hinders him from achieving any fulfilling purpose. Prufrock’s resulting unfulfillment and estrangement
from society is evident through his mythological fantasy of the “Sea-girls” as he states “I do not think
they will sing to me” implying that even in his fantasies, he cannot see himself as free from societal
judgement. This is quickly interrupted by the metaphorical human voices who “wake us and we drown”
awakening him from his subconscious to remind him that he cannot escape his mechanical existence.
Prufrock’s existence in a pseudo-intellectual cultural milieu, in which social isolation propels his
emotional estrangement and inability to find contentment is metaphorical of Eliot’s own metaphysical hell
in a pretentious Modern civilisation.

Eliot subsequently moves away from any catharsis in finding meaningful fulfilment in The Hollow Men.
Instead his use of subversive language devices disorients readers and prompts consideration on salvation
as unattainable in a Modern society that has become disillusioned and spiritually void. Inspired by the
teachings of Herbert Spencer’s Doctrine of Social Darwinism, Eliot depicts how the principles of
evolution apply to human societies through the gradual corruption of humanity by Modernism. The poem
is set in a metaphorical realm of a Dantean purgatory, where the Hollow Men are ironically introduced as
the ‘stuffed men’, depicting Modern man as a hollow collective, lacking individual conviction yet filled
with convictions they don’t believe in. The collective pronoun, “Alas!/Our dried voices”, their lack of
personal beliefs and conviction in Modern life has eroded their principles to the point where their words
are ineffectual and lack meaning on an individual level. The Hollow men have been abandoned by any
righteous God and thus ask for help from the raised “stone images” they’ve constructed, where the stone
represents a reification of the Divine, in the sense that artifice and Modernity has pervaded the innate
connection between humanity and the Divine. With the world ending “Not with a bang, but a whimper”,
Eliot’s anticlimactic thesis thus suggests that in such a spiritually void society, the end of humanity is not
a glorious conclusion, but rather pathetic and feeble, conveying a central pessimism common to
Modernism. The impossibility of redemption via spiritual means thus results in the individual’s only
solace being found within the mortal world. However, as we have seen previously in Prufrock where the
persona “prepares a face” to meet others, the living world is similarly devoid of meaning, reduced merely
to superficiality and facade, prompting readers to question whether Eliot’s search for meaning is
inevitably futile.

While Eliot previously denounced the possibility of faith in The Hollow Men, Magi asserts the potential
for spiritual redemption after suffering as a form of enlightenment. The Magi embark on their religious
“journey” as an allegory for Eliot’s own struggles during his conversion to Anglo-catholicism in 1927.
Use of objective correlative in the first stanza as the Magi sought “summer palaces on slopes” and “silken
girls bringing sherbert” alludes to Modern man’s superficial existence previously seen in Prufrock,
establishing the Magi’s initial pompous lifestyle. However, the lexical chain relating to suffering, “cities
hostile and the towns unfriendly” contrasts their previous excesses to their current paucity, implying that
in order to gain fulfilment, the corruptive temptations the Magi were previously accustomed to, a life
antithetical to that advocated by Christ, must be left behind. Readers are prompted to piece together
anachronistic symbols in the temperate valley such as ‘the running stream’, an allusion to Baptism, to
understand that suffering along this new spiritual way of life, in retrospect, will offer objective meaning.
Concluding the Magi’s arduous journey where they witness the birth of Jesus Christ, Eliot reveals that
finding the newborn Messiah is only “(you may say) satisfactory”, understating the significance of
Christ’s birth to acknowledge that faith is not all comprehensive yet reconciles the divide between
humanity and the Divine which had previously prevented the Hollow Men from crossing into ‘death’s
other Kingdom”. Thus Eliot’s concluding line, ‘alien people clutching their gods…should be glad of
another death”, dissolves this duality between birth and death, alluding to the next death as a salvation
from the Modern condition and reconciliation with the Divine to find satisfaction. As such, Eliot is able to
subtly disparage the Modern condition while also asserting a possible mechanism by which we may be
liberated: faith.

