Appunti di letteratura inglese: Thomas Stearns Eliot, Temi di Inglese

Scarica Appunti di letteratura inglese: Thomas Stearns Eliot e più Temi in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT (1888-1965) BIOGRAPHY Thomas Stearns Eliot is still considered to be the second greatest poet in the history of English literature, after William Shakespeare. Eliot was born in 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri, in the United States. The most important thing to know about his biography is that he studied in three extremely important universities: he indeed graduated from Harvard University but since he wasn’t satisfied with his education and he needed a closer outlook to the tradition and learn more about the classics he went study at the Sorbonne (Paris), and then at Oxford – where . In 1927 he became an English citizen; this information can seem odd if compared to other poets and writers’ biographies since most of them moved from Europe to the United States and not the other way around as Eliot, an American born, did. It is true that the United States of America had more opportunities to give but he wanted to live in Europe to get closer to what he was interested in (medieval studies, antiquities, Greek and Latin, the classics). He married twice: the first time he married to the dancer Vivienne Haigh-Wood but unfortunately it wasn’t an happy marriage, due to her mental problems which damaged both of them. As a result of his wife’s mental struggle, Eliot too started to suffer from a nervous breakdown – also related to the war that had just ended. It was during this period that he wrote the first draft of his work, The Waste Land. Another important piece of information about Eliot is that in 1914/15 he moved to England and he lived in London, where he became and editor and founded a new publishing company called Faber & Faber. He was not only a poet but also a critic and an essayist. He divorced from Vivienne Haigh-Wood in 1933 and he remarried again in 1957 to his secretary Valerie Fletcher, who was thirty years younger than he was. THE WASTE LAND Eliot felt that he had a sort of mission to pursue and it is made clear in his masterpiece and most known work, The Waste Land – which also happens to be one of the most important work of Modernism. The Waste Land was written and published during the annus mirabilis of Modernism, 1922, the same year when Joyce’s Ulysses was published. The Waste Land is a poem that completely changed the way of making poetry, since it’s a conundrum of different pictures, images, quotations; T. S. Eliot influenced many poets from that moment on and one example of it is Eugenio Montale. In 1915 he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood but their marriage was unhappy: their daily routine was filled with problems, the biggest one was that she suffered from psychic problems and Eliot did too. In 1921 he was pushed to the verge of a nervous breakdown and in order to recover he went to a sanatorium in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he wrote the first draft of The Waste Land – an idea that was already present in some of Eliot’s early works such as The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock (1915). During his two months stay at the sanatorium in Lausanne he focused and developed his many ideas into the first draft of his soon to be masterpiece, The Waste Land. Later he gave the first draft to his friend and fellow poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972), one of the few poets that moved from America to Europe, specifically he moved to Paris and then to Italy, to feel closer to the literally tradition. Moreover, he started to get involved in politics and the fascist movement: in fact he admired Benito Mussolini and he became a supporter of the fascist regime. He maintained his political ideas throughout his life and, at the end of WW2, he was arrested and charged with treason. He paid the price of his political choices; for example he was excluded from the Nobel Price for Literature although he was an extraordinary poet an Imagist artist (Imagism was a literary movement that wanted to develop an image). Pound was not only a poet, an editor and a critic but he was a dear friend and supporter of Eliot, whom he supported in order to publish his poems and works. In fact, after he recovered from his mental breakdown he went to Paris and he gave the first draft to Ezra Pound, who blue inked the manuscript (he edited the manuscript); they worked together in order to achieve the final draft. Pound wrote a 48 lines poem to celebrate the birth and the first publishing of The Waste Land in October 1922 titled Sage Homme where Pound says that Eliot is the mother of The Waste Land, whereas “Ezra performed the Caesarean Operation” to point out all the help that Pound gave to Eliot. Eliot dedicated The Waste Land to Ezra Pound as a sign of his gratitude and the dedication wrote: To Ezra Pound – Il miglior fabbro The dedication is also a quotation of Dante’s Divina Commedia, more specifically a quotation of the 26 th canto from the Purgatory: within this canto Dante meets Guido Guinizzelli (the founder of the Dolce Stil Novo literary movement) who was judged as lustful alongside of Arnaut Daniel, a French trobar clus, who is praised by Dante as indeed “the best smith” (v. 117, Purgatorio XXVI, “fu miglior fabbro del parlar materno”). • The main sources of The Waste Land The first source Eliot benefitted from is Jessie L. Weston’s book, From Ritual to Romance, a book that deals with anthropology, medieval legends, the relationship between ancient culture and the medieval age. “Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance. Indeed so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston’s book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and I recommend it (apart from the great interest of the book itself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble” The second source is James George Frazer, an important volume. “To another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough; I have used especially the two volumes Attis Adonis Osiris. Anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognise in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies.” • The vegetation gods