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THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT (1888-1965) - Coggle Diagram
THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT (1888-1965)
LIFE
born in St Louis, Missouri
studied at Harvard but had an English cultural background (metaphysical poets and John Donne).
He learnt Italian by studying Dante and celebrated him saying that 'more can be learned about how to write poetry from Dante than from any English poet'
He studied at the Sorbonne and knew Henri Bergson
At the outbreak of the First World War he stayed in London
in 1915 he married the ballet dance Vivienne Haigh-Wood
his wife was in poor physical and mental health and he spent some time in a sanatorium in Lausanne
In 1927 he became British citizen and joined the Church of England
he separated from his wife, who died in a mental asylum in 1947 - Eliot's sense of guilt
In 1948 he received the
Nobel Prize for literature
His epitaph in East Coker is taken from
Four Quartets
:
In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning
WORKS
1917
Prufock and other observations
collection establishing him as an avant-garde poet
1922
he founded and eduted the literary magazine
Criterion
1925
he became a director for the publishers Faber & Faber
encouraged Ezra Pound and W.H. Auden
1922
The Waste Land
his masterpiece
finished in Lausanne
Ezra Pound contributed to it
dedicated to Pound, defined with Dante's words
il miglior fabbro
, the better craftsman
1925
The hollow men
a sequel of
The Waste land
's philosophical despair
Religious poetry
poems
Ash Wednesday
(1930)
Four Quartets
(1943)
The journey of the Magi
(1927)
plays
Murder in the cathedral
(1935)
on the assassination of Thomas Becket
The family reunion
(1939)
on the guilt of a man haunted by the Furies
1920
Gerontion
Essays
The Sacred wood
Selected Essays
he shared Joyce's view on impersonalism
he explained Joyce's mythical method as 'a simple way of giving shape to the immense panorama of anarchy which is contemporary history' (
Ulysses, order and myth
)
PERIODS
BEFORE THE CONVERSION
pessimistic vision of the world
AFTER THE CONVERSION
purification, hope and joy
THE WASTE LAND
5 SECTIONS
III - The Fire Sermon
introduction of
Tiresias
. Present alienation described through a loveless sex encounter
IV - Death by water
Spiritual shipwreck described through a drowned Phoenician sailor,
Phlebas
II - A game of chess
juxtaposition of the present squalor to the past splendour
V - What the thunder said
possible solution found in sympathy with other human beings, but the atmosphere remains of desolation
I - The Burial of the Dead
Spring comes in a sterile land
STRUCTURE
no order nor unity
a collection of states of mind
One speaking voice with a multiple personality:
Tiresias
, the Theban prophet from Sophocle's plays
he experienced blindness and the life of both sexes
the knight from the Grail legend
fragmentary to reflect the breakdown of a social order destroyed by the war
MAIN THEME
The fertility of the mythical past and the spiritual sterility of the present world
literary quotations from the past
present and past exist simultaneously
continuous shifts in time and space caused by the free associations (as in Joyce's
Ulysses
)
STYLE
mixture of blank verse, ode, quatrain, free verse
reproduction of the chaos of modern civilization
the active participation of the reader/public is required
technique of the
OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE
a combination of images, objects of descriptions evoking a particular emotion
explained in his essay
Hamlet and his problems
(1920)
repetitions of words and phrases
juxtaposition of squalid and poetic elements
TEXTS
The Burial of the Dead
name of the funeral service in the Anglican rite, metaphor for the condition of modern man and his meaningless life
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land [...]
THE HOLLOW MEN
The voices of the hollow men have been dried up and made 'quiet and meaningless'
2 introducing EPIGRAPHS:
Mistah Kurtz - he dead
uttered by a black boy of Conrad's
The Heart of darkness
A penny for the old Guy
in reference to Guy Fawkes and the effigies burnt on 5th November
The history of Kurtz in Conrad's novel is the study of primitive rituals of fertility. The parallel in T.S. Eliot consists in the theme of degradation through the rejection of the good, of despair through consequent guilt
TEXT
This is the dead land
We are the hollow men
we are the stuffed men
leaning together
headpiece filled with straw. Alas!