George Eliot's Middlemarch

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.

Victorian period was a distinct period in history that is marked for being an Age of Faith where the old traditions and cultures had renewed emphasis on everyday life. However, it was also a period of economic prosperity that resulted in the growth of industrialization and science. The scientific theories such as Evolution and “Higher Criticism”, which was a scientific study of the Bible, resulted in the Victorian period also being classified as “Age of Doubt” which brought gradual collapse of longstanding religious beliefs. This complex relationship of Victorian period being both the Age of Faith and Doubt

In Middlemarch, George Eliot utilizes several literary devices to portray her two characters and their complex relationship that reveals their marriage is dominated by the husband who objectifies his wife into silence. Throughout the passage, Eliot makes it clear that Rosamond and Tertius Lydgate are in an uneven relationship, considering Tertius refuses to listen to his wife who seems to only have his best interest at heart, yet still, he continues to yell at her for thinking she knows what is best for him. With the help of details, Tertius’s critical tone, and imagery, Eliot is able to showcase how complex their relationship is when it comes to Rosamond giving her opinions and ideas, just to be casted to the side.

Wordsworth, like other Romantic Poets, with his overwhelming mind observed life with greater suction and fundamentality; his partaking in the working of life was keen and so minute that when he did finally caught up with the philosophy of life his poems became more and more sublime and transcendental in feelings. In his Preface to the “Lyrical Ballads” republished in 1800 described a Poet and his working which in a way popularized self-expression connecting an object of little importance to the infinite vision of the Creator. His grew as a poet gradually with

The first point of Wordsworthian aesthetic programme is connected with themes of works, i. e. descriptions of day-to-day life of uneducated people, rural orphans, handicapped, (e. g. The Idiot Boy) people who suffered or rejoiced. Wordsworth achieved perfection thanks to interweaving simplicity of the characters and their expressiveness at the same time (Mroczkowski, 311, Zbierski

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.

Relationships are always undoubtedly complex and dysfunctional. George Eliot, in this excerpt from the novel Middlemarch, thoroughly portrays many of these intricacies of relationships through a husband and a wife: Rosamond and Tertius Lydgate. This relationship’s dysfunctionalities are revealed through a financial conflict which brings to light their underlying thoughts toward each other. Eliot makes certain to portray Tertius as the dominant and strategically manipulative character while Rosamond is the weak, ignorant and oblivious one. Through these distinct personalities, Eliot shows how these characters react oppositely to each other when they clash from an economic struggle, stemming from a small disagreement. Eliot portrays Rosamond

The urban landscape is employed by Eliot in Preludes to demonstrate the isolated desertion of a modern city. The use of repetition in “the showers beat on broken blinds” emphasises the polluted, squalid environment and

The Middle Passage was a long and dreadful stage of The Atlantic Slave trade where millions of Africans were shipped to the New World. Large ships filled with crew left Europe and headed to Africa for goods, which led to the Triangular Trade system. Everyone involved had a different experience and also each individually faced many hardships during this inhumane part of history.

Upon a visit to Mr. Irwine’s abode in Chapter 5 of Adam Bede, George Eliot’s audience encounters a seemingly trivial interaction between Captain Arthur Donnithorne and his godmother, Mrs. Irwine. The chapter’s title being “The Rector,” one does not necessarily expect to find much significance in Arthur’s brief discussion with his godmother, and, when compared to Arthur’s exchanges with Mr. Irwine and Hetty Sorrel in the same chapter, their conversation can even border on forgettable; however, it is in this brief interaction that Eliot’s audience catches a glimpse of one of the text’s scarce interactions between upper-class individuals, the interaction itself absolutely doused in rhetorical devices which ultimately undermine the upper-class characters in the scene, revealing their hypocrisy and their inability to properly articulate the world they live in. This is accomplished through Eliot’s use of irony in the contradictory nature of Mrs. Irwine’s paradoxical

T.S. Eliot characterizes his speaker in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” based on his own personal experiences. In 1915, Eliot wrote one of his most famous poems as a skeptic (Schneider 1103). He constantly questioned the meaning of human life and the reasons why human beings were created at all. In the same way, Prufrock also has a difficult time in finding the purpose of his long life. The speaker of this poem takes the reader on a journey so that maybe the listener can aid him in finding meaning to his life. Throughout T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the narrator is overwhelmed by the nothingness in his life through the characterization of himself, the wandering to many different settings, and the feeling of death approaching him.

When discussing the greatest poetic minds to ever put their genius to use, it is nearly impossible to not mention Thomas Stearns Eliot. Eliot used his works to develop and display his emotions and his morals by writing complex themes and descriptive scenes that are all based on simple situations that either Eliot himself had lived through, or that someone he knew closely had. By doing so, Eliot was able to convey some of the core human emotions well enough to leave the reader unsure on how he or she feels about the topic themselves. Often times, the only way to express emotion, was through his works. The analysis of the life, and the writings of Thomas Stearns Eliot reveal the possible influences in his works, and the facts behind what led

"How has your research into TS Eliot's life and the opinions of ONE critic enriched your understanding of an aspect of The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock?"

Everyone knows that life is not always easy and that there a myraid of sad situations that occur daily. In the poem Rhapsody On a Windy Night by T. S Eliot, the speaker is trying to escape the day to day issues by taking an all night walk, only to realize that the troubles of the day roll over into different, but equally as troubling problems. T. S Eliot uses multiple different comparison tequniques such as similes. It is midnight and the speaker is walking down the street describing the darkness. Than they start to notice the street lamps: “Every street lamp that I pass/Beats like a fatalistic drum”( 8-9).

As one of America's first modernist poets, T. S. Eliot's unique style and subject matter would have a dramatic influence on writers for the century to come. Born in 1888 in St. Louis Mo. at the tail end of the "Cowboy era" he grew up in the more civilized industrial era of the early 20th century, a time of the Wright Brothers and Henry Ford. The Eliot family was endowed with some of the best intellectual and political connections in America of that time, and as a result went to only the best schools. By 1906 he was a freshman in Harvard, finishing his bachelors in only 3 years and studying philosophy in France from 1910 to 1914, the outbreak of war. In 1915 the verse magazine Poetry published Eliot's first notable piece, 'The