Attis, Adonis and Osiris are three ancient divinity whose deaths and resurrections are symbolic of the yearly cycle of vegetation: they are brought back to life after being killed in a violent death. These myths of death and resurrection are deeply linked to plants, because nature, the seasons and the cycle of life keep repeating themselves on and on forever in time. ATTIS, a Phrygian god and consort of the Mother of the Gods Kybele, a goddess as well; as a punishment for his infidelity, the goddess drove him into a mad frenzy which caused him to castrate himself (in another version of the myth Attis is killed by a wild animal and later brought back to life). ADONIS, in Greek mythology Adonis was a beautiful youth beloved by Aphrodite and Persephone. Aphrodite left Adonis in the care of Persephone, who raised him and made him her lover. Aphrodite later demanded the youth for herself, but Persephone was unwilling to relinquish him. A fight between the two goddesses starts, since both of them claim the boy for themselves. Zeus settled the dispute by arranging for Adonis to spend half the year (the summer months) above the ground with Aphrodite and the other half in the underworld with Persephone. Ares – the god of war and Aphrodite’s lover – is jealous of Adonis and therefore sends (or, according to other myths, is turned into) a wild gore and kills Adonis while out on a chase. Beautiful red flowers called anemones grew and bloomed where Adonis’s blood fell on the soil. OSIRIS, the Egyptian god of the earth and vegetation; according to the myth Osiris, who was married to his sister Isis, was to become the sole ruler of Egypt. He was praised and beloved by the people and because of that Seth, his evil and jealous brother, killed him and tore the body into fourteen pieces and Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. […] The Waste Land starts with a quotation of a very famous passage in English literature: the General Prologue from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales – a collection of stories told by a group of pilgrims that set out on a pilgrimage in April. Nevertheless, Chaucer chose April as the month of regeneration and rebirth so that after the winter people feel alive again so they set out on a journey to purify their souls. On the contrary, according to Eliot and therefore in the modern time, April is the cruelest month. Winter was perceived during medieval times and by ancient cultures as the season of death and spring was the season of life, or even better of resurrection (cfr. Vegetation gods), generating a clear distinction in a negative/positive way between the two seasons. In this poem winter isn’t described as something entirely negative: winter keeps everything under forgetful snow, describing a scene of suspension of life (nothing is actually happening, life isn’t dying but it’s just at a pause). Joyce wrote about the snow in the short story The Dead (the last story in the collection The Dubliners): even in Joyce’s story snow is covering everything, wrapping Gabriel’s life (life goes on, whether we are alive or dead). The snow, according to Eliot, is forgetful meaning that we can hide under it and just pause; during the spring, nevertheless, we can’t hide anything and life is coming back: flowers are blooming, new life is born and we can’t escape from this reality. When life comes back to the sterile land a terrible epiphany occurs on the cruel reality of the world. Life, but what life can one live in the wasteland? Eliot wants to start his poem, an obscure poem, with the iambic pentameter – the perfect and traditional verse used in all English literature. He wants to give to his readers a sense of sterility: the reader is accustomed to the verse but its contents are extremely different to the tradition. In this passage what Eliot wants to convey is that coming back to life is not beautiful, that the old idea of regeneration during the spring is no longer true: this awareness is eerie and scary. “Mixing memory and desire” is a beautiful verse about life: memory represents the past and desire (meaning one’s projects and aspirations in life) represents future. Follows another quotation of Chaucer (“spring rain”), although it is turned upside down by Eliot – who describes a completely different image compared to the pilgrimage described in Chaucer’s job. April is the cruelest month because it brings awareness that we live in the waste land that is modern society, that is living in a time of decay and crisis. II. The Burial of the Dead (II) The following extract is the end of the first section of The Waste Land, where Eliot mixes quotations and reality, past and present. […] Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: ‘Stetson! ‘You who where with me in the ships at Mylae! ‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden, ‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? ‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed? ‘O keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men, ‘Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again! ‘You! hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable, - mon frère!’ The first line (“Unreal City”) is a quotation from Charles Baudelaire, a symbolist French poet. One of his most important work, The Albatross, a poem about the condition of the poet in modern society. Eliot begins a new fragment with a quotation, it goes on quoting Dickens’ “Big House” – the fog is everywhere, covering the river, the city, and it’s even covering the souls of Dickens’ characters. “I had not thought death had undone so many” isn’t an original sentence but it’s taken from Dante (Inferno, canto III, vv. 56-57: “ch’i’ non avrei creduto che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta”), more precisely in the anti- inferno where souls are awaiting to be judged. Eliot is describing how the people in London (using actual references about the city) are walking over London Bridge on a morning while going to work, the crowd is moving and everyone is lost in their own thoughts – a sort of alienation that isn’t neither happy or sad, there isn’t any emotion. Each individual of the crowd is isolated in its own universe. “With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine” is a reference to the working