Eliot and Hardy poetry

Question 1

Poems for memory.

Answer 1

1. Overlooking the river Stour - Hardy
2. Rhapsody on a Windy Night - Eliot
3. Boterel - Hardy
4. Portrait - Eliot

Question 2

Critical view for Overlooking the river Stour - Hardy

Answer 2

The form of the poem, with the opening lines of each stanza repeated using anaphora, creates what the critic, Paulin, calls a ‘deliberately monotonous structure’

Question 3

Critical view for Rhapsody on a Windy Night - Eliot (D________)

Answer 3

‘Rhapsody’ reaches farthest into the surreal spaces of the dark; into memory and irrationality. Eliot’s Protagonist (or anti-hero) of the poem, makes as Dickey describes
Dickey ‘ the journey into consciousness’

Question 4

Critical view for Rhapsody on a Windy Night - Eliot (G________)

Answer 4

Grey - ‘there is nothing rhapsodic about these lyrics as they develop the highly ironic and highly unromantic vision of nocturnal existence’

Question 5

Critical view for Boterel (L.R)

Answer 5

The hill is much like Hardy’s poetry in a way, he uses, as Lisa Robertson suggests ‘hackneyed words as they are good’, his archaic language such as ‘bedrenches’ and ‘balked’ is worn and familiar , much like the grooves eroded into the Cornish landscape ‘by thousand more’ visiters to the Castle.

Question 6

Critical view for Boterel (T.SE)

Answer 6

He uses colloquial inflections to root his poetry in a sense of place and give conviction to his memories of the ancient landscape. Unlike T.S Eliot who was convinced that words ‘slip, slide, perish’ his familiar register helps express the endless, eternal nature of nature.

Question 7

Critical view for Prufrock (L.G.S)

Answer 7

In critic L.G. Salingar’s own words, ‘the most interesting verse… was that which constantly approached a fixed pattern without quite settling into it’.

Question 8

Critical view for Prufrock (R.L)

Answer 8

When Eliot invites the reader into the lonely mind of Prufrock, he creates ‘a mixture of sympathy and judgement’ critic Robert Langbaum suggests in The Poetry of Experience. It is an exceptional study of the average mind which swarms with memories triggering all the indecision, insecurity and anguish that makes us human.

Question 9

Critical view for Portrait

Answer 9

The poem, then, is symmetrically structured closely along the lines of the epigraph, even while tone and underlying meaning contrast with it.’ M. Laurentia