T.S Eliot- Faith + Decay + Search for Truth
January 5, 2016~ wutosama
T.S Eliot, one of the eminent literary figures of the Modernist era, captures the exultation and despair of a generation in a modernist response caused by the First World War and the disillusionment of mundane modernity. His profound anxiety is demonstrated in “The Love song of J.Alfred Prufrock”, “The Hollow men”, “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and “Journey of the Magi” through the deliberate subversion of Romantic poetry. The enduring appeal of his poems is the evocation of emotion within the reader, conjuring “a hope which sprang from the renunciation of the world, a hope so different from despair yet different from nihilism.” (A.Moody, 1979) Eliot’s cohesive poems possess a unity of culture, revealing timeless concerns such as the fragility of faith, decay and alienation of humanity and search for truth.
Both “Love Song” and “The Hollow Men” capture the bewildering moment when man transitions from the traditional Romantic period into a world of strangeness and vulnerability. This is acknowledged by Eliot’s metaphor of Prufrock having, “lingered in the chambers of the sea…” The allusion of the ‘chambers’ appropriates the sublime experience of Romantic poetry, in which literature becomes an escapist perception. However, this experience is disrupted by “human voices” that ‘wake us, and we drown.’ The disruption of Prufrock’s “chamber” instils an awakening from a Romantic escape, where the fragility of the human soul seeking relief is brought back to the reality of anguished voices. The recurring low modality evokes enervation as Eliot forces us to confront the material world rather than seeking an escape. The fragility of faith and the universality of confusion is further evident in “The Hollow Men” which highlights the shift of theological traditions to the teleological notion that humans are secluded. The lack of celestial bodies “in this valley of dying stars” alludes to the modernist belief by Nietzsche that “God is dead”. Ambivalence and vulnerability pervaded European civilisation, a civilisation that had lost its faith both in the benevolence of God and the nobility of man. Further reinforced through “there are no eyes here”, the poem elucidates a lost world where we lack guidance and location, where we are responsible for our own sins and decisions. This terror was particularly inherent in Eliot’s society during the devastating effects of the First World War as they were confronted with the idea of bearing the burden of sin. Hence, Eliot’s poems capture the disorientated state of western society as they forsake the beliefs of the past and subversively fall into a state of scepticism.
The loss of faith in the modern man led to psychological decay and paralysis, captured by Eliot’s experimentation of form in “Love Song” and “Rhapsody”. The modernist movement expressed the attitudes of an anxious generation unprepared for the onset of modernity. “The Love Song” is a poem that critiques the stagnation of Eliot’s society. The rhetorical question: “Do I dare eat a peach?” strikes the audience with the absurdity of a persona confounded by a piece of fruit. However, the persona’s reflection evokes the fear of an emasculated middle age man, representative of old traditions subverted into anxiety and scepticism. The peach metaphorically represents forbidden fruit and the dangers of knowledge, in which acknowledgement would lead to displacement and disillusionment; a direct reflection of modernity. “Rhapsody” also accomplishes a vision of desolation and apathy through the free association of twisted images. Eliot’s persona portrays the decay of Europe through fragmented imagery “So the hand of the child, automatic / Slipped out and pocketed a toy / I could see nothing behind that child’s eye.” The ‘automatic’ action of the child metaphorically represents the dehumanising impacts of increasing industrialisation within Eliot’s society in which the presumably innocent child is stripped of free will and morality. The synecdoche in “nothing behind that child’s eye” implies the absence of their soul or humanity, the depersonalisation of the lost child reflecting the sullen apprehension of the early twentieth century. Hence, through experimentation with textual form, Eliot highlights the alienation of humanity in a world dislocated from security and certainty.
The destruction of the old world creates a resonating desire to find a universal truth. Eliot’s particular approach to poetic form encourages us to find meaning within his poems. The experimental nature of Eliot’s poetry can be captured in the juxtaposition of capitalised letters to lower case letters in “Birth or Death? / I had seen birth and death” from “The Journey of the Magi.” The “Birth” and “Death” allude to Jesus’ birth which represented the end of the old civilisation (B.C), and the beginning of the Christian world (A.D). Both the end of the Romantic period and the Birth of Christ bring upon a new era in western civilisation, as we are struck between tradition and innovation, anxiety and impatience in finding new meaning through experimentation and exploration. The inadequacy of speech to demonstrate the search for meaning is elucidated through the fragmented metaphors in the “Hollow Men.” Eliot’s asks us to seek personal meaning “Between the conception And the creation/ Between the desire And the existence” as a result of the abandoned civilisation from God. The anaphora “between” emphasises the poet’s inability to articulate his concerns and his inability to reach beyond the barriers of language as a result of its subjectivity. Eliot’s work is tantalising, forever hinting at but never revealing its full illumination. Therefore, he invites us to interpret his poems which captures the spirit of Modernism in search of the ‘new’ revealing that life is a continual process of seeking personal truth as a result of the disillusionment in Europe.
Eliot’s poems depict the subversion of the Romantic era to Modernism in which his poems confront a material world of alienation and confusion. As a result, Eliot evokes an abiding desire to search for meaning which brings his poetry a cultural and personal unity. Therefore, by analysing Eliot’s particular approach to poetic form, the audience gains a better understanding of the fragility of faith and the subsequent significance of the search for truth.
January 5, 2016~ wutosama
T.S Eliot, one of the eminent literary figures of the Modernist era, captures the exultation and despair of a generation in a modernist response caused by the First World War and the disillusionment of mundane modernity. His profound anxiety is demonstrated in “The Love song of J.Alfred Prufrock”, “The Hollow men”, “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and “Journey of the Magi” through the deliberate subversion of Romantic poetry. The enduring appeal of his poems is the evocation of emotion within the reader, conjuring “a hope which sprang from the renunciation of the world, a hope so different from despair yet different from nihilism.” (A.Moody, 1979) Eliot’s cohesive poems possess a unity of culture, revealing timeless concerns such as the fragility of faith, decay and alienation of humanity and search for truth.
Both “Love Song” and “The Hollow Men” capture the bewildering moment when man transitions from the traditional Romantic period into a world of strangeness and vulnerability. This is acknowledged by Eliot’s metaphor of Prufrock having, “lingered in the chambers of the sea…” The allusion of the ‘chambers’ appropriates the sublime experience of Romantic poetry, in which literature becomes an escapist perception. However, this experience is disrupted by “human voices” that ‘wake us, and we drown.’ The disruption of Prufrock’s “chamber” instils an awakening from a Romantic escape, where the fragility of the human soul seeking relief is brought back to the reality of anguished voices. The recurring low modality evokes enervation as Eliot forces us to confront the material world rather than seeking an escape. The fragility of faith and the universality of confusion is further evident in “The Hollow Men” which highlights the shift of theological traditions to the teleological notion that humans are secluded. The lack of celestial bodies “in this valley of dying stars” alludes to the modernist belief by Nietzsche that “God is dead”. Ambivalence and vulnerability pervaded European civilisation, a civilisation that had lost its faith both in the benevolence of God and the nobility of man. Further reinforced through “there are no eyes here”, the poem elucidates a lost world where we lack guidance and location, where we are responsible for our own sins and decisions. This terror was particularly inherent in Eliot’s society during the devastating effects of the First World War as they were confronted with the idea of bearing the burden of sin. Hence, Eliot’s poems capture the disorientated state of western society as they forsake the beliefs of the past and subversively fall into a state of scepticism.
The loss of faith in the modern man led to psychological decay and paralysis, captured by Eliot’s experimentation of form in “Love Song” and “Rhapsody”. The modernist movement expressed the attitudes of an anxious generation unprepared for the onset of modernity. “The Love Song” is a poem that critiques the stagnation of Eliot’s society. The rhetorical question: “Do I dare eat a peach?” strikes the audience with the absurdity of a persona confounded by a piece of fruit. However, the persona’s reflection evokes the fear of an emasculated middle age man, representative of old traditions subverted into anxiety and scepticism. The peach metaphorically represents forbidden fruit and the dangers of knowledge, in which acknowledgement would lead to displacement and disillusionment; a direct reflection of modernity. “Rhapsody” also accomplishes a vision of desolation and apathy through the free association of twisted images. Eliot’s persona portrays the decay of Europe through fragmented imagery “So the hand of the child, automatic / Slipped out and pocketed a toy / I could see nothing behind that child’s eye.” The ‘automatic’ action of the child metaphorically represents the dehumanising impacts of increasing industrialisation within Eliot’s society in which the presumably innocent child is stripped of free will and morality. The synecdoche in “nothing behind that child’s eye” implies the absence of their soul or humanity, the depersonalisation of the lost child reflecting the sullen apprehension of the early twentieth century. Hence, through experimentation with textual form, Eliot highlights the alienation of humanity in a world dislocated from security and certainty.
The destruction of the old world creates a resonating desire to find a universal truth. Eliot’s particular approach to poetic form encourages us to find meaning within his poems. The experimental nature of Eliot’s poetry can be captured in the juxtaposition of capitalised letters to lower case letters in “Birth or Death? / I had seen birth and death” from “The Journey of the Magi.” The “Birth” and “Death” allude to Jesus’ birth which represented the end of the old civilisation (B.C), and the beginning of the Christian world (A.D). Both the end of the Romantic period and the Birth of Christ bring upon a new era in western civilisation, as we are struck between tradition and innovation, anxiety and impatience in finding new meaning through experimentation and exploration. The inadequacy of speech to demonstrate the search for meaning is elucidated through the fragmented metaphors in the “Hollow Men.” Eliot’s asks us to seek personal meaning “Between the conception And the creation/ Between the desire And the existence” as a result of the abandoned civilisation from God. The anaphora “between” emphasises the poet’s inability to articulate his concerns and his inability to reach beyond the barriers of language as a result of its subjectivity. Eliot’s work is tantalising, forever hinting at but never revealing its full illumination. Therefore, he invites us to interpret his poems which captures the spirit of Modernism in search of the ‘new’ revealing that life is a continual process of seeking personal truth as a result of the disillusionment in Europe.
Eliot’s poems depict the subversion of the Romantic era to Modernism in which his poems confront a material world of alienation and confusion. As a result, Eliot evokes an abiding desire to search for meaning which brings his poetry a cultural and personal unity. Therefore, by analysing Eliot’s particular approach to poetic form, the audience gains a better understanding of the fragility of faith and the subsequent significance of the search for truth.
The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot: Critical Analysis
Eliot's The Waste Land is an important landmark in the history of English poetry and one of the most talked about poem of the 20th century. It is long poem of more than four hundred lines in 5 parts entitled: 1) The burial of the Dead; 2) A Game of Chess; 3) The fire Sermon; 4) Death by Water; 5) What the Thunder Said.
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
The Waste Land draws much of its symbolism and narrative framework from the mythological story of the quest for the Holy Grail, the sacred cup that Jesus Christ drank from at the Last Supper. The poem is dedicated to Ezra Pound. It was written during the autumn of 1921, in Switzerland, where the poet was just recovering after a serious breakdown in health caused by domestic worries and over work. The poem presents a bleak and gloomy picture of the human predicament in the twentieth century. Ina way it presents the "disillusionment of a generation." The gloom and despair of the poet are mirrored in this poem.
The Waste Land, a poem in five parts, was ground breaking in establishing the form of the so-called kaleidoscopic, or a fragmented modern poem. These fragmented poems are characterized by jarring jumps, in perspective, imagery, setting, or subject. Despite this fragmentation of form, The Waste Land is unified by its theme of despair. Its opening lines introduce the ideas of life's ultimate futility despite momentary flashes of hope. The poem goes on to present a sequence of short sketches following an individual's baffled search for spiritual peace. It concludes with resignation at the never-ending nature of the search. The poem is full of literary and mythological references that draw on many cultures and universalize the poem's themes. According to legend, only the pure of heart can attain the Grail. In the version of the Grail myth that Eliot draws on, a wasteland is awaiting a miraculous revival-for itself and its failing ruler, the Fisher King, guardian of the Holy Grail. The Waste Land appeared in the aftermath of World War I (1914-1918), which was the most destructive war in human history to that point. Many people saw the poem as an indictment of the post-war European culture and as an expression of disillusionment with contemporary society, which Eliot believed was culturally barren.
The theme of the poem is the spiritual and emotional sterility of the modern world. Man has lost his passion, i.e. his faith in God and religion; his passion to participate in religion and this decay of faith has resulted in the loss of vitality, both spiritual and emotional. Consequently, the life in the modern wasteland is a life-in-death, a living death, like that of the Sibyl at Cumae. According to Eliot's philosophy, in so far as we are human beings we must act and do either evil or good, and it is better to do evil than to do nothing. Modern man has lost his sense of good and evil, and this keeps him from being alive, from acting. In the modern desolate and, there is a life-in-death, a life of complete inactivity, listlessness and apathy. That is why winter is welcome to them, and April is the cruelest months, for it reminds them of the stirrings of life and, "They dislike to be roused from their death-in-life."
The poem thus presents "a vision of dissolution and spiritual drought". This spiritual and emotional sterility of the denizens of The Waste Land arises from the degeneration, vulgarization, and commercialization of sex. Eliot's study of the fertility myths of different people had convinced him that the sex - act is the source of life and vitality, when it is exercised for the sake of procreation and when it is an expression of love. But when it is severed from its primary function, and is exercised for the sake of momentary pleasure or momentary benefit, it becomes a source of degeneration and corruption. It then represents the primacy of the flesh over the spirit, and this result in spiritual decay and death.
The title "A Game of Chess" suggests that sex has become a matter of intrigue, a matter of moves and counter- moves, a source of momentary pleasure, a sordid game of seduction and exploitation of the innocent. There is the fashionable society woman who, despite all her pomp and show, despite all the luxury with which she is surrounded, is bored and hysterical as a consequence. Her love, too, suffers from mental vacuity and is unable to keep up even small conversation.
Sex- relationship in the middle is equally mechanical. This is seen in the mechanical relationship of the typist and the clerk. The typist gives herself to the clerk with the sense of total indifference and apathy. There is neither repulsion nor any pleasure, and this absence of feeling is a measure of the sterility of the age. It is just animal like copulation. The songs of three Thames daughters clearly show that they have been sexually exploited, but they can do nothing about it. They and their people are too poor and too apathetic to make any efforts of the betterment of their lot. Not only has sex been vulgarized and commercialized there also prevailed abnormal sex- practices of various kinds. Thus Mr. Eugenides is a homosexual and Hotel Metropole is a hot bed of homosexuality, a relationship which is essentially sterile. All Europe is burning with lust and sexuality.
However, it would be wrong to say that The Waste Land merely depicts the disillusionment of the post- war generation, and that it is a mere diagnosis of the distemper of the modern age without any solution or hope of salvation. It, no doubt, deals with the tragedy of the modern age, but it also shows that tragedy is at the heart of life, all life, in all ages. The past and the present are telescoped, and it is thus shown that what is happening in the present age did also happen in the past. For this reason, it will be wrong to call the poem "a sigh for the glories of a vanished past"; Eliot has not glorified the past at the expense of the present. Rather, he was revealed, the resembling contrasts between the past and the present. Sexual sins, perversion of sex, have always led to degeneration and decay. The sexual sins of the King Fisher and his soldiers laid waste his kingdom; and ancient Thebes was laid waste because its king was guilty of the sin of incest. Sexual violence has always been there: Philomela was raped and her tongue was severed so that she may not reveal the crime. Reference to Elizabeth and Leicester in the song of the daughters of the Thames shows the sex- relationship in the past also has been equally futile and meaningless. In all these respects, the present resembles the past. The only difference is that in the past, suffering and penance resulted in spiritual regeneration and return to health: Philomela was transformed into the bird of golden song and King Fisher was cured and his kingdom redeemed.