timetable in the City, and London in general, that is generally described with the common phrase “from nine to five”. The sound that announces the start of the working day is a quotation of John Donne’s “For whom the bell tolls” (“For whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee”). Eliot is describing the dark and dull reality of an ordinary day, the routine of the everyday life where everyone is lost, alone in the middle of the crowd, isolated from the rest of the world – from the human being, similar to themselves, next to them. “There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: ‘Stetson!” Stetson, according to some critics, is the brand of a hat maker; not everyone agrees, probably this Stetson is Ezra Pound, because he used to wear a Stetson hat, a very popular brand at the time. “You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!” Mylae is a battle that took part during Ancient Greece, which may seem odd if compared with the notion that Stetson is somebody from modern times. “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed? Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men, Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again! You! Hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable, – mon frère!” This passage is about one of the main themes and sources quoted by Eliot himself: the corpse the author is talking about is the corpse of the Vegetation Gods (it’s not specified which one). A handsome god dies and is resurrection is always linked to plants or flowers, because it’ll bring life and fertility back to the land – that is now sterile and dead. Nature and the world are now sterile (sterility is the key word in most passages of The Waste Land) because the vegetation gods are still dead: this was a belief of ancient people, who tried to justify the cycle of the seasons through mythology. The dog that is mentioned is Cerberus, the three-headed dog and one of the guardians of Hell. This passage is deeply influenced by Greek mythology. The end of the passage is once again a quotation form Baudelaire (this time in its original language): “You! Hypocrite reader! – my kin, – my brother!” III. The Fire Sermon The Fire Sermon is the third section of The Waste Land; the first fragment of The Fire Sermon repeats the phrase “Unreal City” from The Burial of the Dead – the chapter about life and death, regeneration and rebirth. The Fire Sermon is the chapter about love, and the kind of love possible in the waste land. Unreal City Under the brown fog of a winter noon Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants C.i.f. London: documents at sight, Asked me in demotic French To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel Followed by a weekend at the Metropole. The second line is also very similar to The Burial of the Dead, except for the last word that from “winter dawn” has become “winter noon” – that is because it’s still winter (the season when the Vegetation Gods are still dead) and humans are still in a state of alienation and suspension. Spring has not arrived yet but time is passing. Mr. Eugenides is a man whose name means “well born” or “rich” in the Greek language; he asks the narrator out for lunch and a date. C.i.f. stands for the insurance policy, a document needed to enter in a place like a hotel (it’s something related to trade and the middle-class burocracy). Cannon Street Hotel and the Metropole are two places that at the time were well-known to be frequented by homosexuals in their encounters – which at the time was still a felon. Eliot is not condemning homosexuals but one thing is clear and interests the author: homosexual love is sterile, new life cannot be generated. At the violet hour, when the eyes and back Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits Like a taxi throbbing waiting, I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea, The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights Her stove, and lays out food in tins. Out of the window perilously spread Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays, On the divan are piled (at night her bed) Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays. I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest— I too awaited the expected guest. He, the young man carbuncular, arrives, A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare, One of the low on whom assurance sits As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire. The time is now propitious, as he guesses, The meal is ended, she is bored and tired, Endeavours to engage her in caresses Which still are unreproved, if undesired. Flushed and decided, he assaults at once; Exploring hands encounter no defence; His vanity requires no response, And makes a welcome of indifference. Lastly, The Waste Land ends with the repetition of the word shantih, which means peace in Hindu. Repeating something three times makes something holy (3 is the Holy number). This is an invocation to eternal peace that cannot be described with words but is an emotional condition that allows one to life in peace with the ugliness of life and in peace with oneself. Despite being described as a pessimistic era, the main two works of Modernism – Ulysses and The Waste Land – both end with a positive message about the future, opening to a new world and to a society that is no longer chaotic. Humanity must rely on culture to survive, to face whatever ugliness, chaos and disorder may come. THE HOLLOW MEN The Hollow Men is a poem written by Eliot in 1925, three years after The Waste Land. The epigraphy of the poem is a quotation from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Cornad. Mistah Kurtz—he dead. A penny for the Old Guy Mister Kurtz is an extraordinary man such as in the first part of the book many characters describe him as a great scholar and trader. He established an ivory trade in Africa, where he founded a ?? where he’s surrounded by indigenes that he treats like savages but nevertheless they worship him like a god. Kurtz is gravely ill and is going to die, so he realizes that he is a hollow man, he is left with nothing inside, he has lost everything and he has a heart of darkness. The second sentence, “A penny for the Old Guy”, is not a quotation from any poetry or prose but it’s taken