T.S. Eliot's Poetical Devices T.S. Eliot was one of the great early 20th Century poets. He wrote many poems throughout his career including "The Waste Land"(1922), "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"(1917), and "Ash Wednesday"(1930). Throughout his poems, he uses the same poetic devices to express emotion and give an added depth to his poetry and act like a trademark in his works. One of the devices used throughout is his personification of nature. The second device he often uses is allusions to Greek mythology, Greek plays, and the Christian bible. Finally, the last device he often uses is imagery of death. Throughout the poems mentioned above this is especially apparent as it makes them all seem identifiable to his style. T. S. …show more content…
In his poem "The Waste Land", it reads "A current under sea picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell He passes the stages of his age and youth." Since the character is essentially trapped in time the image of bones gives it a dark feeling. The bones that are described are part of death because when a body decays, all that is left is bones and so he is trapped in time while dying. The second example of death in Eliot's poems comes from "The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock" where it says, "I know the voices dying with a dying fall." This quote demonstrates death because the character knows people are dying. This shows that death is apparent in this poem because the author uses it to describe the world the character lives in. The final example of death in Eliot's poems comes from "Ash Wednesday" where it reads "The empty forms between Ivory Gates." The Ivory gates are associated with heaven and when someone dies, they will go to the gates in order to be judged by St. Peter. Death is apparent because the imagery of the Ivory Gates deals with the afterlife and what happens to the soul when someone dies. Overall, Eliot uses imagery of death throughout his work as shown through the examples given making this one of his trademark' poetic devices in his work. The next poetic device that Eliot uses throughout his work is the allusions to mythology, religion, and other literature. The first example comes from the poem "The Waste Land" where it reads "In fattening
At this time, T.S. Eliot had just gotten out of college and was undecided in his work. His question was to either become a professor, or to keep writing poems. When T.S. Eliot was in London, Ezra Pound noticed his poetic gift and assisted in the publication of his work in many different magazines. Ezra Pound describes his poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock as “the best poem I have yet had or seen from an American”. Ezra Pound then takes Eliot in as his student. In 1915, he published his first poetic masterpiece called The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock which was written four years before he published this piece.
T.S. Eliot, was a renowned poet within the early 20th century whose poetry was largely influenced by the effects of the modernism era. His poems were reflective of contextual concerns such as the Enlightenment period, and largely explored the thematic concerns of desire whilst simultaneously exploiting the tension of human suffering. Eliot, in his poems, explores the ambiguity of identity explicitly through both The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and Prelude. Both poems examine the complexities of human suffering through a post World War climate and capitalises upon the revolution of industrialisation. Concurrently, the excerpt of Jeanette Winterson's critique and commentary of Eliot's poetry within the BBC documentary, Arena: T.S. Eliot
How has Eliot used both conventional and Modernist poetic techniques to represent his Modernist concerns?
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
Many of the repeated lines share connections to other texts. Eliot repeats the idea of a ‘kingdom’ (lines 30, 37, 45,55 and 64) to depict the location of the hollow men is a desolate wasteland. This connects to Bible as in a world without God man will suffer. This is a way in which Eliot attempts to illustrate the consequences of failing to abide by religious doctrine and morality. Man will live in a barren world without salvation and God.
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 was the most famous English poet of his time, and he was one of the most influential poet. His distinctive style of writing took the attention of not only other poets, but many people all over the world. “Thomas Stearns Eliot is best known as a poet and literary critic (he received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948), but his work in social and cultural theory has also been widely influential”(Edwards). T.S. Eliot's style of writing was mostly a pessimistic view on life. One of the best examples of his pessimistic view on life comes from his work The Hollow Men. The Hollow Men is a short part of the title The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot. The Hollow
In the poems “The Love Song by J. Alfred Prufrock,” written in 1910, published in 1915, and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” written in 1917, both of which were written by poet and literary-critic T. S. Eliot, the symbolism and imagery of the women represented in mythological means, the locations and landscapes that both protagonists wander through or plan on going to, and the nature that is used in both poems are very similar, yet uniquely different. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is about a man with low self-confidence worrying about going to a party in the evening where he is sure that the women there with reject and ridicule him; “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” is about a man wandering his way back in the early hours of the morning
Another idea that deeply concerned TS Eliot was the decaying state of his society. In poem after poem the idea of feeling detached and pushed away from the world sprang out from the pages. The poem entitled Hollow men depicts this idea very well. Here, TS Eliot describes how everyone is just hollow men stuffed with useless knowledge and things he calls ‘straw’.
The type of writing that had made him famous was his collection of poetry that he named “Four Quartets”. “Four Quartets” is a collection of four separate poems with five verses in them all, that Eliot Made made out of inspiration of his life, mankind's history, and the religion he had just succumbed to. As an interesting fact about the names of the poems, “Burnt Norton”, “East Coker”, “The Dry Salvages”, and
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
Most first time readers of Eliot's work would, probably, agree that his poems read as bleak and depressing. They would also say that many of his poems portray society as having a terminal illness, but when we look deeper you can see that amid the anguish not all is lost and there is hope to be found among the ruins. "The Wasteland", is an amalgamation of fragmented images that are disturbing and, yet, at times beautifully poetic. The juxtaposition of the ugly landscape and the lyricism with which it is conveyed lend the poem an
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
The Waste Land, written by T.S. Eliot, is poem portraying the lack and/or the corruption of culture in England during the post WWI period. Eliot uses a form of symbolism, in which he uses small pieces from popular literary works, to deliver his message. He begins by saying that culture during the post WWI period is a “barren wasteland.” Eliot goes on to support this claim by saying that people in England are in a sort of shock from the violence of World War I. Eliot believes that the lack of culture open doors for immorality to grow among the populace.
This epigraph may serve as a way to connect with a certain group of scholars, as not many people speak the language it is written in, however, when it is read in its original context it may mean that Eliot does not foresee a very bright future, which would be in tune with the rest of the poem, furthermore this reference strongly hints at the use of tarot cards and the notion of randomness in the rest of the poem. The fact that this epigraph is in a foreign language greatly contributes to the theme of the poem and is therefore discussed in the next section of this paper. Followed by the epigraph is a quotation from the Anglican burial service, which serves as the subtitle of the first part of the poem: “1. The Burial of the Dead”. This leads us to additional intertextuality,