Thus, the poem also makes promise and prophecy. It suggests that regeneration is possible, as it has always been possible, through suffering and penance. In the last section of the poem, the thunder is already heard and the clouds are there. Thus a promise is held out of the coming of the rain of divine grace, only if man will repent and do penance as the King Fisher and the King Oedipus did. Eliot brings together the wisdom of the East and the West and shows that spiritual regeneration can come, if only we heed the voice of the thunder: Give, sympathize, and control.
It must be clearly understood that The Waste Land is a social document of our times, a poem which throws light on the problems and perplexities of modern civilization. Eliot is not enamoured of the golden past nor does he heave a sigh for the vanished glory of the past. He is not an escapist or a romanticist; he is a stern realist who laid his hand on the pulse of the modern man. He does not believe that all was beautiful and glorious. At the same time, Eliot is not pessimist rather than despair it is hope that sustains The Waste Land.
The theme of The Waste Land is essentially the spiritual experience of man; it has to be related to its background. In the world of today, one cannot ignore the social, secular, commercial and technical compulsions of the modern world. Eliot has referred to the past in order to show the similarity of the problems of both ages and how the experience of the past can help in finding solutions of the problems of our time.
Moreover, the past has another advantage over the present. It showed the courage and vitality of the human spirit; it had the capacity to do things both good and evil. People then were not inert, lazy and bored. Elsewhere, Eliot wrote that the quality which distinguishes humanity is its capacity to do good or evil. Vigor and vitality are the secret of any civilization or a great period in history. In the modern age, spiritual paralysis has overtaken man. This is due to our secular democracy, commercial interests and mechanical and technological progress which has eroded man's faith in religion, moral values and individual development and achievement. Man may be an atom in this great universe, but he is an intense atom, capable of yielding energy and power. It is this latent power which needs to be discovered and utilized.
Cite this Page!
Shrestha, Roma. "The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot: Critical Analysis." BachelorandMaster, 25 Nov. 2013, bachelorandmaster.com/britishandamericanpoetry/the-waste-land.html.
https://humx.org/modernism-and-the-waste-land-36fae9390498
Alexander Gonzalez on T. S. Eliot
Literary Criticism for "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
Thomas Stearns Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock lives up to its name, as it expresses its protagonist’s indecision and troubled relations with the opposite sex. Characteristic of Eliot, it does not let the reader determine this easily or early on, but rather leads the reader through a complicated and altogether engrossing verbal maze while revealing bits and pieces of his intent. He begins with an epigram from Dante’s Inferno, which, roughly translated from the original Italian, means that the speaker (a condemned soul) speaks only because he does not believe his audience (Dante) will escape the pit.
Prufrock, the narrator, approaches the women that fascinate him intellectually more than emotionally, which is strange, considering his bizarre sentence structure and certain other aspects of the piece. Imagery is omnipresent, and typically takes the form of simile, such as in the first verse after the epigram: “Like a patient etherized upon a table.” Very frequently, imagery is used to assign to an inanimate object or an abstract concept a range of motion foreign to it, such as in the following line: “[the yellow fog] Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap….” This type of imagery blurs the distinction with personification, and lends a peculiar, animated quality to the entire piece. It is as if the entire world is a thinking, living entity, which Prufrock observes wistfully, wishfully.
The indecision and cynical disgust which characterize Prufrock’s thoughts, and therefore most of the poem, emerge with the fourth verse after the epigram. Here, he utters these lines: “Time for you and time for me, / And time yet for a hundred indecisions, / And for a hundred visions and revisions / Before the taking of a toast and tea.” Later in the poem, he expresses his own indecision with lines as obvious as “That is not it at all, / That is not what I meant at all.” He has a very cynical view of his own inability to act with haste and drive, and the preponderance of deliberation and slowness in his being, and this cynicism drives the next several verses of the piece. That Prufrock’s expression of his own disgust takes a deliberate, lengthy, and roundabout form only underscores the message his words attempt to articulate—that he resents himself for his inability to act with speed and energy.
For all of this cynicism and unhappiness, and apparently against the usual incomprehensibility of modernist poetry, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock proceeds with a definite elegance and grace. The variations in meter and rhyme between lines complement each other in ways that the regimented verse of other forms cannot match; this is evident in the following verse: “For I have known them all already, known them all— / Have known the evenings mornings, afternoons, / I have measured out my life with coffee spoons / I know the voices dying with a dying fall / Beneath the music from a farther room. / So how should I presume?” Many of the verses in Prufrock exhibit a characteristic common with Keats and other romantic, lyric writers, which is the use of a much shorter final line in each verse, which breaks up any metrical patterns found in earlier lines and forces the reader to note the anomalous line more than the conformist ones. While no real pattern exists in Prufrock, the shorter final lines draw attention to themselves nonetheless.
The total effect of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is to describe, in marvelous detail, the complicated mental processes of a terminally shy and uncertain, well-educated and highly observant individual. The cadences of this work of T. S. Eliot course musically, belying the distinctions between verses and allowing the entire disparate piece to flow with unexpected ease, especially when read aloud. Rightly regarded as one of Eliot’s finest works, this piece should be a welcome read for anyone interested in poetry.
Works Cited
Lozano, Amy. The T. S. Eliot Prufrock Page. 07 2002. 03 Mar. 2005 <http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/5616/prufrock.html>.
e to edit.
Literary Criticism for "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
Thomas Stearns Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock lives up to its name, as it expresses its protagonist’s indecision and troubled relations with the opposite sex. Characteristic of Eliot, it does not let the reader determine this easily or early on, but rather leads the reader through a complicated and altogether engrossing verbal maze while revealing bits and pieces of his intent. He begins with an epigram from Dante’s Inferno, which, roughly translated from the original Italian, means that the speaker (a condemned soul) speaks only because he does not believe his audience (Dante) will escape the pit.
Prufrock, the narrator, approaches the women that fascinate him intellectually more than emotionally, which is strange, considering his bizarre sentence structure and certain other aspects of the piece. Imagery is omnipresent, and typically takes the form of simile, such as in the first verse after the epigram: “Like a patient etherized upon a table.” Very frequently, imagery is used to assign to an inanimate object or an abstract concept a range of motion foreign to it, such as in the following line: “[the yellow fog] Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap….” This type of imagery blurs the distinction with personification, and lends a peculiar, animated quality to the entire piece. It is as if the entire world is a thinking, living entity, which Prufrock observes wistfully, wishfully.
The indecision and cynical disgust which characterize Prufrock’s thoughts, and therefore most of the poem, emerge with the fourth verse after the epigram. Here, he utters these lines: “Time for you and time for me, / And time yet for a hundred indecisions, / And for a hundred visions and revisions / Before the taking of a toast and tea.” Later in the poem, he expresses his own indecision with lines as obvious as “That is not it at all, / That is not what I meant at all.” He has a very cynical view of his own inability to act with haste and drive, and the preponderance of deliberation and slowness in his being, and this cynicism drives the next several verses of the piece. That Prufrock’s expression of his own disgust takes a deliberate, lengthy, and roundabout form only underscores the message his words attempt to articulate—that he resents himself for his inability to act with speed and energy.
For all of this cynicism and unhappiness, and apparently against the usual incomprehensibility of modernist poetry, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock proceeds with a definite elegance and grace. The variations in meter and rhyme between lines complement each other in ways that the regimented verse of other forms cannot match; this is evident in the following verse: “For I have known them all already, known them all— / Have known the evenings mornings, afternoons, / I have measured out my life with coffee spoons / I know the voices dying with a dying fall / Beneath the music from a farther room. / So how should I presume?” Many of the verses in Prufrock exhibit a characteristic common with Keats and other romantic, lyric writers, which is the use of a much shorter final line in each verse, which breaks up any metrical patterns found in earlier lines and forces the reader to note the anomalous line more than the conformist ones. While no real pattern exists in Prufrock, the shorter final lines draw attention to themselves nonetheless.
The total effect of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is to describe, in marvelous detail, the complicated mental processes of a terminally shy and uncertain, well-educated and highly observant individual. The cadences of this work of T. S. Eliot course musically, belying the distinctions between verses and allowing the entire disparate piece to flow with unexpected ease, especially when read aloud. Rightly regarded as one of Eliot’s finest works, this piece should be a welcome read for anyone interested in poetry.
Works Cited
Lozano, Amy. The T. S. Eliot Prufrock Page. 07 2002. 03 Mar. 2005 <http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/5616/prufrock.html>.
e to edit.
ANALYSIS
"Portrait of a Lady" (1917)
T. S. Eliot
(1888-1965)
"After ‘Prufrock’ the ‘Portrait of a Lady’ seems to be only another poem similar in form and theme. But it has a social malice which makes it more objective in attitude and more conversational in tone. Under a sophisticated surface Eliot develops a conflict of feelings which weaves its sensuous imagery into patterns of changing mood and significance. Yet it is not so much the portrait of a lady as the portrait of another uncertain Prufrock, adolescent rather than prematurely aged, suspended between feelings of attraction and repulsion. The epigraph from Marlowe’s Jew of Malta (IV.i) suggests the situation, in which the dash after ‘committed’ is important, for it indicates the moral uncertainty in the poem that parallels the uncertainty of accusation in the play. What this youth has committed is less certain than what Barabas committed.
This affair runs through a year, and the seasons are important to the development of its tone and theme…. The youth passes from a feeling of superiority to a feeling of uneasiness and uncertainty, which threatens altogether to displace the earlier feeling. In the first section, after the concert, the lady’s approach and the youth’s response are both developed in musical terms, which provide metaphors of malicious innuendo. These metaphors give polite expression to the lady and indicate the quality of reception in the youth. The implications of the lady’s ‘music’ set up a prelude in the youth’s mind that is at least a definite false note, after which there is only one escape—the masculine escape to externals. The bathetic character of these externals of course mocks the confusion in his mind. It will be noticed how Eliot employs the dash to indicate a hiatus or sudden transition. So the section ends with the youth’s attempt to escape the intimate atmosphere established by the lady, and the ‘tobacco trance’ is his counter for the one she sought to induce. Of course the ‘atmosphere of Juliet’s tomb’ becomes ironic in the love tryst prepared for this Romeo by an older Juliet.
In the next section, now spring, the poet appropriately adds flower imagery to the musical imagery in developing the relationship which the lady calls ‘friendship.’ This new imagery serves to intensify the feeling of the lady and to make more intolerable the tension of the youth. He still manages to smile and treat the situation objectively, but it is proving more and more disturbing…. As her ‘buried life’ becomes more and more obtrusive he becomes more and more uncomfortable, until flight again is the only escape. But as the imagery of his revulsion mounts so does her power to disturb him. Thus he takes his hat rather than make ‘a cowardly amends.’
But what does he mean? Does he mean, take advantage of her? Or has he done that already? Or does he mean, to pretend what he does not feel? Either means a cowardly escape from an awkward position; and whatever his motive, his attention has given her some claim. Certainly this section ends on the note of moral perturbation. But the speaker has posed the problem of cowardly amends, and the poet does not change the subject: What follows is a development of that problem. If what the speaker reads in the paper characterizes the young man who first sought to escape, it also focuses his problem. The sensational items represent various kinds of desire and offense which do not disturb him. What does bother him returns in the musical and floral imagery which represents the lady and now combines in its qualities revulsion and attraction. Finally he poses the question whether his reactions to these things are right or wrong.
The third section answers the question by decision. His flight is no longer going to be temporary. But while his action is decisive enough, his reaction is shadowed with doubt. This time the imagery of his return involves mounting the stairs; and, as in ‘Prufrock,’ it is a tensional imagery of effort and awkwardness. Now his ‘self-possession gutters’ in the candle imagery of the opening situation, and his smiles are really forced; he takes refuge in the objectively conventional, but his discomfiture is projected by
his feeling of having to borrow the imitative actions of animals to find expression. And it all ends on the original theme of escape.
In imagined retrospect he contemplates her death after his going away—an event which would consummate the situation of the epigraph. But the issue is by no means certain, either in the rightness of his action or the quality of his feeling. The perplexity of his feelings is not resolved by this event, which seems to give her the emotional advantage and ironically to make her music successful. His final discomfiture is to become doubtful of ‘the right to smile.’
What has he committed? Has he been tempted but inhibited? Did he run away from a problem rather than solve it? Essentially the break between ‘committed’ and ‘fornication’ has developed into a theme of emotional frustration. He has been disturbed but baffled by the situation, and has been able to deal with it only by flight. Fornication is insufficient to characterize the action unless it includes the attraction and repulsion of sex complicated by moral feeling.
The form of this verse, Eliot tells us, was drawn from Laforgue and later Elizabethan drama, assimilating their conversational modes; its use of the half-line also reminds us of Spenser or Milton. It stretches, contracts, and distorts iambic pentameter and alexandrine verse; uses rhyme freely, functionally, not according to any set patterns. It develops verse as speech rather than verse as song, but the lyric note becomes insistent at times. It has the loose, repetitive, emergent syntax of speech, by which it becomes both reticent and insinuating.
Note the syntax of the lady’s speech when she is being most direct in her indirection, especially the anticipatory pronouns or loose reference which she clarifies as she seems to hesitate or feel her way along. These repetitive hesitations become part not only of the psychology but also of the speech as verse; they are imitations of speech that also function in the movement of the verse. And the verse usually quickens or beats more obviously when the youth is moved by the impulse to escape. The tonal quality of Eliot’s verse is no less a part of the suppressed feeling of this poem, which is given a setting almost Whistleresque in its elegance of color. All of these elements contribute to the atmosphere or mood of the poem, which belongs to a world of revealing reticences."
George Williamson
A Reader’s Guide to T. S. Eliot: A Poem-by-Poem Analysis
(1949; Farrar, Straus/Noonday 1957-63) 70-75
"’Portrait of a Lady’ is laid in a similar setting [to ‘Prufrock’]. The speaker is a young man; his companion is a lady, somewhat older who wishes to hold him although she realizes their affair cannot hope to be permanent. For his part the young man is torn between sympathy and a longing for freedom. Perhaps a little too refined and sensitive, the lady leads a highly artificial life among her flowers, her Chopin recitals, and her ‘few friends.’ In the penultimate stanza (11.102-08) the lady, in spite of her sophisticated manner, scarcely conceals her anguish at the parting; yet the young man realizes this last separation to be a permanent one. The poem symbolically covers a cycle of time from winter to winter. Section I takes place in December; in Section II it is April and the lilacs are in bloom. In the final section October completes the circle and accentuates the young man’s restlessness, nostalgia, and boredom. The last stanza in Section II (11.71-83) is the chief expression of the young man’s attitude toward the lady, an attitude dominated by sympathy but lacking real passion. Like ‘Prufrock,’ this poem is a character study intended to communicate the mood of a certain social environment."