from English culture: the Old Guy is Guy Fawkes, who led the gunpowder plot in 1609, when a group of Catholic terrorists tried to blow up the House of Parliament in order to kill King James I. Eliot quotes this sentence that kids say before the 5th of November when they displayed their Guy Fawkes puppet filled with straw. According to Eliot the inhabitants of the wasteland are hollow but stuffed men which might seem a paradox, they men full of nothing, sort of scarecrows. The main idea behind The Hollow Men is the same idea shown in The Dubliners: the characters are paralyzed, and they bring that paralysis with them wherever they go. Eliot goes on quoting Dante once again, more specifically he quotes Inferno’s third canto: the ignavi ?? are the hollow men. LATE WORKS Eliot was searching for answers to plenty of questions he had about life and he was trying to achieve peace in his own life. He found it in religion, especially in a precise identity. He received the British citizenship in 1927 and in the same year he became a member of the Church of England. This information is extremely important because he changed completely: in fact, when he wrote The Waste Land he had some ideas that he maintained when he wrote The Hollow Men but his following works changed deeply and were different. All the second part of Eliot’s life is characterized by a new attitude towards religion: Eliot found his own personal peace after 1927 and is deeply affected by it. • Four quartets (1943) Four quartets is a collection of poems that is Eliot’s second most important work. In this set of four poems Eliot tried to give an answer of tranquility to all the questions he had on life and to the chaos of modern society he was living in, more specifically to the question “where can one find peace in the chaotic world of the wasteland?” According to Eliot one can find peace in his own rose garden; Eliot takes inspiration from the 16 th century French poet Pierre de Ronsard, a member of the literary movement called La Pléiade, along other poets. Among de Ronsard’s believes was the idea that one had to pick the rose when it’s at its splendor, a metaphor to suggest to his beloved to enjoy life because it fades quickly; this theme – a very common theme between poets – can be seen in de Ronsard’s poem “Ode à Cassandre” dedicated to his muse, Cassandra. • Murder in the Cathedral (1935) Eliot was a playwright and wrote a verse drama titled Murder in the Cathedral, a play that portrays the assassination of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. What is interesting is that Eliot mixes medieval drama – such as morality plays, a genre of strong tradition within English dram – with modern drama. In morality plays the characters didn’t have proper names but were just symbols for something good or bad; the most famous example of morality play is the 15th century play Everyman, the story of a man – named indeed Everyman – who is going to die and will be judged by God. His only councilor and guide through his life is a character called Good Deeds, who shows to Everyman what is good and what is evil in order to behave in a way that will lead his soul to heaven. Murder in the Cathedral is sort of a morality play: the temptations Becket faces (pride, love etc.) are clear to the readers. The readers then witness the moment of Becket’s murder inside the cathedral by the hand of four knights sent by king Henry II. The play doesn’t end with the death of the main character but it goes on with a speech held by the four knights who try to justify their actions in front of the audience. THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE (1948) In 1948 Eliot is awarded with the Nobel Prize for Literature. The following text is an extract from his acceptance speech that contains the very same ideas and believes in the closing passage of The Waste Land. Poetry is usually considered the most local of all the arts. Painting, sculpture, architecture, music, can be enjoyed by all who see or hear. But language, especially the language of poetry, is a different matter. Poetry, it might seem, separates people instead of uniting them. But on the other hand we must remember, that while language constitutes a barrier, poetry itself gives us a reason for trying to overcome the barrier. To enjoy poetry belonging to another language is to enjoy an understanding of the people to whom that language belongs, an understanding we can get in no other way. We may think also of the history of poetry in Europe, and of the great influence that the poetry of one language can exert on another; we must remember the immense debt of every considerable poet to poets of other languages than his own; we may reflect that the poetry of every country and every language would decline and perish, were it not nourished by poetry in foreign tongues. When a poet speaks to his own people, the voices of all the poets of other languages who have influenced him are speaking also. And at the same time he himself is speaking to younger poets of other languages, and these poets will convey something of his vision of life and something of the spirit of his people, to their own. Partly through his influence on other poets, partly through translation, which must be also a kind of recreation of his poems by other poets, partly through readers of his language who are not themselves poets, the poet can contribute toward understanding between peoples. In the work of every poet there will certainly be much that can only appeal to those who inhabit the same region, or speak the same language, as the poet. But nevertheless there is a meaning to the phrase «the poetry of Europe», and even to the word «poetry» the world over. I think that in poetry people of different countries and different languages - though it be apparently only through a small minority in any one country - acquire an understanding of each other which, however partial, is still essential. And I take the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature, when it is given to a poet, to be primarily an assertion of the supra-national value of poetry. To make that affirmation, it is necessary from time to time to designate a poet: and I stand before you, not on my own merits, but as a symbol, for a time, of the significance of poetry.