T.s. Eliot Essay

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.

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.

his profession as a pastor in search for vital truth and hope. But his father

     In Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” published in 1729, Swift engages in an extraordinary amount of irony and satire. Swift states that in order to reduce famine in Ireland and to solve the problems that they are having that eating children would be a good solution. This is not the purpose of Swift’s essay. The real intent was to get the people of Britain to notice that the ideas that they were coming up with were not any better than his satirical one, and new ideas and efforts needed to come forth in order to solve the problem.

Did you know that the Dead Sea Scrolls also known as the greatest archaeological discovery of the 20th century were discovered in 1946? The Dead Sea Scrolls are Hebrew and are very interesting to study because of the vest history included. The Scrolls are important because you can see what the Hebrews were writing about around 100 BC and possibly why the Scrolls were being written.

West Spencer was in a severe bike accident leaving him in a coma and paralyzed. West and his best friend Mike were doing tricks on their bikes when West crashed at their local bike park. In and out of his coma at the Wilson Center, West makes a friend named Olivia. She's in the room next door.

In Emerson's Self-Reliance we see the crowning work of the transcendentalist movement. In this piece Emerson explains his belief in the innate divinity of man and defines our "Self-Reliance" as the broad identity in which we personally participate. Emerson challenges his readers to not conform to traditional practices in a variety of realms. However, he punctuates just four aspects of these challenges to tradition and they are: religion, education, art, and society. I found these passages to be the best representatives of Emerson's ideology due to their poignancy and numbered paragraphs. He talks of these challenges to man as revolutions due to a greater self-reliance. The profoundness of thought in this piece is surprising to

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

Cooperation is the key to human survival, and over time humans have been known to group together to survive. This strategy has allowed humans to develop massive cities and countries of immense power. Without the natural instinct to cling to one another, humans would not be as advanced as they are today, and may not have even made it out of the caves. Many authors display our natural instinct to cooperate in their works, allowing the characters to become more real to the readers.

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

In order to fully understand Eliot’s statement, it would be helpful to locate the statement in Eliot’s essay and then speculate its meaning within its context. Right before the quoted passage, Eliot writes, “if were agreed as to what we meant by wisdom, by the good life for the individual and for society, we should apply moral judgements to poetry as confidently as did Johnson” (Eliot 212). It seems Eliot implies that Johnson is confident about his moral judgement because there is a consensus in society on what is right and what is wrong. Consequently, when Johnson reads a text, it is relatively easy for him to judge the morality of this work, whereas Eliot’s time is “an age in which no two writers need agree about anything” (Eliot 212). For this reason, Eliot laments that readers in his age must endeavor to “discount [the] attraction or repulsion” of “the ideas, as well as the personality of the author” (Eliot 212). Yet in Johnson’s age, the relatively homogenous value system, Eliot believes, frees Johnson from the struggle to dissociate the work from the author’s idea. Johnson can simply disregard the author and weighs the text against the commonly accepted value, as Eliot says, “what interests Johnson is the edifying power of the poem, rather than the deliberate intention of the poet” (Eliot, 212). In other words, Eliot portrays Johnson as an disinterested critic who is only interested in how a text reflects the commonly accepted morality. In this sense, Johnson is able

Dylan Thomas Dylan Thomas was born on October 27, 1914 in Swansea, Wales. His father was a teacher and his mother was a housewife. Thomas was a sickly child who had a slightly introverted personality and shied away from school. He didn’t do well in math or science, but excelled in Reading and English. He left school at age 17 to become a journalist.

Mr. Eliot believed that poetry does not move the poet, but instead, the poetry moved the reader. His approach was that of Modernist, always alluding to something, with the reader left wondering. He wanted his poetry to be one that was always linguistically perfect, resulting in Eliot not publishing many poems in his lifetime. Eliot met Ezra Pound who was a literary critic who was influential in helping Eliot’s poem, A Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock become published. This was probably one of Eliot’s best piece’s of poetry.

The waste land by T.S.Eliot in 1922 is a mix of publications containing many themes and features. The poem contains five sections with the image of the city being the main focus for things to occur. The waste land encounters many different cultural impacts with the poem focusing on the imagery of nature and the whole rural setting. When researching Eliot you learn that most of his works draw vastly on literary and religious texts and the traditions around them. When reading the Waste lands written by Eliot you create your own images of war, trauma, death and numerous delusions that came about as the after effect of war.

Containing stories, news, and opinions of both T.S. Eliot and others who wrote about him, The Letters of T.S. Eliot offer an inside perspective on Eliot’s life.. In Volume 1 of the revised edition of the letters Patrick Query describes how T.S. Eliot felt so much passion for culture and how it must improve (Letters, Volume 1). In the volume, the writer states that Eliot started a movement to modernize literature all on his own. Eliot contained such a strong passion for making the world a better place, that as society generally acted apathetic towards life, Eliot strived for a culture where people actually inserted energy and passion into life. Also, in John Worthen’s biography of T.S. Eliot, the author believes Eliot focused the entire masterpiece of Four Quartets on illustrating to his audience despite painful times in life, people must focus more on the beauty of life (Worthen). Devoting much of his literature career to impacting society, Eliot often focused on changing the lack of enthusiasm culture contained.