Donald Heiney
Recent American Literature 4
(Barron’s Educational Series 1958) 484-85
"The ‘Lady’ whose ‘Portrait’ Eliot draws is like someone out of E. A. Robinson; but there is in this poem none of the precision and self-defeating honesty of Robinson’s best portraits. Observing his Lady, listening to her, meditating her fate, the poet concludes: ‘Well and what if she should die some afternoon…’ This is honest enough, but really not very clear. Indeed, such clarity as the poem has resides in its epigraph, from The Jew of Malta: ‘Thou hast committed -- / Fornication; but that was in another country, / And besides, the wench is dead.’ We gather that it is that other country which the poet cannot understand. Obviously lacking in ‘Portrait of a Lady’ is the motivating force, the sense of the human
situation, which will make for continuity and integral, not to say organic, form. Eliot could not (would not?) endow the speaker with such insight into motivation as would make of the poem that sort of whole composition in which one part leads to and demands the next. In short, from the very beginning the autobiographical mode, much less the narrative, has simply not been Eliot’s metier."
Roy Harvey Pearce
The Continuity of American Poetry
(Princeton 1961) 296-97
Michael Hollister (2015)
T S Eliot Poem -- Rhapsody on a Windy Night. A Critical Analysis
James Parsons - Feb 9, 2009
T. S. Eliot's poem, Rhapsody on a Windy Night, is full of blunt imagery that evokes the individual's increasing isolation in a depleted, worn-out society. " Rhapsody on a Windy Night" is one of the best-loved poems by T S Eliot and one which is sometimes characterised as lyrical and pensive, and more to do with the function of memory than anything else. This misses the point. The imagery piles up relentlessly to present a picture of a worn-out society in which no one communicates. The first obvious feature of ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, and perhaps the key to understanding the poem, is the procession of regular time calls throughout the poem – ‘Twelve o’clock’, ‘Half-past two’, etc. A first reading might suggest that this a picture of someone strolling home after a night out. But then comes the realisation that this ‘stroll’ starts at 12 midnight and doesn’t end till 4 o’clock? A 4 hour ‘stroll’ in the wee small hours is remarkably odd behaviour. This is the first clue that the poem is about isolation and a society of isolates.
The Isolation of the Individual
This ‘stroller’ has no purpose; he is deliberately putting off going home, because home is as empty and lonely as the world in which he has been walking. It is a place where a single ‘toothbrush hangs on the wall’ – he lives alone. His room is up a flight of dimly-lit stairs and has a number on the door: it is very likely a cheap hotel or boarding house, the sort of residence where men who have no one in their lives frequently end up. T.S. Eliot has given the persona or ‘voice’ in this poem the task of representing the isolation and alienation of the human condition. Not only is the persona clearly a loner, but the world his eyes scan for the reader also reeks of loneliness, decay and lack of communication.
Lack of Communication
Is there any communication evident in this poem? The street lamp is the only speaker. The woman in the doorway (at this hour, perhaps a prostitute) doesn’t approach; she ‘hesitates towards him’. Even she cannot make the necessary contact for a human act. Normally, children are portrayed in fiction with bright, eager eyes, because they are naïve and open to all, but when this persona remembers a child, he ‘could see nothing behind that child’s eye.’ This is perhaps Eliot’s greatest indictment of society – to suggest that even the children can no longer communicate.
The Imagery of the Barnacled Crab
Eyes are, of course, the ‘windows of the soul’. It is telling that the eyes in this poem ‘peer through the shutters’. They want to pry but not be present in a relationship. The persona’s only ‘communication’ is with a crab in a pool. That communication is at arm’s length – the crab and the man each grasp the end of a stick. Eliot has chosen a hard-shelled, evasive creature to characterise humankind - there are overtones of ‘crusty’ ‘crabby’ and, of course, crabs have the potential to ‘bite’ with that same ‘hand’ of friendship.
A Society decaying – a shell of its former self
Coupled with these striking images of isolation are images that speak of decay and disuse. Does Eliot suggest that our social fabric is disintegrating, needs repair – is perhaps beyond repair? There are certainly no positive images of the persona’s world: “A madman shakes a dead geranium”. The first human the reader encounters is a social outcast – a madman. Most home gardeners would tell you that it’s near impossible to kill a geranium: they live in arid soils and with very little maintenance. Yet this geranium is dead. The woman’s dress is “torn and stained with sand”, and her eye ‘twists like a crooked pin’. There is a’ crowd of twisted things’, including a broken spring (that symbol of resilience), of which he recalls that “rust clings to the form that the strength has left.” That is a most enduring image of a society sapped of moral and physical energy.
No Hope Offered for Society
All else is old, dull, dusty sunless and shuttered. There is no reprieve, no hopeful ending- not a glimmer of hope - to society’s woes. The examiner of all this tawdry world returns home – a word not used as it has too many happy and comforting connotations - and tells himself to “sleep – prepare for life.” This is a final ironic thrust: people are normally told to prepare for death. Thus, Eliot equates this sort of meaningless, non-communicative life with death. He spells it out through his persona. For this man, arriving home is ‘the last twist of the knife.’ There is sufficient evidence here to offer isolation and alienation as a theme analysis.
James Parsons - Feb 9, 2009
T. S. Eliot's poem, Rhapsody on a Windy Night, is full of blunt imagery that evokes the individual's increasing isolation in a depleted, worn-out society. " Rhapsody on a Windy Night" is one of the best-loved poems by T S Eliot and one which is sometimes characterised as lyrical and pensive, and more to do with the function of memory than anything else. This misses the point. The imagery piles up relentlessly to present a picture of a worn-out society in which no one communicates. The first obvious feature of ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, and perhaps the key to understanding the poem, is the procession of regular time calls throughout the poem – ‘Twelve o’clock’, ‘Half-past two’, etc. A first reading might suggest that this a picture of someone strolling home after a night out. But then comes the realisation that this ‘stroll’ starts at 12 midnight and doesn’t end till 4 o’clock? A 4 hour ‘stroll’ in the wee small hours is remarkably odd behaviour. This is the first clue that the poem is about isolation and a society of isolates.
The Isolation of the Individual
This ‘stroller’ has no purpose; he is deliberately putting off going home, because home is as empty and lonely as the world in which he has been walking. It is a place where a single ‘toothbrush hangs on the wall’ – he lives alone. His room is up a flight of dimly-lit stairs and has a number on the door: it is very likely a cheap hotel or boarding house, the sort of residence where men who have no one in their lives frequently end up. T.S. Eliot has given the persona or ‘voice’ in this poem the task of representing the isolation and alienation of the human condition. Not only is the persona clearly a loner, but the world his eyes scan for the reader also reeks of loneliness, decay and lack of communication.
Lack of Communication
Is there any communication evident in this poem? The street lamp is the only speaker. The woman in the doorway (at this hour, perhaps a prostitute) doesn’t approach; she ‘hesitates towards him’. Even she cannot make the necessary contact for a human act. Normally, children are portrayed in fiction with bright, eager eyes, because they are naïve and open to all, but when this persona remembers a child, he ‘could see nothing behind that child’s eye.’ This is perhaps Eliot’s greatest indictment of society – to suggest that even the children can no longer communicate.
The Imagery of the Barnacled Crab
Eyes are, of course, the ‘windows of the soul’. It is telling that the eyes in this poem ‘peer through the shutters’. They want to pry but not be present in a relationship. The persona’s only ‘communication’ is with a crab in a pool. That communication is at arm’s length – the crab and the man each grasp the end of a stick. Eliot has chosen a hard-shelled, evasive creature to characterise humankind - there are overtones of ‘crusty’ ‘crabby’ and, of course, crabs have the potential to ‘bite’ with that same ‘hand’ of friendship.
A Society decaying – a shell of its former self
Coupled with these striking images of isolation are images that speak of decay and disuse. Does Eliot suggest that our social fabric is disintegrating, needs repair – is perhaps beyond repair? There are certainly no positive images of the persona’s world: “A madman shakes a dead geranium”. The first human the reader encounters is a social outcast – a madman. Most home gardeners would tell you that it’s near impossible to kill a geranium: they live in arid soils and with very little maintenance. Yet this geranium is dead. The woman’s dress is “torn and stained with sand”, and her eye ‘twists like a crooked pin’. There is a’ crowd of twisted things’, including a broken spring (that symbol of resilience), of which he recalls that “rust clings to the form that the strength has left.” That is a most enduring image of a society sapped of moral and physical energy.
No Hope Offered for Society
All else is old, dull, dusty sunless and shuttered. There is no reprieve, no hopeful ending- not a glimmer of hope - to society’s woes. The examiner of all this tawdry world returns home – a word not used as it has too many happy and comforting connotations - and tells himself to “sleep – prepare for life.” This is a final ironic thrust: people are normally told to prepare for death. Thus, Eliot equates this sort of meaningless, non-communicative life with death. He spells it out through his persona. For this man, arriving home is ‘the last twist of the knife.’ There is sufficient evidence here to offer isolation and alienation as a theme analysis.
"The Hollow Men" (1925)
T. S. Eliot
(1888-1965)
"It would be glib to say that in ‘The Waste Land’ and ‘The Hollow Men’ Eliot wrote his Inferno and that since then his poems represent various stages of passing through a Purgatorio; still such a remark may possibly illuminate both his aims and achievement…. From that early poem onward, through the much deeper accents of ‘Gerontion’ and ‘The Waste Land,’ the prevailing theme of Eliot’s poems is the emptiness of life without belief, an emptiness that finally resounds with sickening fear and desperation in ‘The Hollow Men’…. Through ‘The Waste Land’ and ‘The Hollow Men’ resounded the poet’s dread of death and dissolution, a shudder at the thought of bones ‘rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year’…. ‘Mistah Kurtz—he dead’—the harrowing climax of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, his expression of utter horror, epitomizes in a sentence the very tone of blasphemous hopelessness which issues from ‘The Hollow Men’…."
F. O. Matthiessen
The Achievement of T. S. Eliot
(1935; Oxford/Galaxy 1959) 11, 99, 118, 53
"From a letter Pound wrote to Eliot early in 1922, we know that Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was very much in his mind at the time he wrote ‘The Waste Land.’… The only direct influence of the Conrad story is in the first of the songs of the Thames-daughters in Part III…. Psychologically, the experience in ‘The Hollow Men’ is even more despairing than that of the conclusion of ‘The Waste Land.’
The full horror of the situation of spiritual stagnation is experienced, without the actively dramatized revulsion from the contemporary scene, or the actively dramatized inner struggle between compulsion and revulsion towards personal change. The poet sees himself inescapably identified with his environment, and any power of choice or movement towards action of any sort seems utterly paralysed. It is a condition which Jung, as well as Eliot, characterizes symbolically as the meeting with the Shadow. To Jung it is the confronting of our own inner ‘darkness,’ which means ‘bitter shock, though it is the indispensable prerequisite of every renewal of the spirit.’…
He can no longer project his own ‘darkness’ upon all the elements in his environment to which he feels alien, but superior. He can no longer find any release in the exposure of the hollowness and horror of a Sweeney, of a decadent ‘landlord,’ of a Madame Sosostris, of empty, aimless women and young men carbuncular. He himself is a dweller in darkness as deep as that of those he had so surely and cynically displayed, and far deeper than that of those ‘lost violent souls’ in history or imaginative creation, who, if damned, were at least damned for overt action, and not for…passive non-entity….
The symbol of the eyes in ‘The Hollow Men,’ which are the only hope of overcoming the Shadow, cannot belong to any vision of romantic illusion, any more than they can be Kurtz’s ‘wide and immense stare’ [from Heart of Darkness; compare eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleberg in The Great Gatsby]. In Part I they are the ‘direct eyes’ of those of assured faith, who have died, but later the symbol absorbs much richer implications…. Parts III and IV develop the horror of ‘death’s dream kingdom.’… The water symbol here has no regenerative value. It is the ‘tumid river’ as described in Heart of Darkness… After this torturing picture of hollowness, loneliness, darkness and deadness, we are reminded again of Dante and Beatrice; of how, after his repentance, she bathed him in the river of Lethe, and her stern gaze turned to smiling encouragement, to ‘eyes of light.’…
There is certainly no hope in the conclusion. Instead of any vision, any release, any forward movement, any light or any ‘wind’s singing,’ there is the eternal going round in the cactus land, enclosed in time and place, in a childish nursery-rhyme world of make-believe. Then, passing out of the concrete evocation of
physical parallels, the poet conceives of the Shadow as ‘paralyzed force,’ as that abstract principle of the negation of the will, which either uses the forms of prayer without the substance of action, or evades the issue by a postponement… He is lost in the Shadow, and his ‘world ends’ not in any self-chosen dark night of the soul, but in a sense of tormented, whimpering vacuity."
Elizabeth Drew
T. S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry
(Scribner’s 1949) 91-97
11
"This poem (1925) is provided with two epigraphs, one pointing to a basic contrast and the other to a basic resemblance. The hollow men are antithetic to ‘Mistah Kurtz’ but like the ‘Old Guy,’ that is, the effigy of Guy Fawkes. The hero of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness enjoys an advantage over the hollow men, not least in the fact that he is dead and they only deadened. Kurtz and Guy Fawkes both were ‘lost violent souls,’ not hollow men. But the effigy of Guy Fawkes is a hollow man, for this epigraph derives from the game of make-believe in which children use a stuffed effigy of Guy Fawkes as a means to beg pennies for fireworks on the fifth of November. The relation of this epigraph to the poem, however, suggests another inference: As children make a game of make-believe out of Guy Fawkes so we make a similar game out of religion. The game ritual of the poem supports this implication.
The first lines bring the title and epigraph into critical relationship. We are like the Old Guy, effigies stuffed with straw. It may be observed that the first and last parts of this poem indicate a church service, and the ritual of effigies is suggested throughout. The action of this part is indicative of the service: ‘Leaning together…whisper together,’ the voices ‘quiet and meaningless’ as the service drones on. Then the paradoxes, in which one term denies the other, turn these effigies into abstractions, devoid of even their arid appearance, self-contradictory even in this realm. The erstwhile worshippers disappear in a blur of shapes, shade, gesture, to which no reality is attached.
Then the crucial orientation is developed, toward ‘death’s other Kingdom.’ Those who have crossed unafraid remember us—except for the ironic qualification—in terms of the basic opposition between Kurtz and the Old Guy, ‘not as lost violent souls,’ but only as the effigies of this service. Now we know where we are in a larger sense, at least that we are in a kingdom of death. And let us observe that the confusing kingdoms of death in the poem are distinguished rather simply: First, the kingdoms of death without relation to God or church have no capital; second, death’s real kingdom finds its similitude in life as the ‘dream’ or ‘twilight’ kingdom.
II
Part II defines the hollow men in relation to the reality which those ‘with direct eyes’ have met, and develops the contrast implied by ‘direct.’ Fortunately, the eyes he dare not meet even in dreams do not appear to ‘death’s dream kingdom.’ There they are only reflected, indirect and broken light; wind is reflected by a swinging tree; voices are another illusion of the wind; all is perceived indirectly, and not without beauty. The images are reminiscent of Biblical imagery, but this kingdom resembles Dante’s limbo of Trimmers.
He too would be no nearer, but would also wear intentional disguises—those proper to the scarecrow, behaving, like the tree, as the wind behaves. He would be no nearer, no more direct, in this twilight kingdom. He fears the ultimate vision. The eyes in this poem evoke a range of feeling dominated by that which the eyes of Charon excite in Dante (Inferno, C.3).
