TS Eliot essay Flashcards
‘JAP’ intro signposting
Consciously rejecting the sentimentality of Romantic verse, his poignant poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1910) (‘Prufrock’) symbolically represents the modern man who struggles to rationalise his purpose amongst the dreary landscape.
‘Hollow’ intro signposting
Eliot evolves his alternate stylistic features and form in ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925) which exposes the predicament of the modern man who is confined to a nihilistic and purgatorial existence.
‘Magi’ intro signposting
Subverting portraits of a doomed humanity in his early work, ‘Journey of the Magi’ (1927) marks a shift in Eliot’s poetry through its fragmented portrayal of the journey that humanity must undertake to experience spiritual rebirth.
JAP paragraph introduction
In his poignant pre-war poem ‘Prufrock’ (1910), Eliot powerfully conveys the disturbing ‘masquerades’ of 20th century urban life through J. Alfred Prufrock, the symbolic representation of the modern man who struggles to rationalise his purpose from the sordid landscape of modernity.
JAP- form
Dramatic monologue form that shifts between first and third person observations
- Eliot reveals the inner life of Prufrock with ironic cynicism
- hence suggesting modern life in a sterile society that cannot act holds no purpose
JAP techniques
Alluding to Dante’s ‘Inferno’ in the epigraph which Dicksey suggests has a “Dantean model in mind”
- the bleak tone eludes to the suffering of Prufrock in the hell of the modern world where individuals are stripped of their humanity into fragmented entities.
Dramatically subverting imagery of 19th century poetry in a “patient etherized upon a table”
- Eliot conveys Prufrock’s emotional paralysis and lifelessness to suggest the inherent sickness of uncertainty that prevailed, only curable with spiritual salvation.
Refrain in which “women come and go Talking of Michaelangelo”
- suggest the unstable reverie of Prufrock as a character foil of the ‘Renaissance Man’
- Presenting the modern man as weak in purposeful conviction and lost to the grime of the urban streets.
Hollow paragraph introduction
T.S Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925) follows the crisis of the modern man who lives a purgatorial existence that Eliot claims can only be salvaged by spiritual fulfilment.
Hollow- form
Episodic free verse poetic form fragmented in five parts
- poetic consciousness establishes intense nostalgia for spirituality
- hence placing the “hollow men” in the bleak urbanity of civilisation.
Structuring the poem with fragmented pieces of the Lord’s prayer
- Modern man has deteriorated into being incapable of spiritual vision
- deems life as pointless as the ‘Mulberry Bush’ nursery rhyme.
Hollow techniques
Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ (1899) in the first epigraph
- spiritual vacuity of the prototypical modern man likened to “Mr Kurtz”
- Convey him as one who needs renewed spirituality after being morally blackened from urbanity
Referencing “Old Guy (Fawkes)” from the 1605 Failed Gunpowder Plot
- Krause claims it forms a “veritable mosaic of intertextual and historical references”
- Parallel the Dantean reference in ‘Prufrock’ to the man obsessed over his “bald spot”.
Utilising binary opposition of “Shape without form, shade without colour, paralysed force, gesture without motion”,
- negation is used to portray the modern man attempting avoid the inevitability of death
- inertia so paralysing that humanity can’t move through life itself.
Magi paragraph introduction
TS Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi’ (1927) marks a shift in Eliot’s poetry in its portrayal of the Magi to expose the journey that humanity must undertake to experience needed spiritual rebirth in the perpetually barren 20th century.
Magi- form
Leitch comments that by “Dramatizing… his religious consciousness” in the monologue form with biblical allusion to the birth of Christ fragmented into three stanzas
- Journey toward and away from salvation is personalised
- Illuminates the extent of existential alienation endemic in his modern world.
Magi- techniques
Appropriating from Lancelot Andrewes’ 1622 Christmas Sermon “A cold coming they had of it”
- Alliteration establishes realisation of the hardship of the ironic journey where the old dispensation is eradicated for the new.
Second person narrative voice of the Magi complimented by disrupted syntax and parenthesis “Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory”
- subverts expectations of a spiritual individual discovering a saviour like Eliot’s own religious conversion
- Implying the turmoil endured for spiritual salvation in a morally vacuous society.
Concluding with the metaphor of “Alien people clutching their Gods”
- hope present in the opening is left unfulfilled as most of humanity fails to find ontological meaning
- Eliot’s Prufrockian-like Otherness is pertinent as an anomaly to modernist sentiment.