The tension in Eliot’s poetry stems from a dialectic between a spiritually void society and faith as a means
for finding meaning. Through Prufrock, Eliot establishes the conflicts of an individual’s internal desires
with the superficial Modern existence, trapping them in a mechanical cycle. Eliot considers the possibility
of faith as a means to break this unfulfilling cycle through Hollow Men where he explores the
disintegrated line between pessimistic Modern man and the Divine. His representation in Magi however
offers faith as a satisfactory medium to attain salvation after suffering. T.S. Eliot’s Modernist poetry is
thus an allegory for Eliot’s search through the degraded remnants of the human spirit, for fulfilment.

Word Count: 1178

Preludes

Eliot’s modernist representation in Preludes reflects on an industrial society obsessed with quotidian
routines, and the irrevocably corrupt effects of this on individuality. The poem begins with a glut of
metonymic images, “smells of steaks...grimy scraps...broken blinds”, each symbolising the privation
inherent to working class urban experience, indicative of his Modernist context in pre-WWI Paris.
Despite the anachronistic imagery of the “lonely cab-horse”, Eliot’s setting evokes the universal trends in
the individual’s search for meaning, marked by the pluralistic representation of a collective of “muddy
feet” searching in the same way. For Eliot, individuals are produced by social context, as the shift to
second person in the third stanza focalises an unnamed female subject, whose “sordid” imaginings are a
“vision of the street”, as this parallelism can be inhibited or enabled depending on the features of their
world. Unfortunately, Eliot’s Modernist “streets hardly understands”, as his paradoxical use of
personification highlights society’s lack of consciousness - suggesting that while the individual’s ambition
towards meaning is produced by their world, the world is nonetheless disinterested and thus incapable of
providing any universal truth. Here, as critic D.N. Aloysius recognises, Eliot’s subjects “are running after
their own materialistic ambitions”, where the speaker’s Absurdist decision to “laugh” at the scene
highlights the vapidity of culturally situated pursuits, depicting the paradoxical human desire for universal
meaning despite our tendency to simply conform to our social homogeneity. Thus, by depicting the
isolationism individuals experience within the confines of urbanity, the universality in Eliot’s pessimism
towards achieving meaning is defined by a recognition that Modern routine is morally corrosive.

Rhapsody

Eliot’s oeuvre most heavily focuses on the mutual corruption of the natural world and the innate human
spirit, depicting the struggle to retain human connection in a modernising world. This is showcased
through repeated temporal motifs throughout Rhapsody on a Windy night, depicting modernism as
inherently fatalistic to human connections through the first stanza; “Every street lamp that I pass Beats
like a fatalistic drum.” Here, Eliot introduces the first person, where instead of the street lamps being seen
as symbols of scientific progress, their artificially illuminating the natural darkness of the midnight serves
only as a reminder that such progress will only culminate in the degradation of humanity within the
industrial landscape. Furthermore, the anaphora of feminine pronouns to describe the moon “Regard the
moon...She winks a feeble eye, she smiles...she smooths…” portrays the disconnection from nature,
reflecting the moon as a symbol of irrelevance, rather than transcendence. Her light is only “feeble”,
compared to the street lamps; she “smiles” and “smooths”; gentle terms somewhat antithetical to the
proactive vocabulary of incessant industrial progress. This again rejects Romantic philosophical doctrines,
showcasing how temporality and progression is ultimately redolent to the disconnection from the natural
world. The “broken spring” has become “hard and curled and ready to snap,” where Eliot’s use of
polysyndeton here builds a tension and anticipation towards this breaking point. As the passing
streetlights previously ‘beat like a fatalistic drum,’ in the opening stanza, the spring of society is now
progressing forward to an inevitable point of collapse. It has been corrupted by an industrialised state in
the sense that our perceptions toward nature have been corrupted by the prioritisation of materialism over
nature.

Eliot subsequently avoids any catharsis in finding meaningful connection… (continue on with og essay)