III
Part III defines this similitude of death’s kingdom in relation to the worship of the hollow men. A dead, arid land, like its people, it raises stone images of the spiritual, which are supplicated by the dead. And again the ‘fading star’ establishes a sense of remoteness from reality.
The image of frustrated love which follows is a moment of anguished illumination suspended between the two kingdoms of death. ‘Waking alone’—not quite out of the dream kingdom—at a propitious time, lips that would adore pray instead to a broken image, for the impulse is frozen. The ‘broken stone’ unites the ‘stone images’ and the ‘broken column,’ which bent the sunlight.
IV
Part IV explores this impulse in relation to the land, which now darkens perceptibly as the valley of the shadow of death. Now there are not even similitudes of eyes, and the ‘fading’ becomes the ‘dying’ star. The land as a ‘hollow valley’ carries a ghostly reflection of the human physiognomy in decay, ending as the broke, inarticulate, image of the lost kingdoms of the Old Testament exiles. And with this declination comes the awareness that the indirect meeting found in aspects of beauty must yield to the direct meeting which has been shunned, for this is the last of meeting places.
In action the hollow men now ‘grope together / And avoid speech,’ gathered on the banks of the swollen river which must be crossed to ‘death’s other kingdom.’ The contrast with Part I is clear, and the river suggests that of Dante’s Inferno (C.3). Without any eyes at all they are without any vision unless ‘the eyes’ return as the ‘perpetual,’ not fading or dying, star; as the ‘multi-foliate rose’ of this kingdom. But for empty men this is only a hope. As star becomes rose, so the rose becomes the rose window of the church; the rose as an image of the church, and multi-foliate, appears in Dante’s Paradiso (C.31-32).
V
But Part V develops the reality, not the hope, of empty men; the cactus, not the rose. And it begins with the prickly pear ritual of cactus land; the nursery level of make-believe mocks the hope of empty men. In desire they ‘circumambulate’ the pear, but are frustrated by the pickles. Here we may recall ‘the hour when we are Trembling with tenderness,’ for the poem now develops that frustration of impulse. At various levels, in various aspects of life, between the impulse and its realization there falls the frustrating shadow of fear, the essential shadow of this land. Yet the Shadow is more than fear: It concentrates the valley of the Shadow into a shape of horror, almost a personification of its negative character. The antiphonal division of this part, marked by the type, exhibits the irony which leads ‘round the mulberry bush’ to the last line.
Various stages are interrupted by the interpolation of elements that qualify this thwarting Shadow; after the first, the passage from the Lord’s Prayer relates the Shadow to religion, with irony in the attribution; after the second, the response about the length of life relates it to the burden of life; and after the third, the Lord’s Prayer again relates it to the Kingdom that is so hard. The repetition follows the thwarting of the series that produces life itself, frustrating the essence from descent to being (see Purgatorio, 31: 107). This is the essential irony of their thwarted lives.
Then the rather ambiguous relation of these interrupting elements to the Shadow is made more explicit. This is done by turning these responses…into the main chant, with the result that each completion hesitates between its former complement and the Shadow, and at the same time suggests by its truncation the final interruption. This end comes by way of ironic completion as the nursery rhyme again takes up its repetitive round (‘This is the way we go to church’), and terminates with the line that characterizes the equivocating excuses. They are the whimpers of fear with which the hollow men end, neither the bang of Guy Fawkes Day nor of the ‘lost violent soul.’ The conclusion also transforms the liturgical ‘world without end.’
In Part V the frustration of reality is described by the abstractions introduced in Part I; life is frustrated at every level, and this accounts for the nature of the land and the character of its people. By placing God in a casual relation to this condition, the poem develops an irony which results in the ‘whimper.’ But the most devastating irony is formal: The extension of game ritual into liturgical form.
The ‘Shadow’ derives from Dowson’s most famous poem… Of course it has been transformed, but it is still qualified by the memory. The part to which it most obviously connects earlier in the poem appears in the ‘lips that would kiss’; the desire that is frustrated there preserves this ambiguity in Part V. Other repetitions in Dowson’s poem besides the shadow of Cynara have probably had some effect on Eliot’s
poem. In Dowson, after each lapse in faith, which is followed by the line ‘And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,’ there is a statement of its effect, followed by his declaration of faith. After each lapse, the shadow precipitates these consequences, and this circumstance may have suggested Eliot’s transformation. Some of Dowson’s other lines may lurk behind some of Eliot’s…
Comparison suggests that Eliot’s theme of the frustration of desire by fear still carries oppositions and overtones of the poem from which its ‘shadow’ is derived. And this frustration is finally the reason why the eyes are obscured and the land a realm of shadows. Here Eliot, to use his words on Baudelaire, is ‘looking into the Shadow.’ Thus Dowson’s poem provided the hint by which Part V amalgamated all the others, translating the lack of substance which they described into the thwarting shadow. One reason for considering the possible genesis of Part V is the light it throws on Eliot’s piecemeal mode of composition."
George Williamson
A Reader’s Guide to T. S. Eliot: A Poem-by-Poem Analysis
(1949; Farrar, Straus/Noonday 1957) 155-62
"’The Hollow Men’ is similar in tone and content but much less extensive in treatment [compared to ‘The Waste Land’]. The epigraph is from Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, which depicts the contrast between the artificiality of civilization and the elemental but savage power of primitive superstition. The Hollow Men are the citizens of modern Western culture, synthetically stuffed with opinions, ideas, and faiths they cannot feel. The senselessness of the modern man’s daily routine is indicated in the childish nursery rhyme which begins Section V. The fourth stanza of this section (‘Between the desire…’) suggests the impotence of the Prufrock-Gerontion type of figure who is reduced to inaction through the ‘Shadow’ of thought. The chief feature of modern culture is its banality and pettiness; the world ends ‘not with a bang but a whimper’."
Donald Heiney
Recent American Literature 4
(Barron’s Educational Series 1958) 490
"Occupying a position between ‘The Waste Land’ and ‘Ash-Wednesday,’ both with respect to content and the order in which the poems were written, ‘The Hollow Men’ begins with references to human paralysis and ends with a juxtaposition of the human world of illusory dreams and the divine Kingdom beyond death. The first four sections of the poem deal respectively with the general sterility of the ‘living dead,’ the particular fear of reality and of the eyes of judgment, the desolation of the world between birth and death, and the faint hope for the appearance of the ‘perpetual star’ and ‘multifoliate rose’; the fifth section recapitulates the themes of the first four in alternation of fragmentary phrases. The ending is ambiguous, both a cry of despair at the emptiness of human life and a simultaneous assertion ‘For Thine is the Kingdom’."
Max J. Herzberg & staff
The Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature
(Crowell 1962)
"Eliot said in an interview that ‘The Hollow Men’ originated ‘out of separate poems… That’s one way in which my mind does seem to have evolved through the years poetically—doing things separately and then seeing the possibility of focusing them together, altering them, making a kind of whole of them.’ The first four sections had all appeared separately before the publication of the whole, in 1925. Some of the material was originally in ‘The Waste Land.’ The Hollow Men are like the city crowds of ‘The Waste Land,’ the damned who are so because of a lack of spiritual reality, even their sins lacking violence and conviction. The first references are, then, Dantean. There is a contrast with the blessed; their ‘direct eyes’ are avoided in II, where the hollowness of the Hollow Men begets scarecrow imagery. The landscape is a stony desert of privation; despair and a consciousness of the necessary imperfection of a life which resembles that of the faint-hearted damned are the other themes developed. For the title see Julius Caesar IV.ii.23, where the word means ‘insincere’; Conrad uses ‘hollow’ several times in Heart of Darkness."
Frank Kermode & John Hollander, eds.
Modern British Literature
(Oxford 1973) 490
Michael Hollister (2015)
T. S. Eliot
(1888-1965)
"It would be glib to say that in ‘The Waste Land’ and ‘The Hollow Men’ Eliot wrote his Inferno and that since then his poems represent various stages of passing through a Purgatorio; still such a remark may possibly illuminate both his aims and achievement…. From that early poem onward, through the much deeper accents of ‘Gerontion’ and ‘The Waste Land,’ the prevailing theme of Eliot’s poems is the emptiness of life without belief, an emptiness that finally resounds with sickening fear and desperation in ‘The Hollow Men’…. Through ‘The Waste Land’ and ‘The Hollow Men’ resounded the poet’s dread of death and dissolution, a shudder at the thought of bones ‘rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year’…. ‘Mistah Kurtz—he dead’—the harrowing climax of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, his expression of utter horror, epitomizes in a sentence the very tone of blasphemous hopelessness which issues from ‘The Hollow Men’…."
F. O. Matthiessen
The Achievement of T. S. Eliot
(1935; Oxford/Galaxy 1959) 11, 99, 118, 53
"From a letter Pound wrote to Eliot early in 1922, we know that Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was very much in his mind at the time he wrote ‘The Waste Land.’… The only direct influence of the Conrad story is in the first of the songs of the Thames-daughters in Part III…. Psychologically, the experience in ‘The Hollow Men’ is even more despairing than that of the conclusion of ‘The Waste Land.’
The full horror of the situation of spiritual stagnation is experienced, without the actively dramatized revulsion from the contemporary scene, or the actively dramatized inner struggle between compulsion and revulsion towards personal change. The poet sees himself inescapably identified with his environment, and any power of choice or movement towards action of any sort seems utterly paralysed. It is a condition which Jung, as well as Eliot, characterizes symbolically as the meeting with the Shadow. To Jung it is the confronting of our own inner ‘darkness,’ which means ‘bitter shock, though it is the indispensable prerequisite of every renewal of the spirit.’…
He can no longer project his own ‘darkness’ upon all the elements in his environment to which he feels alien, but superior. He can no longer find any release in the exposure of the hollowness and horror of a Sweeney, of a decadent ‘landlord,’ of a Madame Sosostris, of empty, aimless women and young men carbuncular. He himself is a dweller in darkness as deep as that of those he had so surely and cynically displayed, and far deeper than that of those ‘lost violent souls’ in history or imaginative creation, who, if damned, were at least damned for overt action, and not for…passive non-entity….
The symbol of the eyes in ‘The Hollow Men,’ which are the only hope of overcoming the Shadow, cannot belong to any vision of romantic illusion, any more than they can be Kurtz’s ‘wide and immense stare’ [from Heart of Darkness; compare eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleberg in The Great Gatsby]. In Part I they are the ‘direct eyes’ of those of assured faith, who have died, but later the symbol absorbs much richer implications…. Parts III and IV develop the horror of ‘death’s dream kingdom.’… The water symbol here has no regenerative value. It is the ‘tumid river’ as described in Heart of Darkness… After this torturing picture of hollowness, loneliness, darkness and deadness, we are reminded again of Dante and Beatrice; of how, after his repentance, she bathed him in the river of Lethe, and her stern gaze turned to smiling encouragement, to ‘eyes of light.’…
There is certainly no hope in the conclusion. Instead of any vision, any release, any forward movement, any light or any ‘wind’s singing,’ there is the eternal going round in the cactus land, enclosed in time and place, in a childish nursery-rhyme world of make-believe. Then, passing out of the concrete evocation of
physical parallels, the poet conceives of the Shadow as ‘paralyzed force,’ as that abstract principle of the negation of the will, which either uses the forms of prayer without the substance of action, or evades the issue by a postponement… He is lost in the Shadow, and his ‘world ends’ not in any self-chosen dark night of the soul, but in a sense of tormented, whimpering vacuity."
Elizabeth Drew
T. S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry
(Scribner’s 1949) 91-97
11
"This poem (1925) is provided with two epigraphs, one pointing to a basic contrast and the other to a basic resemblance. The hollow men are antithetic to ‘Mistah Kurtz’ but like the ‘Old Guy,’ that is, the effigy of Guy Fawkes. The hero of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness enjoys an advantage over the hollow men, not least in the fact that he is dead and they only deadened. Kurtz and Guy Fawkes both were ‘lost violent souls,’ not hollow men. But the effigy of Guy Fawkes is a hollow man, for this epigraph derives from the game of make-believe in which children use a stuffed effigy of Guy Fawkes as a means to beg pennies for fireworks on the fifth of November. The relation of this epigraph to the poem, however, suggests another inference: As children make a game of make-believe out of Guy Fawkes so we make a similar game out of religion. The game ritual of the poem supports this implication.
The first lines bring the title and epigraph into critical relationship. We are like the Old Guy, effigies stuffed with straw. It may be observed that the first and last parts of this poem indicate a church service, and the ritual of effigies is suggested throughout. The action of this part is indicative of the service: ‘Leaning together…whisper together,’ the voices ‘quiet and meaningless’ as the service drones on. Then the paradoxes, in which one term denies the other, turn these effigies into abstractions, devoid of even their arid appearance, self-contradictory even in this realm. The erstwhile worshippers disappear in a blur of shapes, shade, gesture, to which no reality is attached.
Then the crucial orientation is developed, toward ‘death’s other Kingdom.’ Those who have crossed unafraid remember us—except for the ironic qualification—in terms of the basic opposition between Kurtz and the Old Guy, ‘not as lost violent souls,’ but only as the effigies of this service. Now we know where we are in a larger sense, at least that we are in a kingdom of death. And let us observe that the confusing kingdoms of death in the poem are distinguished rather simply: First, the kingdoms of death without relation to God or church have no capital; second, death’s real kingdom finds its similitude in life as the ‘dream’ or ‘twilight’ kingdom.
II
Part II defines the hollow men in relation to the reality which those ‘with direct eyes’ have met, and develops the contrast implied by ‘direct.’ Fortunately, the eyes he dare not meet even in dreams do not appear to ‘death’s dream kingdom.’ There they are only reflected, indirect and broken light; wind is reflected by a swinging tree; voices are another illusion of the wind; all is perceived indirectly, and not without beauty. The images are reminiscent of Biblical imagery, but this kingdom resembles Dante’s limbo of Trimmers.
He too would be no nearer, but would also wear intentional disguises—those proper to the scarecrow, behaving, like the tree, as the wind behaves. He would be no nearer, no more direct, in this twilight kingdom. He fears the ultimate vision. The eyes in this poem evoke a range of feeling dominated by that which the eyes of Charon excite in Dante (Inferno, C.3).
III
Part III defines this similitude of death’s kingdom in relation to the worship of the hollow men. A dead, arid land, like its people, it raises stone images of the spiritual, which are supplicated by the dead. And again the ‘fading star’ establishes a sense of remoteness from reality.
The image of frustrated love which follows is a moment of anguished illumination suspended between the two kingdoms of death. ‘Waking alone’—not quite out of the dream kingdom—at a propitious time, lips that would adore pray instead to a broken image, for the impulse is frozen. The ‘broken stone’ unites the ‘stone images’ and the ‘broken column,’ which bent the sunlight.
IV
Part IV explores this impulse in relation to the land, which now darkens perceptibly as the valley of the shadow of death. Now there are not even similitudes of eyes, and the ‘fading’ becomes the ‘dying’ star. The land as a ‘hollow valley’ carries a ghostly reflection of the human physiognomy in decay, ending as the broke, inarticulate, image of the lost kingdoms of the Old Testament exiles. And with this declination comes the awareness that the indirect meeting found in aspects of beauty must yield to the direct meeting which has been shunned, for this is the last of meeting places.
