A social commentator, artistic critic, and artist, T.S. Eliot importantly chides modernist culture within his representation of the recurring character Sweeney, while also adhering to principles that he advances within his critical essays. Not only does Eliot merely describe the lust that he observes, but he, through Sweeney, interacts with, and consequently conveys its specific circumstances. Infusing mythological allusions into his depictions of such immoral situations, Eliot becomes an important medium for channeling the progression of such phenomena as sexual catastrophe into a modern setting. Criticizing the lechery and vulgarity which characterize the Modern Period, Eliot intentionally creates a two dimensional world in both “Sweeney Erect,” and “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” in order to more sufficiently caricaturize the decadence of the lust and animalism that pervade his culture.
An essential framing mechanism for both emphasizing the poem’s theme, and consequently providing social commentary, Eliot’s static, caricatured, portrayal of Sweeney augments his argument that sexual deviance and lust perpetrate sexual catastrophe. Considering the benefit of static characters within Ben Jonson’s poetry, Eliot notes that “Men may not talk in that way, but the spirit of envy does, and in the words of Jonson envy is a real and living person,” thus insinuating that the act of limiting his character to a mere manifestation of envy is a more cogent method of highlighting his theme than creating a dynamic role (63). By titling his poem “Sweeney Erect,” Eliot verifies his desire to establish a static mechanism for providing social commentary, as the title itself both posits that Sweeney resembles a primitive human ancestor, and elicits the image of sexuality through the word “erect,” ultimately characterizing his satirical figure before he is even introduced. Mirroring this sentiment, Eliot uses Sweeney as an embodiment of both primalism and sexual promiscuity, thereby developing his ultimate contention that concupiscence directly results in sexual catastrophe. Introducing this relationship in his poem “Sweeney Erect,” Eliot depicts Sweeney’s reaction to a prostitute who was suffering from epileptic shock, noting
Eliot uses allusions and imagery to make several references to characters—both real and fictional—to vicariously show how Prufrock feels. The first allusion is an epigraph from Dante’s Inferno:
Now I intend to turn my attention to concrete examples from Walt Whitman's poetry to provide some evidence of that sexuality played an important role in his poetry, and there are possible readings to find traces for that. Of course, we cannot only rely on selected
By looking through a critical lens at T Stearns Eliot’s poetry in light of his 20th century, modernist context, much is revealed about his personal and the rapidly evolving societal beliefs of that era. Through his repeating motif of time and fragmentation throughout his poems, Eliot reveals the prevalent feelings of isolation while in society along with the need to hide one’s feelings and emotions in this degrading society. His exploration of the use of ambiguity and stream of consciousness by Eliot, which is a characteristic of modernist artists, allows his work to resound over decades while being interpreted and differently understood by every audience that encounters them.
This chapter is about the young Emperor gets her sickness. Takiko plays on the Kyoto and its soothes the young Emperor which it helps her survive through it.
4. One of the most demanding aspects of this poem is its allusions, as Eliot expected his readers to be as well educated as he was. Some allusions are fairly accessible. The allusions to Michelangelo—an artist most people are familiar with—in line 14 and again in line 36 help us imagine the women Prufrock is talking about. The function of the less accessible allusions—such as “works and days of hands” (l. 29)—may serve a different purpose. Why might Eliot have included such esoteric allusions? How do they affect your reading of the poem?
T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land explores modernism, specifically focusing on the troubling of binaries and the breakdown of the traditional. The boundaries between life and death, wet and dry, male and female, and more are called into question in Eliot’s conception of modernity and the waste land. The blurring of gender boundaries—significantly through Tiresias and the hooded figure scene in “What the Thunder Said”— in the poem lends itself to Eliot’s suggestion that traditional masculinity breaks down and decays in the waste land. Traditional masculinity is further challenged through Eliot’s criticism of hyper-masculinity and heterosexual relations in the modern era through allusions to the myth of Philomela and the “young man carbuncular” scene in “The Fire Sermon.” Along with this, Eliot stages scenes charged with homoeroticism to further challenge ideas of traditional masculinity. Homoerotic scenes such as the “hyacinth girl” scene in “The Burial of the Dead” and the Mr. Eugenides scene in “The Fire Sermon” suggest an intensity and enticement towards male-male relations, while also offering a different depiction of masculinity than is laid out in the heterosexual romance scenes. Through scenes depicting queer desire and homosexual behavior, Eliot suggests that masculinity in the modern era does not need to be marked by aggression and
T.S. Eliot and Melvin Tolson use their poems, which reference political norms and utilize a diverse set of diction, in order to purvey socio-economic paradigms of the time period in which each author lived, which in turn, gave the audience a look into their lives. These two authors actively tried to change their environments by satirizing these paradigms and drawing attention to them in order to bring
Eliot is not solely criticising modern life in the poem, it also serves as a reflection of Eliot’s social context and his own life, a product of its time.
Eliot is vague in his suggestion of Prufrock’s audience, only referring to the listener once using “you and I;”(1) however, by analyzing Eliot’s intertextual inclusion of the passage from Dante’s Inferno and Prufock’s
T.S. Eliot in the twentieth-century wrote what is today widely-regarded as one of the most important text of modernist poems, “The Waste Land.” This poem evaluates many aspects of ancient and contemporary culture and customs, and how the contemporary culture has degraded into a wasteland. In “The Waste Land,” Eliot conjures, through allusions to multiple religions and works of literature in five separate sections, a fragmented and seemingly disjointed poem. Eliot repeatedly alludes to western and eastern cultural foundation blocks to illustrate the cultural degradation prevalent in the modern era of England. One specific eastern example is brought up in the third section of the poem, which T.S. Eliot names “Fire Sermon,” an allusion to
Q5 "Much of what Eliot writes about is harsh and bleak, but he writes about it in a way that is often beautiful". Comment fully on both parts of this assertion.
In T.S. Eliot’s most famous poem The Wasteland, a bleak picture of post-war London civilization is illuminated. The inhabitants of Eliot’s wasteland are living in a morally bankrupt and spiritually lost society. Through fragmented narration, Eliot recalls tales of lost love, misplaced lust, forgone spirituality, fruitless pilgrimages, and the “living dead”- those who shuffle through life without a care. These tales are the personal attempts of each person to fulfill the desires which plague them, though none ever stop to consider that what they want may not be what they need, nor do they consider why it is they feel they must do these things. Through studies in Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic perspective
This quote is a proposition for gay sex at a hotel, a sort of thing that was considered very immoral at the time. Eliot thought that emptiness in culture was giving way to sexual immorality. This point is brought up again a few lines later;
Eliot’s creative use of poetic form is one of the hallmarks of “The Wasteland” and greatly contributed to the overall tone and mood. The structure of the poem is uneven and almost discordant. It rapidly transitions between various unrelated scenes at a rapid pace. For example, “I read, much of the night and go south in the winter/What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow…” (19-20) illustrates an abrupt shift in the setting which includes the speaker, time, and place. In the first line, the reader is listening to the story of Marie. In the second line, however, the reader has been transported to a desert: a literal wasteland. This choppy stream of images emphasizes a message about society: like the poem, society does not progress smoothly and can even be unpredictable.
This time Eliot does not quote another piece of text, however, he does consciously foregrounds that he uses the opening to Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (Bennett and Royle 5). This profusion of intertextuality, even before “The Waste Land” is well and truly on