Choruses from the Rock by T.S. Eliot Essay

Susan Griffin writes her book, A Chorus of Stones: the Private Life of War, in a way that makes it into a blend of memoirs, history, and psychology. She includes three sorts of history in the writing: world, family, and personal history. With her own personal history, she writes about and describes her childhood and life which interlaces with her family’s history. The lives of the characters in her essay bring about the larger world history and the events that occurred.

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.

American born poet, T.S. Eliot reflects modernistic ideas of isolation, individual perception and human consciousness in his many poems. His poems express the disillusionment of the post–World War I generation with both literary and social values and traditions. In one of Eliot’s most famous poems, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which was published in 1915, a speaker who is very unhappy with his life takes readers on a journey through the hell he is living in. In this journey, Prufrock criticizes the well-dressed, upstanding citizens who love their material pleasures more than they love other people, while explaining he feels ostracized from the society of women. Eliot’s use of isolation, human consciousness and individual perception is quite evident in his dramatic monologue within the story of J. Alfred Prufrock. Prufrock wants to be seen as a normal citizen who can find friends or a lover, but his anxiety-driven isolation forces him to live a life that relates more to Hell than paradise. In over examining every fine detail of his life, Prufrock perceives himself as useless and even a waste of life. By using many poetic devices including repetition, personification, and imagery Eliot drives readers to feel the painful reality of Prufrock’s life. In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” T.S Eliot uses modernistic ideas and poetic devices to portray how Prufrock’s life relates to Hell while simultaneously criticizing social aspects of the younger post–World War I generation.

These are all simple laws of nature that one thing cannot stay constant forever and yet I struggle with this idea and I try to fight it. I’m only comfortable in the known and the routine. So when I look at the universe I see something comfortable and yes, I would be more than happy to eliminate the violence from this modern era. I would take out the oppression and the depression but if I take this away from the world we live in then what monstrosity will take its place? What if it is somehow worse and there ends up being more death and more hate in the world how “should I then presume?” (Eliot line 73) How do I change it in its current state? If I dare to change the universe “then where should I begin,” (Eliot line 74) with the depression or the oppression? This world is not an algebraic formula where we can find out which of the two is the independent and which is the dependent variable. Is it the depression forcing the oppression or the oppression causing the depression? Frankly I wouldn’t want my life to be explained in the way of a formulaic solutions, lucky for me that is the case for the more complex things in the world, anything touched by freewill to be exact. I suppose it’s quite possible to “face the whole external world for an instant” (Fitzgerald pg. 48) and figure everything out but by the

Poetry can sometimes allow one to explore the unknown. However, in some works of poetry, one can realise that some known ideas or values remain relevant to current society. This is certainly applicable to T.S. Eliot’s poems, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Rhapsody on a Windy Night. Eliot’s manipulation of poetic techniques in both these poems allows the responder to realise that some ideas prevail in both modern and post-modern society. These poems explore the unknown phenomena of the obscurity regarding the purpose and meaning of life. This unknown phenomena causes the persona in both texts to resort to a sense of isolation or alienation. Eliot uses poetic techniques such as metaphors and personification to convey his ideas.

According to data from the Pew Research Center, Americans are becoming less religious, but, simultaneously, more spiritual. Often described as “nones,” these individuals have rejected the trappings of institutional religion, yet still feel “a deep sense of spiritual peace and well-being as well as a deep sense of wonder about the universe.”

T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” illustrates the poet’s fear of the fragmentation of modern society. In the poem, Eliot creates the persona of his speaker, J. Alfred Prufrock. Prufrock is speaking to an unknown listener. The persona of Prufrock is Eliot’s interpretation of Western society and its impotency at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. His views are modernistic, which idolize the classical forms while incorporating new ideas about psychology and the subconscious. Eliot illustrates his contempt for the faithlessness of modern society by illustrating its fragmentation with synecdoche, characterization of Prufrock, and allusions to literary traditions throughout the narrative. In his poem, Eliot illustrates his view of a great tradition that he is witnessing as it falls apart.

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.

Also, Eliot uses other text such as that, which is in the lines, "But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed, Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter, I am no prophet- and here's no great matter" (777); as an allusion to indicate his inability to convey his message. He explains that even though he has prayed (perhaps for society) and wept and fasted, he still can not send the true message that has encompassed himself and his soul.

Message of Hope in Eliot's The Waste Land, Gerontion, and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

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 this discussion of Eliot’s poem I will examine the content through the optic of eco-poetics. Eco- poetics is a literary theory which favours the rhizomatic over the arborescent approach to critical analysis. The characteristics of the rhizome will provide the overarching structure for this essay. Firstly rhizomes can map in any direction from any starting point. This will guide the study of significant motifs in ‘The Waste Land.’ Secondly they grow and spread, via experimentation within a context. This will be reflected in the study of the voice and the language with which the poem opens. Thirdly rhizomes grow and spread regardless of breakage. This will allow for an

Eliot’s use of symbolism can be very disorienting. It has been proposed that this choppy medley is actually furthering his point by representing the “ruins” of a culture. An article

All words, phrases and sentences (or just simply images) which make up this poem seem to, in Levi-Strauss’ words, “be a valeur symbolique zero [and the signifier] can take on any value required ”, meaning that the images Eliot uses do not have one fixed signification and consequently conjure up thought-provoking ideas that need to be studied (qtd. in