In action the hollow men now ‘grope together / And avoid speech,’ gathered on the banks of the swollen river which must be crossed to ‘death’s other kingdom.’ The contrast with Part I is clear, and the river suggests that of Dante’s Inferno (C.3). Without any eyes at all they are without any vision unless ‘the eyes’ return as the ‘perpetual,’ not fading or dying, star; as the ‘multi-foliate rose’ of this kingdom. But for empty men this is only a hope. As star becomes rose, so the rose becomes the rose window of the church; the rose as an image of the church, and multi-foliate, appears in Dante’s Paradiso (C.31-32).
V
But Part V develops the reality, not the hope, of empty men; the cactus, not the rose. And it begins with the prickly pear ritual of cactus land; the nursery level of make-believe mocks the hope of empty men. In desire they ‘circumambulate’ the pear, but are frustrated by the pickles. Here we may recall ‘the hour when we are Trembling with tenderness,’ for the poem now develops that frustration of impulse. At various levels, in various aspects of life, between the impulse and its realization there falls the frustrating shadow of fear, the essential shadow of this land. Yet the Shadow is more than fear: It concentrates the valley of the Shadow into a shape of horror, almost a personification of its negative character. The antiphonal division of this part, marked by the type, exhibits the irony which leads ‘round the mulberry bush’ to the last line.
Various stages are interrupted by the interpolation of elements that qualify this thwarting Shadow; after the first, the passage from the Lord’s Prayer relates the Shadow to religion, with irony in the attribution; after the second, the response about the length of life relates it to the burden of life; and after the third, the Lord’s Prayer again relates it to the Kingdom that is so hard. The repetition follows the thwarting of the series that produces life itself, frustrating the essence from descent to being (see Purgatorio, 31: 107). This is the essential irony of their thwarted lives.
Then the rather ambiguous relation of these interrupting elements to the Shadow is made more explicit. This is done by turning these responses…into the main chant, with the result that each completion hesitates between its former complement and the Shadow, and at the same time suggests by its truncation the final interruption. This end comes by way of ironic completion as the nursery rhyme again takes up its repetitive round (‘This is the way we go to church’), and terminates with the line that characterizes the equivocating excuses. They are the whimpers of fear with which the hollow men end, neither the bang of Guy Fawkes Day nor of the ‘lost violent soul.’ The conclusion also transforms the liturgical ‘world without end.’
In Part V the frustration of reality is described by the abstractions introduced in Part I; life is frustrated at every level, and this accounts for the nature of the land and the character of its people. By placing God in a casual relation to this condition, the poem develops an irony which results in the ‘whimper.’ But the most devastating irony is formal: The extension of game ritual into liturgical form.
The ‘Shadow’ derives from Dowson’s most famous poem… Of course it has been transformed, but it is still qualified by the memory. The part to which it most obviously connects earlier in the poem appears in the ‘lips that would kiss’; the desire that is frustrated there preserves this ambiguity in Part V. Other repetitions in Dowson’s poem besides the shadow of Cynara have probably had some effect on Eliot’s
poem. In Dowson, after each lapse in faith, which is followed by the line ‘And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,’ there is a statement of its effect, followed by his declaration of faith. After each lapse, the shadow precipitates these consequences, and this circumstance may have suggested Eliot’s transformation. Some of Dowson’s other lines may lurk behind some of Eliot’s…
Comparison suggests that Eliot’s theme of the frustration of desire by fear still carries oppositions and overtones of the poem from which its ‘shadow’ is derived. And this frustration is finally the reason why the eyes are obscured and the land a realm of shadows. Here Eliot, to use his words on Baudelaire, is ‘looking into the Shadow.’ Thus Dowson’s poem provided the hint by which Part V amalgamated all the others, translating the lack of substance which they described into the thwarting shadow. One reason for considering the possible genesis of Part V is the light it throws on Eliot’s piecemeal mode of composition."
George Williamson
A Reader’s Guide to T. S. Eliot: A Poem-by-Poem Analysis
(1949; Farrar, Straus/Noonday 1957) 155-62
"’The Hollow Men’ is similar in tone and content but much less extensive in treatment [compared to ‘The Waste Land’]. The epigraph is from Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, which depicts the contrast between the artificiality of civilization and the elemental but savage power of primitive superstition. The Hollow Men are the citizens of modern Western culture, synthetically stuffed with opinions, ideas, and faiths they cannot feel. The senselessness of the modern man’s daily routine is indicated in the childish nursery rhyme which begins Section V. The fourth stanza of this section (‘Between the desire…’) suggests the impotence of the Prufrock-Gerontion type of figure who is reduced to inaction through the ‘Shadow’ of thought. The chief feature of modern culture is its banality and pettiness; the world ends ‘not with a bang but a whimper’."
Donald Heiney
Recent American Literature 4
(Barron’s Educational Series 1958) 490
"Occupying a position between ‘The Waste Land’ and ‘Ash-Wednesday,’ both with respect to content and the order in which the poems were written, ‘The Hollow Men’ begins with references to human paralysis and ends with a juxtaposition of the human world of illusory dreams and the divine Kingdom beyond death. The first four sections of the poem deal respectively with the general sterility of the ‘living dead,’ the particular fear of reality and of the eyes of judgment, the desolation of the world between birth and death, and the faint hope for the appearance of the ‘perpetual star’ and ‘multifoliate rose’; the fifth section recapitulates the themes of the first four in alternation of fragmentary phrases. The ending is ambiguous, both a cry of despair at the emptiness of human life and a simultaneous assertion ‘For Thine is the Kingdom’."
Max J. Herzberg & staff
The Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature
(Crowell 1962)
"Eliot said in an interview that ‘The Hollow Men’ originated ‘out of separate poems… That’s one way in which my mind does seem to have evolved through the years poetically—doing things separately and then seeing the possibility of focusing them together, altering them, making a kind of whole of them.’ The first four sections had all appeared separately before the publication of the whole, in 1925. Some of the material was originally in ‘The Waste Land.’ The Hollow Men are like the city crowds of ‘The Waste Land,’ the damned who are so because of a lack of spiritual reality, even their sins lacking violence and conviction. The first references are, then, Dantean. There is a contrast with the blessed; their ‘direct eyes’ are avoided in II, where the hollowness of the Hollow Men begets scarecrow imagery. The landscape is a stony desert of privation; despair and a consciousness of the necessary imperfection of a life which resembles that of the faint-hearted damned are the other themes developed. For the title see Julius Caesar IV.ii.23, where the word means ‘insincere’; Conrad uses ‘hollow’ several times in Heart of Darkness."
Frank Kermode & John Hollander, eds.
Modern British Literature
(Oxford 1973) 490
Michael Hollister (2015)
The Naming of Cats was published in 1939. It was featured in a poetry collection called Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. This collection contains whimsical poems about feline psychology and sociology. The Naming of Cats, particularly, describes the names of cats and how they receive them. This is addressed to humans, as the lyrical voice tries to teach the reader more about feline life. T. S. Eliot’s poem shows the mysteriousness and deviousness of cats. Most of the poems in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats were written in 1930’s and included in letters to T. S. Eliot’s godchildren. In 1939, these were collected and published.
The first edition of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats was illustrated by the author, but when it was re-published in 1940 it was fully illustrated by Nicolas Bentley. Later editions include illustrations by Edward Gorey (1982) and Axel Scheffler (2009). Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats includes 15 poems. The last one in the collection, Cat Morgan Introduces Himself, was added in the 1952 edition.
The Naming of Cats, and the rest of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, was adapted for the stage by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Lloyd Webber’s approach to the text is the best known musical adaptation of these poems. As well as the poems featured in the collection, Lloyd Webber’s musical introduces characters from Eliot’s own unpublished drafts. Furthermore, The Naming of Cats is also referenced in several films, including Logan’s Run.
The Naming of Cats has a great number of literary devices, such as allusions, similes, and repetitions, among others. Moreover, personification is one of the main literary devices, as cats are given human characteristics. The lyrical voice acquires a didactic, but playful tone. He/she explains about the naming of cats, but, at the same time, he/she plays with external references and different types of allusions. The rhyme scheme of the poem is ABAB and it produces a short and rhythmical dialogue.
The Naming of Cats is presented in one big text portion and can be read in full here. Although the partition in stanzas can be made following the rhyme scheme, the poem is not printed with those spaces. Therefore, the poem will be analysed as a whole, but those further partitions can be made. The Naming of Cats explores the way in which cats acquire their names. The lyrical voice explains how a cat has three different names: the name they are given by their human family, a particular name, and an unknown name for humans.
The poem begins by stating the importance of the naming of cats:
The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn’t just one of your holiday games;
There is an allusion to Alice in Wonderland to compare the reader’s possible thought while reading to a reference he/she knows and has read about (“You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter”). Notice the emphasis made in capital letters on the number of names that a cat has. The capitalization of phrases is crucial for the poem, as it stresses important information. Then, the lyrical voice talks about the first name: the family name. Notice the repetition in the syntax when the lyrical voice is giving examples of names (“Such as…”/ “All of them sensible everyday names”). These repetitions and the rhyme scheme create a particular rhythmical pace in the poem, which is almost song-like.
Then, the lyrical voice proceeds to talk about the second name a cat has. This name is a peculiar name which the cat possesses. The lyrical voice stresses the importance of this name, as it brings pride to the cat. This name is also very important, as it never belongs to more than one cat. The syntax repetitions are made once again to continue the rhythmical pace and the metrical form of the poem. The names given as examples are a bit eccentric and they separate themselves from general knowledge, contrary to the ones given as examples of the first name. As the poem advances, the things that the lyrical voice mentions and the references he/she makes are more and more unknown to the reader.
Finally, the lyrical voice talks about the last name. There is an emphasis made on the impossibility of knowing this name (“And that is the name that you never will guess;/The name that no human research can discover”) and on the knowledge that the cat has of it (“But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess”). There is some mystery about this final name, as the narrator states that it will never be known to humans. The rhythm changes a little and the repetition is not found in the syntax, but on the words (“Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:/His ineffable effable/Effanineffable”). This change in rhythm and structure allows the lyrical voice to finish the poem dramatically and to capture his/her reader’s attention.
TS Eliot's Ash Wednesday – a call to spiritual awareness that falls short Roz Kaveney
As with Dante, this is a poem in which the visions of hell are stronger than the visions of heaven. First published on Wed 7 May 2014 00.05 AEST
Among the first fruits of TS Eliot's conversion were the first three parts of the poem that he ended up calling Ash Wednesday and that, accordingly, we think of, not wholly inaccurately, as an essentially liturgical piece. Ash Wednesday is – after all – a set of rituals and prayers that Anglicanism ended up transferring across from Catholicism essentially unaltered. For a high Anglican like Eliot it was perhaps especially important that Protestants such as Thomas Cranmer tried to remove them and failed. The liturgy is a reminder of mortality and a call to repentance both individual and collective; the poem does these things, but also creates, in its later sections, an idealised medieval landscape, a jewelled pictorial Book of Hours to contemplate as well as pray over.
Yet that is not all that is going on here. When the poem was first published as a whole in 1930, it was dedicated to Vivienne, from whom he was increasingly estranged but not yet formally separated. Eliot had chosen as his spiritual adviser a clergyman who, after hearing his confession, agreed that he should probably end the marriage – it's worth remembering that for Eliot, who never tried to divorce Vivienne, this meant, because he took these issues seriously, a choice of celibacy. This is perhaps not entirely surprising given how he had written of the sexual life in The Waste Land and in Sweeney Agonistes; his misogyny meant that he blamed and went on blaming Vivienne. (When he appeared as the murderer Crippen for fancy dress, she went as his cross-dressed mistress and accomplice, not his wife and victim.)
For a religious poem, Ash Wednesday has a distinctly secular aspect some of the time. Even more than The Waste Land, it is heavily intertextual; you can read its allusions as metonymous, that is to say as bringing into his text the whole of the texts that they echo. The first section, for example, originally had the title of a love poem by the Florentine Cavalcanti that its first line echoes: "Perch'i' no spero di tornar giammai" – "Because I do not hope to turn again".
We are so used to reading what Eliot wrote, with its evocation of spiritual dryness, its sense of himself as "an aged eagle" with stubs instead of wings – he was 40 – learning "to sit still" and find spiritual solace in withdrawal and renunciation, that it comes as a shock to realise that in the poem he chose to echo, the dying Cavalcanti is still praising his mistress, sending his poem to be her comforter. There is something quite creepy in his dedicating the whole poem to Vivienne when the first section so totally refuses to be the sort of love poem it echoes.
The second section is just as sinister, but also Eliot at his most beautiful and lyrical. The echoes here are of courtly love again, but also of Dante – the leopards that have eaten the poet's heart and brains leaving his bones dry are associated with sins like lust and idleness and gluttony – and the brothers Grimm. Unpack that reference and we find long-concealed murder and betrayal revealed and punished against all odds – what was there in Eliot's marriage to Vivienne that makes him feel such a sinner? That was so dreadful that his confessor thought he should end it? That makes the bones glad to be done with life – "we are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other"?
Yet tied to these moments of nightmare – and the ones in the next section where Eliot is pursued on a staircase by sinister ghosts and urban squalor – is the evocation of a Lady, who is the Virgin, and all of the Beloveds of courtly love, and most especially Dante's Beatrice, and is also associated with gardens and fertility and a sort of organic community. She is also, presumably, Emily Hale, whom Eliot's poetry associates with gardens from the beginning; Eliot demonises one of his muses and places another on a goddess-like pedestal, and in both cases you end up feeling that the real woman gets progressively erased from his work.
It's interesting that there is so much talk of fertility here and it is always gardens and never children. By separating from Vivienne, and adopting celibacy, Eliot was accepting childlessness. In a more or less contemporaneous poem called Marina, he talks of yearning for a daughter – echoing Shakespeare's Pericles and his reunion with his child against the odds, but also, in the epigraph, Seneca's Hercules, waking from a madness in which he has killed wife and child. There is something deeply sad, but also dishonest, in this replacement of what he perhaps really desired with an etiolated and inauthentic religious vision; Eliot at his best speaks more honestly than that, even when he is being cryptic.
The later sections of the poem are a call to spiritual awareness, and acceptance of divine forgiveness. There's something worrying, if logical, about Eliot's vision of himself as a preacher calling the world to order – it was after all, the original family business, running revivals was why his ancestors moved to the Midwest. The problem is that the organic society he shows us is so totally a decoration, people walking and talking in a landscape, and a piper playing plaintive tunes; in the later sections of Ash Wednesday, the quotations of liturgy are progressively stronger than the bits that are Eliot.
This is a poem – the same can be said of Dante – in which the visions of hell are stronger than the visions of heaven, in which the original evocation of the heavenly (the lyric "Lady of silences" in the second section) is much more effective than the later parts; Eliot is trying urgently to convince us, and sacrificing much to that attempt, and yet he falls short of what he is trying to do.
Since you’re here …… we have a small favour to ask. More people are reading the Guardian’s independent, investigative journalism than ever but advertising revenues across the media are falling fast. And unlike many news organisations, we haven’t put up a paywall – we want to keep our journalism as open as we can. So you can see why we need to ask for your help.
