ELIOT
LIFE
He was born in St Louis in 1888
He was educated at Harvard but in 1910 he studied in Paris at the Sorbonne where he started to read French Symbolists' works
He came back to Harvard and in 1914 he won a scholarship to Oxford
THE WASTE LAND
Style
The Waste Land is considered a central work in Modernism.
It rejects any order or unity, and all the fragmentary passages seem to belongbto one voice relating to a multiple personality.
He take images from every day life, but he deflating the tragic meaning of the existence, with ironic stance and different tipes of tones
The main theme of the poem is: the contrast between the fertility of a mythical past and the spiritual sterility of the present.
The most famous character is Tiresias, the Theban prophet who experienced blindness and the life of both sexes.
Eliot's thought
In 1915 He married Vivienne Haigh-Wood
Eliot was Influenced by
Dante Alighieri with "Divina Commedia"
In 1921 he was hospitalized for acute psychological stress caused by problems with his marriage
The Simbolism poets, like Arthur Simons
Imagism, Ezra Pound
Moreover the ability to see the past as a concrete premise for the present is Classicism.
In 1927 he became a British citizen and converted to the Anglican Church
17th Century Metaphysical current, John Donne
Eliot requires the active participation of the reader/public, who experiences the same world as that of the speaker/poet.
Works
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)
The Waste Land (1922)
The Hollow Man (1925)
Ash Wednesday (1930)
Eliot' thought about modern society clearly influenced his works, the elaboration of these can be devided into two periods:
TECHNIQUE
Murder in the Cathedral (1935)
implication
objective correlative:
Consist to in a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the of that particular emotion.
repetition of words, images and phaser to give greater musicality to the poem.
He divorced his wife in 1933
He use the "Objective Correlative"
In 1948 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature
the mythical method:
It is a method by means of which the antithesis between present and past can exist.
SECTIONS
The Burial of the Dead
It is a metaphor for the condition of contemporary man, whose life is meaningles, empty, alienating, and as a result quite similar to death.
The Fire Sermon
It is the third section of the Waste Land and is centred on the theme of love and on the juxtaposition between fertility of the past and sterility of the present.
The Family Reunion
(1939)
He died in London in 1965
The Four Quartets
(1943)
After Eliot's conversion to Anglo-Catholicism his vision changed and became positive.
He didn't feel to belong to that world in fact through his poems he shows his own sense of isolation.
In the first period Eliot portrayed a modern society sterile full of darkness and despair.
Works were characterised by a pessimistic vision of the world withouth any faith, ideals,values and hope.
In the second period his works were characterised by the words PURIFICATION, JOY, HOPE.