Module B Study Guide: T.S Eliot - themes Flashcards
Main themes (Matrix education)
Relationships
The characters in Eliot’s poetry struggle with their relationships with others. They fail to connect properly, or have failed relationships because of their competing expectations.
Modernity
Eliot is critical of the modern world and its rapidly chaning values.
Isolation
The modern world isolates individuals from society with its competing demands of labour and social expectation.
Gender
Eliot wrestles with the changing gender roles in 20th century society. He is titillated* by sexual freedom, but disgusted at the same time. His male characters struggle with their masculinity.
Literary Tradition
Eliot is deeply concerned with literary tradition and its place in the modern world. His poems are packed with references to other literature.
Time
Modernists were obsessed with time. Time is experienced subjectively; it seems to pass at different speeds at different times. Individuals feel they have all the time in the world only to discover time has passed too quickly.
Entropy and Decay
Entropy is the idea that all things decay and break down. Modernists perceived the structures as the world and human relationships being affected by entropy too.
Personal Struggle
Individuals in Eliots poems struggle with their own identity and place in society. The changes of the modern world have left their lives full of uncertainty.
Cycles
Eliot adopted the poet WB Yeats focus on the cynical nature of history. Modernists perceived and represented history as being prone to the repetition of the same mistakes.
Faith
Eliot struggled with faith. He converted to Anglican Catholicism at a late age. He then struggled with this belief and wrote about it at length. Meanwhile, the modern world was becoming increasingly secular.
Mental Health
Modernism coincided with the development of psychoanalysis and psychiatry. The individual’s psychic struggle with existence in the modern world became even more prevalent with the trauma of WWI.
Tradition
Modernity brought changes to labour roles, habitation, gender, class, religion and social structure. These were often resisted by conservatives who lamented the loss of the old ways.
Death
Death is universal. Everybody dies. Eliot wrote extensively about the effects of coming to terms with one’s mortality.
The Quest
Eliot’s poems often discuss quotes. Traditonally the quest narrative was the search for a holy relic or special object, but in Eliot’s work this object could be understanding or faith.