The Guardian is editorially independent, meaning we set our own agenda. Our journalism is free from commercial bias and not influenced by billionaire owners, politicians or shareholders. No one edits our Editor. No one steers our opinion. This is important because it enables us to give a voice to the voiceless, challenge the powerful and hold them to account. The Guardian’s editorial independence makes it stand out in a shrinking media landscape, at a time when factual and honest reporting is more critical than ever.
As with Dante, this is a poem in which the visions of hell are stronger than the visions of heaven. First published on Wed 7 May 2014 00.05 AEST
Among the first fruits of TS Eliot's conversion were the first three parts of the poem that he ended up calling Ash Wednesday and that, accordingly, we think of, not wholly inaccurately, as an essentially liturgical piece. Ash Wednesday is – after all – a set of rituals and prayers that Anglicanism ended up transferring across from Catholicism essentially unaltered. For a high Anglican like Eliot it was perhaps especially important that Protestants such as Thomas Cranmer tried to remove them and failed. The liturgy is a reminder of mortality and a call to repentance both individual and collective; the poem does these things, but also creates, in its later sections, an idealised medieval landscape, a jewelled pictorial Book of Hours to contemplate as well as pray over.
Yet that is not all that is going on here. When the poem was first published as a whole in 1930, it was dedicated to Vivienne, from whom he was increasingly estranged but not yet formally separated. Eliot had chosen as his spiritual adviser a clergyman who, after hearing his confession, agreed that he should probably end the marriage – it's worth remembering that for Eliot, who never tried to divorce Vivienne, this meant, because he took these issues seriously, a choice of celibacy. This is perhaps not entirely surprising given how he had written of the sexual life in The Waste Land and in Sweeney Agonistes; his misogyny meant that he blamed and went on blaming Vivienne. (When he appeared as the murderer Crippen for fancy dress, she went as his cross-dressed mistress and accomplice, not his wife and victim.)
For a religious poem, Ash Wednesday has a distinctly secular aspect some of the time. Even more than The Waste Land, it is heavily intertextual; you can read its allusions as metonymous, that is to say as bringing into his text the whole of the texts that they echo. The first section, for example, originally had the title of a love poem by the Florentine Cavalcanti that its first line echoes: "Perch'i' no spero di tornar giammai" – "Because I do not hope to turn again".
We are so used to reading what Eliot wrote, with its evocation of spiritual dryness, its sense of himself as "an aged eagle" with stubs instead of wings – he was 40 – learning "to sit still" and find spiritual solace in withdrawal and renunciation, that it comes as a shock to realise that in the poem he chose to echo, the dying Cavalcanti is still praising his mistress, sending his poem to be her comforter. There is something quite creepy in his dedicating the whole poem to Vivienne when the first section so totally refuses to be the sort of love poem it echoes.
The second section is just as sinister, but also Eliot at his most beautiful and lyrical. The echoes here are of courtly love again, but also of Dante – the leopards that have eaten the poet's heart and brains leaving his bones dry are associated with sins like lust and idleness and gluttony – and the brothers Grimm. Unpack that reference and we find long-concealed murder and betrayal revealed and punished against all odds – what was there in Eliot's marriage to Vivienne that makes him feel such a sinner? That was so dreadful that his confessor thought he should end it? That makes the bones glad to be done with life – "we are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other"?
Yet tied to these moments of nightmare – and the ones in the next section where Eliot is pursued on a staircase by sinister ghosts and urban squalor – is the evocation of a Lady, who is the Virgin, and all of the Beloveds of courtly love, and most especially Dante's Beatrice, and is also associated with gardens and fertility and a sort of organic community. She is also, presumably, Emily Hale, whom Eliot's poetry associates with gardens from the beginning; Eliot demonises one of his muses and places another on a goddess-like pedestal, and in both cases you end up feeling that the real woman gets progressively erased from his work.
It's interesting that there is so much talk of fertility here and it is always gardens and never children. By separating from Vivienne, and adopting celibacy, Eliot was accepting childlessness. In a more or less contemporaneous poem called Marina, he talks of yearning for a daughter – echoing Shakespeare's Pericles and his reunion with his child against the odds, but also, in the epigraph, Seneca's Hercules, waking from a madness in which he has killed wife and child. There is something deeply sad, but also dishonest, in this replacement of what he perhaps really desired with an etiolated and inauthentic religious vision; Eliot at his best speaks more honestly than that, even when he is being cryptic.
The later sections of the poem are a call to spiritual awareness, and acceptance of divine forgiveness. There's something worrying, if logical, about Eliot's vision of himself as a preacher calling the world to order – it was after all, the original family business, running revivals was why his ancestors moved to the Midwest. The problem is that the organic society he shows us is so totally a decoration, people walking and talking in a landscape, and a piper playing plaintive tunes; in the later sections of Ash Wednesday, the quotations of liturgy are progressively stronger than the bits that are Eliot.
This is a poem – the same can be said of Dante – in which the visions of hell are stronger than the visions of heaven, in which the original evocation of the heavenly (the lyric "Lady of silences" in the second section) is much more effective than the later parts; Eliot is trying urgently to convince us, and sacrificing much to that attempt, and yet he falls short of what he is trying to do.
Since you’re here …… we have a small favour to ask. More people are reading the Guardian’s independent, investigative journalism than ever but advertising revenues across the media are falling fast. And unlike many news organisations, we haven’t put up a paywall – we want to keep our journalism as open as we can. So you can see why we need to ask for your help.
The Guardian is editorially independent, meaning we set our own agenda. Our journalism is free from commercial bias and not influenced by billionaire owners, politicians or shareholders. No one edits our Editor. No one steers our opinion. This is important because it enables us to give a voice to the voiceless, challenge the powerful and hold them to account. The Guardian’s editorial independence makes it stand out in a shrinking media landscape, at a time when factual and honest reporting is more critical than ever.
Four Quartets consists of four long poems, each further divided into five sections, that were independently published over six years. The first, originally published in 1936, is Burnt Norton, which focuses on time and the need to be aware of the fact that humans can only control the present. This poem charts the process of a speaker meditating on life and the need to live in accordance with universal order. It begins with the narrator walking through a garden and trying to make sense of the process of moving through life. After meditating on the experiences of life, the poem ends with the narrator accepting the Christian notion that love is a crucial aspect of remaining conscious and present throughout existence.
In 1940, Eliot published the second poem, East Coker. The religious perspective introduced in Burnt Norton continues in this poem and is contextualized by the backdrop of ancient and animalistic rituals. These rituals allow the poem to focus on the recent efforts of humanity to overcome the eternal questions at the heart of life. Eliot explores the variety of experiences that humans encounter, ranging from destruction and war to moments of joy and release. In addition to depicting the human tension at the heart of life experienced by all human beings, the feelings of the speaker can be seen as distinctly ambivalent in regards to finding hope and discovering meaning in the process of being born and dying. Ultimately, the speaker finds solace in the notion of salvation offered by Christianity.
The motifs of time, life, and death continue in the third poem, Dry Savages, which was originally published in 1941. As the title implies, one of the main themes is water, and the poem frequently offers images of the sea. However, humanity in the poem is dry in the sense that technology and scientific theories have separated humans from one another, resulting in a sense of loss. Ultimately, the poem reasserts the idea that it's crucial that people not forget their interconnectedness to the past and be aware of the experience of being human.
The influence of Eliot can still be seen throughout English poetry.
Whereas Dry Savages provided many images of the sea, Little Gidding makes use of images of fire. The poem, first published in 1942, focuses on the attempts to solve the problems that the other three poems have introduced. Although the poem is often ambiguous, it insists on the possibility of renewal occurring through sacrifice, which is symbolized with the image of fire. Thus, Eliot's poem seems to offer hope that there is a way to discover meaning in the seeming chaos one experiences in life.
Summary
The first of the quartets, “Burnt Norton,” is named for a ruined country house in Gloucestershire. This quartet is the most explicitly concerned with time as an abstract principle. The first section combines a hypothesis on time—that the past and the future are always contained in the present—with a description of a rose garden where children hide, laughing. A bird serves as the poet’s guide, bringing him into the garden, showing him around, and saving him from despair at not being able to reach the laughing children. The second section begins with a sort of song, filled with abstract images of a vaguely pagan flavour. The poem shifts midway through the section, where it again assumes a more meditative tone in order to sort out the differences between consciousness and living in time: The speaker asserts, “To be conscious is not to be in time,” for consciousness implies a fixed perspective while time is characterized by a transient relativity (around the fixed point of the present). However, this statement does not intend to devalue memory and temporal existence, which, according to the poem, allow the moments of greatest beauty. The third section of “Burnt Norton” reads like the bridge section of a song, in which the key changes. In this section, Eliot describes a “place of disaffection”—perhaps the everyday world—which allows neither transcendence (“darkness”) nor the beauty of the moment (“daylight”). The fourth, very short section returns to a sort of melody (some of the lines rhyme) to describe the unattainable, fictional point of fixity around which time is organized. This point is described as surrounded by flowers and birds; perhaps it can be found in the rose garden of the first section. The final section of this quartet returns to reality: Despite the apparent vitality of words and music, these must die; the children’s laughter in the garden becomes a mocking laughter, scorning our enslavement to time.
Form
Eliot is much less experimental with rhyme and meter here than he is in his earlier works. Instead, he displays a mature language consciousness. Through the repetition of words and the use of structures like chiasmus and pastiche, he creates a rhythm not dependent on previous poetic forms. It is as if the mere meaning of the words is not enough to express the philosophical concepts Eliot wants to explore, as they “decay with imprecision”: He must exploit the physical properties of the words themselves. The repetition and circularity of language that are this poem’s hallmarks highlight the infinite circularity of time: Just as past, present, and future cannot be separated with any precision, neither can the words used to describe them. Rather than exploiting bizarre combinations of images or intricate formal devices, Eliot uses the gravity of terms like “past” and “present” to create a beautiful monument of ideas.
Commentary
The Four Quartets were written over a period of eight years, from 1935 to 1942. These years span World War II; they also follow Eliot’s conversion to the Church of England and his naturalization as a British subject. These poems are the work of an older, more mature, spiritually attuned poet, facing a world torn by war and increasingly neglectful of the past. Each of the Four Quartets considers spiritual existence, consciousness, and the relationship of the present to the past. Whereas The Waste Land and others of Eliot’s early works take an interest in the effects of time on culture, the Quartets are concerned with the conflict between individual mortality and the endless span of human existence. Accordingly, each quartet focuses on a particular place with its own distinctive significance to human history and takes off from that place to propose a series of ideas about spirituality and meaningful experience. Each quartet separates into five sections; Eliot used these divisions and the transitions between them to try to create an effect he described as similar to the musical form of the sonata. The Quartets, thus, display none of the fragmentation or collage-like qualities of Eliot’s earlier poetry; instead, Eliot substitutes an elegant measuredness and a new awareness of language: Puns and other forms of wordplay occur with some frequency.
Eliot does not hide the ideas behind the poetry here. His meditations on time and being are stated fairly explicitly and can be easily traced in the poem. “Burnt Norton” is, however, a poem about distraction, and two of the more interesting aspects of the poem are also two of its most understated moments. The first of these surrounds the garden in which the first section is set. Certainly the garden—”our first world”—references the Garden of Eden: A place of unattainable peace (and in this case insight) that is normally forbidden to mere mortals but that exists in memory and in literature as a standard to which everyday existence must be unfavourably compared. Yet the garden is also a part of the ruined estate from which this quartet takes its name; it bears the marks of human presence and abandonment—empty pools and formal hedges gone wild. The wreck of the garden brings to mind the ruins so prominent in Eliot’s earlier poetry, except that, here, ruins are a symbol of the futility of human aspirations and particularly of the futility of trying to alter the natural order.
Ruins also call to mind fragments, especially of the kind that make up Eliot’s earlier poetry. The first line of the second section of “Burnt Norton”—“Garlic and sapphires in the mud”—highlights Eliot’s new attitude toward the fragmentary nature of modern culture. This famous line juxtaposes a series of random things, but the effect is not the atmosphere of belatedness and melancholy characteristic of The Waste Land. Rather, the collage-like arrangements of this section form a nearly coherent whole, a meaningless song that sounds traditional but isn’t. Again fragments and ruins stand in defiance of human aspirations, only this poem does not lament that things once made sense and have now ceased to do so; rather, it declares that coherence never existed at all—that meaning and human experience are necessarily mutually exclusive.
The second centre of interest in this quartet is constructed around the Chinese vase and the ruminations on poetry in the fifth section. This section clearly owes a debt to Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” with which it shares some of its thematic concerns and its imagery. The Chinese jar represents the capacity of art to transcend the limitations of the moment, to achieve a kind of victory over, or perspective upon, time. In its form and pattern, in its physical existence, the jar is able to overcome the usual imprecision of human expression. By emphasizing form and pattern, Eliot suggests that poetry, which takes advantage of the linguistic versions of these, may also be able to achieve transcendence. Nevertheless, at the end there still remains the ghostly laughter of children in the garden, mocking “the waste sad time” of the poet and of poetry. The place of poetry and Eliot’s own poetic practices will be a subject of scrutiny elsewhere in the Quartets.
Sparknotes.com
In 1940, Eliot published the second poem, East Coker. The religious perspective introduced in Burnt Norton continues in this poem and is contextualized by the backdrop of ancient and animalistic rituals. These rituals allow the poem to focus on the recent efforts of humanity to overcome the eternal questions at the heart of life. Eliot explores the variety of experiences that humans encounter, ranging from destruction and war to moments of joy and release. In addition to depicting the human tension at the heart of life experienced by all human beings, the feelings of the speaker can be seen as distinctly ambivalent in regards to finding hope and discovering meaning in the process of being born and dying. Ultimately, the speaker finds solace in the notion of salvation offered by Christianity.
The motifs of time, life, and death continue in the third poem, Dry Savages, which was originally published in 1941. As the title implies, one of the main themes is water, and the poem frequently offers images of the sea. However, humanity in the poem is dry in the sense that technology and scientific theories have separated humans from one another, resulting in a sense of loss. Ultimately, the poem reasserts the idea that it's crucial that people not forget their interconnectedness to the past and be aware of the experience of being human.
The influence of Eliot can still be seen throughout English poetry.
Whereas Dry Savages provided many images of the sea, Little Gidding makes use of images of fire. The poem, first published in 1942, focuses on the attempts to solve the problems that the other three poems have introduced. Although the poem is often ambiguous, it insists on the possibility of renewal occurring through sacrifice, which is symbolized with the image of fire. Thus, Eliot's poem seems to offer hope that there is a way to discover meaning in the seeming chaos one experiences in life.
Summary
The first of the quartets, “Burnt Norton,” is named for a ruined country house in Gloucestershire. This quartet is the most explicitly concerned with time as an abstract principle. The first section combines a hypothesis on time—that the past and the future are always contained in the present—with a description of a rose garden where children hide, laughing. A bird serves as the poet’s guide, bringing him into the garden, showing him around, and saving him from despair at not being able to reach the laughing children. The second section begins with a sort of song, filled with abstract images of a vaguely pagan flavour. The poem shifts midway through the section, where it again assumes a more meditative tone in order to sort out the differences between consciousness and living in time: The speaker asserts, “To be conscious is not to be in time,” for consciousness implies a fixed perspective while time is characterized by a transient relativity (around the fixed point of the present). However, this statement does not intend to devalue memory and temporal existence, which, according to the poem, allow the moments of greatest beauty. The third section of “Burnt Norton” reads like the bridge section of a song, in which the key changes. In this section, Eliot describes a “place of disaffection”—perhaps the everyday world—which allows neither transcendence (“darkness”) nor the beauty of the moment (“daylight”). The fourth, very short section returns to a sort of melody (some of the lines rhyme) to describe the unattainable, fictional point of fixity around which time is organized. This point is described as surrounded by flowers and birds; perhaps it can be found in the rose garden of the first section. The final section of this quartet returns to reality: Despite the apparent vitality of words and music, these must die; the children’s laughter in the garden becomes a mocking laughter, scorning our enslavement to time.
