The Influence of T.S Eliot Through his Poetry Essay

In college Eliot met the love of his life and he soon married Vivien Haigh-Wood. This would make Eliot a new person in the way he would write and view the world. He self trained himself to make his writing more modern in efforts to reach a bigger crowd (Bush). These efforts would eventually pay off with writings like Ulysses, The Wasteland, and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. These writings would give T.S Eliot the strength to quit his job in a local bank and live off the success of his writings. Eliot used his life struggles as his inspiration to create his successful writings just like how he used it to create Prufrock in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”.

The modern society rejected him, and as an outcast, Eliot found himself to be extremely attentive not only to the surrounding world, but aware of a self-identity. Jeannette Winterson writes that Eliot wrote in “a language to luminous that for us is not in any sense a screen but rather a way in,” though Eliot wrote about his own personal experiences and the overwhelming situations and events, the meaning and connection between the composer and the reader creates a universally human meaning. A meaning created from an infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering

T.S. full name is Thomas Stearns Eliot. He had written a total of 68 poems, dramas, etc. in total (Wikipedia). There are many influences, but I think that Vivienne Haigh-Wood, Eliot`s first wife, Ezra Pound, his mentor and religion are one of the biggest influences on T.S. Eliot.

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.

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

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.

Poetry, by its very nature, comes from a place within of deep emotion and meaning for the writer. Some poets, such as Sharon Olds, utilize a confessional style that connects their personal experiences to the reader as if confessing their inner thoughts and feelings directly in an almost testimonial fashion. In her poems “After Making Love in Winter” and “Still Life in Landscape,” Sharon Olds utilizes poetic elements of setting and imagery to support a theme to convey her inner self in a way that resonates with readers on a personal level.

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

Eliot was living in an era that people were facing a very hard time. World War changed a lot of things for everyone. A lot of cities were destructed and a lot of people were dead and so it was basically a wasteland, and for this reason Eliot was mostly concerned about the society as a whole and how they all want to move on from this mess and not how each individual could be a better

            I think this style of writing is also a reflection of Eliot's feelings about the time.  Eliot was more of a Modernist than Victorian poet and as such held to beliefs like: there is no higher power in the universe, man is alone on this planet to govern his own affairs, everyone is truly alone, there is no unity, no support, for we live in a godless heartless world (Stacey Donohue).  The floating, confusing, jumbled mix of emotions and directions in this poem mirrors the modernist image of society.

Imagine a person is asked to flip a coin. He is given three chances to guess whether the coin will land on heads or tails. The first two flips, he guesses heads and both times the coin lands on tails. Certainly the third time, the guesser believes, the coin must land on heads. He follows his instinct, and he is wrong again. This scenario is just one example of the human mind attempting to impose a pattern on a random phenomenon. People love patterns and order, so we create societies, institutions, and artificial concepts like time. The human brain sees a “man on the moon” and seeks out information confirming its hypotheses (and ignores support for the oppositions). George Eliot critiques this beneficial, but also limiting, skill of the human mind. In “I Grant You Ample Leave,” she argues that humans perceive pattern and connection where there is none. Line 6 of “I Grant You Ample Leave” asserts that “You link false inference with, the ‘Since’ & ‘so’” (Eliot, 6). Within these few words, Eliot describes her audience with an emphatic pronoun. She then retains her audience’s attention using unorthodox styles such as enjambment and blank verse. Finally, she employs a logogram, the ampersand, as a symbol of her poem’s argument.

Eliot uses metaphor to relate accessible, physical entities and concepts to more abstract themes present in the poem. In

   Thomas Stearns Eliot was not a revolutionary, yet he revolutionized the way the Western world writes and reads poetry. Some of his works were as imagist and incomprehensible as could be most of it in free verse, yet his concentration was always on the meaning of his language, and the lessons he wished to teach with them. Eliot consorted with modernist literary iconoclast Ezra Pound but was obsessed with the traditional works of Shakespeare and Dante. He was a man of his time yet was obsessed with the past. He was born in the United States, but later became a royal subject in England. In short, Eliot is as complete and total a

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

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