Form
Eliot is much less experimental with rhyme and meter here than he is in his earlier works. Instead, he displays a mature language consciousness. Through the repetition of words and the use of structures like chiasmus and pastiche, he creates a rhythm not dependent on previous poetic forms. It is as if the mere meaning of the words is not enough to express the philosophical concepts Eliot wants to explore, as they “decay with imprecision”: He must exploit the physical properties of the words themselves. The repetition and circularity of language that are this poem’s hallmarks highlight the infinite circularity of time: Just as past, present, and future cannot be separated with any precision, neither can the words used to describe them. Rather than exploiting bizarre combinations of images or intricate formal devices, Eliot uses the gravity of terms like “past” and “present” to create a beautiful monument of ideas.
Commentary
The Four Quartets were written over a period of eight years, from 1935 to 1942. These years span World War II; they also follow Eliot’s conversion to the Church of England and his naturalization as a British subject. These poems are the work of an older, more mature, spiritually attuned poet, facing a world torn by war and increasingly neglectful of the past. Each of the Four Quartets considers spiritual existence, consciousness, and the relationship of the present to the past. Whereas The Waste Land and others of Eliot’s early works take an interest in the effects of time on culture, the Quartets are concerned with the conflict between individual mortality and the endless span of human existence. Accordingly, each quartet focuses on a particular place with its own distinctive significance to human history and takes off from that place to propose a series of ideas about spirituality and meaningful experience. Each quartet separates into five sections; Eliot used these divisions and the transitions between them to try to create an effect he described as similar to the musical form of the sonata. The Quartets, thus, display none of the fragmentation or collage-like qualities of Eliot’s earlier poetry; instead, Eliot substitutes an elegant measuredness and a new awareness of language: Puns and other forms of wordplay occur with some frequency.
Eliot does not hide the ideas behind the poetry here. His meditations on time and being are stated fairly explicitly and can be easily traced in the poem. “Burnt Norton” is, however, a poem about distraction, and two of the more interesting aspects of the poem are also two of its most understated moments. The first of these surrounds the garden in which the first section is set. Certainly the garden—”our first world”—references the Garden of Eden: A place of unattainable peace (and in this case insight) that is normally forbidden to mere mortals but that exists in memory and in literature as a standard to which everyday existence must be unfavourably compared. Yet the garden is also a part of the ruined estate from which this quartet takes its name; it bears the marks of human presence and abandonment—empty pools and formal hedges gone wild. The wreck of the garden brings to mind the ruins so prominent in Eliot’s earlier poetry, except that, here, ruins are a symbol of the futility of human aspirations and particularly of the futility of trying to alter the natural order.
Ruins also call to mind fragments, especially of the kind that make up Eliot’s earlier poetry. The first line of the second section of “Burnt Norton”—“Garlic and sapphires in the mud”—highlights Eliot’s new attitude toward the fragmentary nature of modern culture. This famous line juxtaposes a series of random things, but the effect is not the atmosphere of belatedness and melancholy characteristic of The Waste Land. Rather, the collage-like arrangements of this section form a nearly coherent whole, a meaningless song that sounds traditional but isn’t. Again fragments and ruins stand in defiance of human aspirations, only this poem does not lament that things once made sense and have now ceased to do so; rather, it declares that coherence never existed at all—that meaning and human experience are necessarily mutually exclusive.
The second centre of interest in this quartet is constructed around the Chinese vase and the ruminations on poetry in the fifth section. This section clearly owes a debt to Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” with which it shares some of its thematic concerns and its imagery. The Chinese jar represents the capacity of art to transcend the limitations of the moment, to achieve a kind of victory over, or perspective upon, time. In its form and pattern, in its physical existence, the jar is able to overcome the usual imprecision of human expression. By emphasizing form and pattern, Eliot suggests that poetry, which takes advantage of the linguistic versions of these, may also be able to achieve transcendence. Nevertheless, at the end there still remains the ghostly laughter of children in the garden, mocking “the waste sad time” of the poet and of poetry. The place of poetry and Eliot’s own poetic practices will be a subject of scrutiny elsewhere in the Quartets.
Sparknotes.com
A Short Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Hippopotamus’
Posted by interesting literature
A summary of one of Eliot’s quatrain poems
‘The Hippopotamus’ is one of T. S. Eliot’s quatrain poems, written just after the First World War and published in his 1919 volume, Poems. By turns comical and serious, sincere and playful, high satirical and almost nonsense-like, ‘The Hippopotamus’ shows a very different T. S. Eliot from the one we glimpse in The Waste Land. It is even more interesting as a satire against the Church in light of Eliot’s later conversion to the Church of England, in 1927. You can read ‘The Hippopotamus’ here; below is our analysis.
The ‘quatrain’ poems which make up all but one of the English poems in Poems (the volume also contains a few poems written in French) were inspired by the French example of Théophile Gautier (1811-72), whose volume Émaux et Camées Eliot had been encouraged to read by Ezra Pound. The hard, sculptured feel to these quatrain poems was the result of Pound’s influence: this precise and controlled kind of poetic form was something which Pound thought Eliot could work with to good effect.
In summary, the poem is an extended comparison between the hippopotamus and the Christian church, both ‘weighty’ things, albeit in very different ways, one literal and the other theological. This argument, presented in polished quatrains rhyming abab, is offered in plain terms but we must not take it at face value. For, whilst the majority of the poem weighs up the hippo and the Church, with the church coming out on top, ultimately it is the hippo that ascends to heaven – despite its considerable bulk – while the Church remains on earth, apparently unworthy of a place in heaven after all.
Why? Because the Church is corrupt and out for its own ends, while the hippopotamus is innocent of such corruption. The hippo may be associated with laziness, lying in the mud all day; but it has a simple existence, trying to feed itself when it isn’t asleep. By contrast, Eliot tells us, the Church can sleep and feed itself at the same time. This is offered, on the face of it, as a virtue, but it is ironic – because others donate food and wealth to the Church, the implication is that the Church has done nothing to deserve such donations, and gives nothing back. The hippopotamus cannot reach the mango up on the mango-tree, but the Church can dine on exotic fruits from overseas because of its vast imperial power and its colonisation of other lands. This is presented as an argument in favour of the awesome might of the Church, but it leaves us feeling sorry for the hippo, and viewing the Church as rather greedy and exploitative.
Every one of T. S. Eliot’s polished quatrains has the same double-edged meaning, which is reminiscent of the speech from Mark Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, which ostensibly praises Brutus as an ‘honourable man’, but subtly and cleverly undermines this by drawing attention to the fact that the things Brutus has done, which the Roman people perceive as honourable, are actually anything but. Eliot’s ‘argument’ in ‘The Hippopotamus’, similarly, is deliberately offered to us as specious and flawed: the hippopotamus may be ‘merely’ flesh and blood, in contrast with the Church which was ‘based upon a rock’, but this line itself reveals the speciousness of the argument being offered. It’s an allusion to Jesus’ words from the Gospel of Matthew: ‘And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it’ (16:18). The ‘rock’ on which the Church was founded was, in fact, a pun on the name of Peter – very much a man of flesh and blood.
At the end of the poem, the hippopotamus ascends to heaven while the Church remains here on earth – engulfed by the very same ‘miasmal mist’ that the hippo formerly sat beneath. Yet Eliot’s excessively comical images – of the hippo playing the harp, for instance – render the conceit ridiculous, bordering on the surreal. Any analysis of this poem must address this comicality: does it render Eliot’s ‘argument’ frivolous? Or does it underscore the extent to which the heavy, cumbersome hippo is still nevertheless more likely to be lifted up to heaven than the corrupt, grasping church?
LINKS
www.matrix.edu.au/hsc-english-module-b-study-guide-t-s-eliot-part-1/
https://humx.org/modernism-and-the-waste-land-36fae9390498
https://poemanalysis.com/the-waste-land-by-t-s-eliot-poem-analysis/
http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/eliot/section1/
http://s699163057.websitehome.co.uk/works-by-tseliot
https://www.bl.uk/people/t-s-eliot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXkLgtusza4
Books in RBSC Library
"Prufrock", "Gerontion", Ash Wednesday And Other Shorter poems by B C Southam NF821:912 ELI:D
York Notes Notes on Selected poems T.S. Eliot by Michael Herbert NF821.912 ELI:H
The Invisible Poet T.S. Eliot by Hugh Kenner NF821.912 ELI:K
The Complete Poems and Plays of T S Eliot Faber and Faber NF821.912 ELI
"Prufrock", "Gerontion", Ash Wednesday And Other Shorter poems by B C Southam NF821:912 ELI:D
York Notes Notes on Selected poems T.S. Eliot by Michael Herbert NF821.912 ELI:H
The Invisible Poet T.S. Eliot by Hugh Kenner NF821.912 ELI:K
The Complete Poems and Plays of T S Eliot Faber and Faber NF821.912 ELI
PRACTICE QUESTIONS
Extract Based Questions:
“You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.”
Q1. In your view, how does Eliot’s portrayal of the complex nature of personal experience contribute to the enduring value of his poetry?
In your response, make detailed reference to Preludes and at least ONE other poem set for study.
“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.”
Q2. It is the inherent tension between desire and fear that creates interest in Eliot’s poetry. To what extent are such ideas reflected in the extract from The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock and TWO other poems set for study?
“A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.”
Q3. Intertextuality plays an essential part in the poetry of T.S. Eliot. Based on your personal response, account for the importance of intertextuality to the poems, making detailed reference to Journey Of The Magi and TWO other poems set for study.
“The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth, and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton,
Stiff and white.
A broken spring in a factory yard,
Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap.”
Q4. How does your reading of Rhapsody on a Windy Night affect your reading of the rest of Eliot’s poetry? In your response, make close reference to the extract provided and at least TWO other poems set for study.
“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us-if at all-not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.”
Q5. How does a critical analysis of the above extract reflect your understanding and appreciation of Eliot’s poetry as a whole? Evaluate the language, content and construction of The Hollow Men and at least TWO other poems to demonstrate your understanding and appreciation of the prescribed text.
Theme Specific Questions:
Q6. Through its portrayal of human experience, Eliot’s poetry reinforces the significance of desire. To what extent does your interpretation of Eliot’s poetry support this view? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q7. How is your personal response to the poetry of Eliot shaped by a perception of voice in your poems? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q8. TS Eliot’s poems are about the quest for individual agency. To what extent does your own interpretation of Eliot’s poetry support this view? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q9. “[Poetry] may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves” – T.S. Eliot
What has Eliot’s poetry made you more aware of? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q10. How is the enduring appeal of Eliot’s poetry enhanced by his adaptation of the dramatic monologue form across his work? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q11. Through its portrayal of relationships, Eliot’s poetry reinforces the significance of desire. To what extent does your interpretation of Eliot support this view? In your response, make detailed reference to TWO poems.
Q12. The power of Eliot’s poetry lies in its representation of the complexities of the human condition. Discuss this view in relation to your own reading of TWO of Eliot’s poems.
Q13. Explore how time and place are used in Eliot’s poetry to shape the audience’s understanding of isolation. In your response, make detailed reference to Rhapsody On A Windy Night and at least ONE other poem.
Q14. “Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity” – Sigmund Freud. In light of the quote, consider how at least TWO of Eliot’s poems explore the challenges associated with the uncertainties of the modern world.
Q15. Eliot’s poetry can be clearly seen as a reaction to his relationship with the modern world in which he lived; yet his works continue to speak to us. In your opinion, how is the modernist focus of Eliot’s poetry granted universal appeal? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q16. The power of Eliot’s poetry lies in his use of unique imagery, using contemporary objects and vernacular to challenge his audience’s perceptions. Discuss this view in relation to your own reading of TWO of Eliot’s poems.
Q17. Eliot’s poetry is marked by an existential questioning of an individual’s place within the order of society. Explore this statement in relation to Journey of the Magi and at least ONE other poem set for study.
Q18. Through its use of powerful images, Eliot’s poetry explores the significance of truth. To what extent does your own interpretation of TWO of Eliot’s poems support this view?
Q19. ‘Eliot’s poetry continues to engage audiences through its poetic treatment of struggle and disillusionment.’
In light of your critical study, does this statement resonate with your own interpretation of at least TWO of Eliot’s poems?
Q20. “A thorough knowledge of Eliot is compulsory for anyone interested in contemporary literature. Whether he is liked or disliked is of no importance, but he must be read”. In light of the quote, account for the enduring relevance of Eliot’s poetry. In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO of the poems set for study.
Q21. Evaluate the effectiveness of Eliot’s exploration of the relationship between
individuals and their world within his poetry. In your response discuss ‘The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and ONE other poem set for study.
Q22. “Through its portrayal of human experience, Eliot’s poetry reinforces the value of the individual”. To what extent does your interpretation of at least TWO of Eliot’s poems support this view?
Q23. To what extent is your personal response to Eliot’s exploration of isolation shaped by the composer’s use of poetic techniques? In your response, make detailed reference to TWO poems set for study.
Q24. Eliot’s poetry is valued because it explores challenging ideas of uncertainty and alienation. Discuss this statement in light of your understanding of at least TWO of Eliot’s poems.
Q25. “Tension between an individual and society is what creates interest in poetry”. To what extent does this statement reflect your personal response to Hollow Men and ONE other poem.
Q26. Ultimately, in Eliot’s poetry, it is the representation of challenging ideas that captivates audiences. Explore the representation of at least ONE challenging idea, evaluating its significance to at least TWO of the poems.
Q27. Explore how time and place are used in Eliot's poetry to shape the reader’s understanding of man's isolation. In your response, make detailed referent to at least TWO of the poems set for study.
Q28. How is your personal response to the poetry of TS Eliot shaped by a perception of the individual in the poems? In your answer, refer to THREE of the poems set for study.
General Essay Questions:
Q29. In what ways has your critical study generated compelling and provocative insights into your text? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q30. How have the form and features of Eliot’s poetry informed your understanding of his work?
Q31. “The power of Eliot’s poetry lies in its ability to transcend time and context.” To what extent does your own interpretation of Eliot’s poetry support this view?
Q32. The power of Eliot’s poetry lies in its representation of the complexities of the human condition. Discuss this view in relation to your own reading of Eliot’s poetry.
Q33. Eliot's poetry was deeply concerned with the techniques and aesthetics of poetry writing. How is this evident in TWO of the poems set for study?
Q34. A key aspect of the poetry’s ongoing appeal is Eliot’s use of meaningful structure. In your view, to what extent does the structure contribute to the appeal of Eliot’s poetry? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q35. Eliot’s poetry remains important through the questions it provokes, not the answers it provides. Discuss the extent to which you agree with this statement and with close reference to at least two poems.
Q36. What do you see as the most enduring aspects of Eliot’s poetry? In your response make detailed reference to at least TWO poems.
Q37. A text has value if it creates opportunities for change, while maintaining its core values. Explore this in relation to at least TWO of Eliot’s poems.
Q38. It is how individuals react to the world around them that reveals the most interesting insights into a text. Explore this in relation to at least TWO of Eliot’s poems.
Q39. Write a critical essay that demonstrates how your response to Eliot’s poetry changed and developed during the process of your critical study.
Q40. Texts on their own are interesting but when you compare them to other texts they become illuminating and dynamic. Discuss how a cumulative study of at least THREE of Eliot’s poems have allowed for a more illuminating and dynamic insight into his work.
Q41. “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time”. How has your study of Eliot’s poetry allowed for you to develop a true understanding of the value of his work? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q42. “Each decision made by the poet in the construction of their poem will ultimately impact the meaning individuals gain from the text.” In light of this, analyse how the language and structure of Eliot’s poetry has influenced your understanding of at least TWO of his poems.
Q43. “Despite differing responses to texts over time, ultimately it is the structure and features of a text that is most significant in evaluating its success”. Explore the effectiveness of the poetic style of T. S. Eliot’s when evaluating his success as a poet. Refer to at least TWO of the prescribed poems set for study.
Q44. Explore the effectiveness of the poetic style of T. S. Eliot’s when evaluating his success as a poet. Refer to at least TWO of the prescribed poems set for study.
Q45. A key aspect of the poetry’s ongoing appeal is Eliot's rejection of structure. In your view, to what extent does the lack of structure contribute to the appeal of Eliot's poetry? Support your evaluation with detailed reference to at least TWO of the poems prescribed for study.
Q46. In your view, how have poetic techniques been used to reveal memorable ideas in Eliot’s poetry? Support your view with detailed reference to TWO poems.
Q47. Your class has been exploring the question, ‘What will continue to make Eliot’s poetry worthy of critical study?’ Your personal response has been challenged by another student. Defend your response through a critical evaluation of at least TWO of Eliot’s poems, analysing the construction, content and language of the texts.
Q48. ‘Interpretations of texts can shift and change with time and place.’
Considering your time and place, reflect on the ways in which context has shaped your critical interpretation of the prescribed text. In your response, refer to TWO poems.
Q49. Compose an argument for or against the topic: ‘That every text has its use-by date.’ Consider your prescribed text’s ideas, language and form, and its reception in different contexts. In your response, refer to at least TWO poems.
Q50. It has been suggested that a key aspect of Eliot’s enduring relevance to audiences is his poetry’s examination of human flaws. To what extent does your personal understanding concur with this view? In your response you should critically analyse and evaluate the techniques, themes and structure of at least TWO poems set for study.
Q51. “An admirable text does not define or exhaust its possibilities”. What possibilities do you see in Eliot’s poetry? Discuss your ideas with close reference to at least TWO poems.
Q52. Anyone can have a good idea. Effective communication of ideas is an art form. Offer an evaluation of the strengths of Eliot’s poetry as an effective vehicle for ideas. In your response, refer to at least TWO poems.
Q53. “Considering a text from different perspectives develops an appreciation of its textual integrity“. Do you agree? Respond to this question through detailed reference to at least TWO of Eliot’s poems.
Q54. Write a series of three or four reflections that demonstrate how your response to Eliot’s poetry has changed and developed during the process of your critical study. Base your reflections on detailed reference to at least TWO poems.
Q55. The value of great texts is that they continue to speak to us. How do such notions account for the value of Eliot’s poetry? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO of Eliot’s poems.
Q56. To what extent has your personal response to Eliot’s poetry been shaped by the enduring power of its intellectual and artistic qualities? Support your evaluation with close reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q57. Analyse the ways T.S. Eliot has prompted you to understand and respond to great and provocative ideas in his poetry. In your response make detailed reference to TWO poems.
Critical Response Questions:
Q58. How has considering other interpretations of Eliot's poetry helped you develop your own appreciation of the textual integrity of the poetry? In your response you should consider the ideas, poetic techniques and structure of at least TWO poems prescribed for study.
Q59. For almost a century, critical studies of Eliot’s poetry have challenged us with a range of perspectives from which we can read and understand the intense exploration of the humanity which lie at the core of the poems. What have you come to understand about humanity from Eliot’s poems? How has this understanding been affected by the perspective of others?
A valuable text has something to say and says it well. How valid is this claim, considering the different contexts in which a text can be received? In your answer, compare your personal evaluation of at least TWO of Eliot’s poems with one other perspective on the poetry.
Hurled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.”
Q60. In your view, how does Eliot’s portrayal of the complex nature of personal experience contribute to the enduring value of his poetry? In your response, make detailed reference to Preludes and at least ONE other poem set for study.
Extract Based Questions:
“You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.”
Q1. In your view, how does Eliot’s portrayal of the complex nature of personal experience contribute to the enduring value of his poetry?
In your response, make detailed reference to Preludes and at least ONE other poem set for study.
“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.”
Q2. It is the inherent tension between desire and fear that creates interest in Eliot’s poetry. To what extent are such ideas reflected in the extract from The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock and TWO other poems set for study?
“A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.”
Q3. Intertextuality plays an essential part in the poetry of T.S. Eliot. Based on your personal response, account for the importance of intertextuality to the poems, making detailed reference to Journey Of The Magi and TWO other poems set for study.
“The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth, and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton,
Stiff and white.
A broken spring in a factory yard,
Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap.”
Q4. How does your reading of Rhapsody on a Windy Night affect your reading of the rest of Eliot’s poetry? In your response, make close reference to the extract provided and at least TWO other poems set for study.
“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us-if at all-not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.”
Q5. How does a critical analysis of the above extract reflect your understanding and appreciation of Eliot’s poetry as a whole? Evaluate the language, content and construction of The Hollow Men and at least TWO other poems to demonstrate your understanding and appreciation of the prescribed text.
Theme Specific Questions:
Q6. Through its portrayal of human experience, Eliot’s poetry reinforces the significance of desire. To what extent does your interpretation of Eliot’s poetry support this view? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q7. How is your personal response to the poetry of Eliot shaped by a perception of voice in your poems? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q8. TS Eliot’s poems are about the quest for individual agency. To what extent does your own interpretation of Eliot’s poetry support this view? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q9. “[Poetry] may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves” – T.S. Eliot
What has Eliot’s poetry made you more aware of? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q10. How is the enduring appeal of Eliot’s poetry enhanced by his adaptation of the dramatic monologue form across his work? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q11. Through its portrayal of relationships, Eliot’s poetry reinforces the significance of desire. To what extent does your interpretation of Eliot support this view? In your response, make detailed reference to TWO poems.
Q12. The power of Eliot’s poetry lies in its representation of the complexities of the human condition. Discuss this view in relation to your own reading of TWO of Eliot’s poems.
Q13. Explore how time and place are used in Eliot’s poetry to shape the audience’s understanding of isolation. In your response, make detailed reference to Rhapsody On A Windy Night and at least ONE other poem.
Q14. “Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity” – Sigmund Freud. In light of the quote, consider how at least TWO of Eliot’s poems explore the challenges associated with the uncertainties of the modern world.
Q15. Eliot’s poetry can be clearly seen as a reaction to his relationship with the modern world in which he lived; yet his works continue to speak to us. In your opinion, how is the modernist focus of Eliot’s poetry granted universal appeal? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q16. The power of Eliot’s poetry lies in his use of unique imagery, using contemporary objects and vernacular to challenge his audience’s perceptions. Discuss this view in relation to your own reading of TWO of Eliot’s poems.
Q17. Eliot’s poetry is marked by an existential questioning of an individual’s place within the order of society. Explore this statement in relation to Journey of the Magi and at least ONE other poem set for study.
Q18. Through its use of powerful images, Eliot’s poetry explores the significance of truth. To what extent does your own interpretation of TWO of Eliot’s poems support this view?
Q19. ‘Eliot’s poetry continues to engage audiences through its poetic treatment of struggle and disillusionment.’
In light of your critical study, does this statement resonate with your own interpretation of at least TWO of Eliot’s poems?
Q20. “A thorough knowledge of Eliot is compulsory for anyone interested in contemporary literature. Whether he is liked or disliked is of no importance, but he must be read”. In light of the quote, account for the enduring relevance of Eliot’s poetry. In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO of the poems set for study.
Q21. Evaluate the effectiveness of Eliot’s exploration of the relationship between
individuals and their world within his poetry. In your response discuss ‘The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and ONE other poem set for study.
Q22. “Through its portrayal of human experience, Eliot’s poetry reinforces the value of the individual”. To what extent does your interpretation of at least TWO of Eliot’s poems support this view?
Q23. To what extent is your personal response to Eliot’s exploration of isolation shaped by the composer’s use of poetic techniques? In your response, make detailed reference to TWO poems set for study.
Q24. Eliot’s poetry is valued because it explores challenging ideas of uncertainty and alienation. Discuss this statement in light of your understanding of at least TWO of Eliot’s poems.
Q25. “Tension between an individual and society is what creates interest in poetry”. To what extent does this statement reflect your personal response to Hollow Men and ONE other poem.
Q26. Ultimately, in Eliot’s poetry, it is the representation of challenging ideas that captivates audiences. Explore the representation of at least ONE challenging idea, evaluating its significance to at least TWO of the poems.
Q27. Explore how time and place are used in Eliot's poetry to shape the reader’s understanding of man's isolation. In your response, make detailed referent to at least TWO of the poems set for study.
Q28. How is your personal response to the poetry of TS Eliot shaped by a perception of the individual in the poems? In your answer, refer to THREE of the poems set for study.
General Essay Questions:
Q29. In what ways has your critical study generated compelling and provocative insights into your text? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q30. How have the form and features of Eliot’s poetry informed your understanding of his work?
Q31. “The power of Eliot’s poetry lies in its ability to transcend time and context.” To what extent does your own interpretation of Eliot’s poetry support this view?
Q32. The power of Eliot’s poetry lies in its representation of the complexities of the human condition. Discuss this view in relation to your own reading of Eliot’s poetry.
Q33. Eliot's poetry was deeply concerned with the techniques and aesthetics of poetry writing. How is this evident in TWO of the poems set for study?
Q34. A key aspect of the poetry’s ongoing appeal is Eliot’s use of meaningful structure. In your view, to what extent does the structure contribute to the appeal of Eliot’s poetry? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q35. Eliot’s poetry remains important through the questions it provokes, not the answers it provides. Discuss the extent to which you agree with this statement and with close reference to at least two poems.
Q36. What do you see as the most enduring aspects of Eliot’s poetry? In your response make detailed reference to at least TWO poems.
Q37. A text has value if it creates opportunities for change, while maintaining its core values. Explore this in relation to at least TWO of Eliot’s poems.
Q38. It is how individuals react to the world around them that reveals the most interesting insights into a text. Explore this in relation to at least TWO of Eliot’s poems.
Q39. Write a critical essay that demonstrates how your response to Eliot’s poetry changed and developed during the process of your critical study.
Q40. Texts on their own are interesting but when you compare them to other texts they become illuminating and dynamic. Discuss how a cumulative study of at least THREE of Eliot’s poems have allowed for a more illuminating and dynamic insight into his work.
Q41. “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time”. How has your study of Eliot’s poetry allowed for you to develop a true understanding of the value of his work? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q42. “Each decision made by the poet in the construction of their poem will ultimately impact the meaning individuals gain from the text.” In light of this, analyse how the language and structure of Eliot’s poetry has influenced your understanding of at least TWO of his poems.
Q43. “Despite differing responses to texts over time, ultimately it is the structure and features of a text that is most significant in evaluating its success”. Explore the effectiveness of the poetic style of T. S. Eliot’s when evaluating his success as a poet. Refer to at least TWO of the prescribed poems set for study.
Q44. Explore the effectiveness of the poetic style of T. S. Eliot’s when evaluating his success as a poet. Refer to at least TWO of the prescribed poems set for study.
Q45. A key aspect of the poetry’s ongoing appeal is Eliot's rejection of structure. In your view, to what extent does the lack of structure contribute to the appeal of Eliot's poetry? Support your evaluation with detailed reference to at least TWO of the poems prescribed for study.
Q46. In your view, how have poetic techniques been used to reveal memorable ideas in Eliot’s poetry? Support your view with detailed reference to TWO poems.
Q47. Your class has been exploring the question, ‘What will continue to make Eliot’s poetry worthy of critical study?’ Your personal response has been challenged by another student. Defend your response through a critical evaluation of at least TWO of Eliot’s poems, analysing the construction, content and language of the texts.
Q48. ‘Interpretations of texts can shift and change with time and place.’
Considering your time and place, reflect on the ways in which context has shaped your critical interpretation of the prescribed text. In your response, refer to TWO poems.
Q49. Compose an argument for or against the topic: ‘That every text has its use-by date.’ Consider your prescribed text’s ideas, language and form, and its reception in different contexts. In your response, refer to at least TWO poems.
Q50. It has been suggested that a key aspect of Eliot’s enduring relevance to audiences is his poetry’s examination of human flaws. To what extent does your personal understanding concur with this view? In your response you should critically analyse and evaluate the techniques, themes and structure of at least TWO poems set for study.
Q51. “An admirable text does not define or exhaust its possibilities”. What possibilities do you see in Eliot’s poetry? Discuss your ideas with close reference to at least TWO poems.
Q52. Anyone can have a good idea. Effective communication of ideas is an art form. Offer an evaluation of the strengths of Eliot’s poetry as an effective vehicle for ideas. In your response, refer to at least TWO poems.
Q53. “Considering a text from different perspectives develops an appreciation of its textual integrity“. Do you agree? Respond to this question through detailed reference to at least TWO of Eliot’s poems.
Q54. Write a series of three or four reflections that demonstrate how your response to Eliot’s poetry has changed and developed during the process of your critical study. Base your reflections on detailed reference to at least TWO poems.
Q55. The value of great texts is that they continue to speak to us. How do such notions account for the value of Eliot’s poetry? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO of Eliot’s poems.
Q56. To what extent has your personal response to Eliot’s poetry been shaped by the enduring power of its intellectual and artistic qualities? Support your evaluation with close reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q57. Analyse the ways T.S. Eliot has prompted you to understand and respond to great and provocative ideas in his poetry. In your response make detailed reference to TWO poems.
Critical Response Questions:
Q58. How has considering other interpretations of Eliot's poetry helped you develop your own appreciation of the textual integrity of the poetry? In your response you should consider the ideas, poetic techniques and structure of at least TWO poems prescribed for study.
Q59. For almost a century, critical studies of Eliot’s poetry have challenged us with a range of perspectives from which we can read and understand the intense exploration of the humanity which lie at the core of the poems. What have you come to understand about humanity from Eliot’s poems? How has this understanding been affected by the perspective of others?
A valuable text has something to say and says it well. How valid is this claim, considering the different contexts in which a text can be received? In your answer, compare your personal evaluation of at least TWO of Eliot’s poems with one other perspective on the poetry.
Hurled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.”
Q60. In your view, how does Eliot’s portrayal of the complex nature of personal experience contribute to the enduring value of his poetry? In your response, make detailed reference to Preludes and at least ONE other poem set for study.