Eliott and The Waste Land, Schemi e mappe concettuali di Inglese

Scarica Eliott and The Waste Land e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT Thomas Stearns Elliot wrote during the first half of the twentieth century, and he was a poet, a critical, an essayist and a playwriter. He was American, but soon he started to develop a European cultural background, that was emphasized by both his studies and his voyages all over Europe. Actually, in 1910 he studied in Paris, at the Sorbonne, where he got in touch with Bergson’s works (same influence of Svevo). Then, during the first world war, he decided to stay in London; these are the years when he married Vivienne High-wood, an English dancer, who gave Eliot a lot of problems, because of her weak physical and mental health, that will bring Eliot, 30 years later, to leave Vivienne in a mental hospital, where she would die after some times (=Pirandello). During his years in London he worked as the director for Faber & Faber, through which he came in contact and encouraged some writers as Ezra Pound, who helped Eliot to finish his best work: “the waste land”. Some years later, Eliot joined to Anglicanism and his works changed of themes, with the introduction of purification and joy , and started to pay more attention on ethical and philosophical problems of the modern society. In 1948 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and he died in London in 1965. Eliot way of writing had different influences: metaphysical poets and John Donn ( we can notice that by the extra-meaning words that we found in his works, as in Ulysses by Joice), Shakespear, symbolism ( with which he came in contact thanks to his studies in Paris) and Dante. Indeed he considered Dante the poet who best described the situation of human being. He was so devoted, that, after finishing “the waste land”, Eliot dedicated it to Ezra Pound, with the sentence “il miglior fabbro”, pronounced in the Purgatorio of Dante, in order to thanks Pound for his contribute in the poem’s writing. ESSAIES He wrote 2 of them on literature, that we have to know in order to understand some features of “the waste land” - “Tradition and the individual talent”, where he explains his ideas on history and tradition, Eliot thought that history was a sort of circle, where everything is repeated and repeated in eternity (ex. wars). Concerning tradition, Eliot says that every book represents a part of history and thought, that all the writers, and people in general, have on the shoulders. He compares it to a sort of genealogical tree where every “new birth” is supported by the others, by the past and tradition. No publication is isolated, past supports the present inevitably (many references to the past in his works) - “Hamlet and his problems” where he explains the way of involving the reader in his narration. He find an “objective correlative”, that is a combination of situation, words, objects that necessarily bring the reader to feel specific emotions, that the writer want them to feel. THE WASTE LAND The waste land is the best work of Eliot, and is considered to be the central work of Modernism. It is a long poem, published in 1922 by and divided into 5 sections, with the addiction of notes of the poet. The five sections are: - “The burial of the dead” - “A game of chess” - “The fire sermon” - “Death by water” - “What the thunder said” This long poem is a collection of fragments that give life to a description of modern world. There are references to London, destroyed by war and industrialization ( =Dickens, “Coketown” ) and references to death, that represents the meaningless life of people in his society ( = Dubliners). The aim of this work is to present the chaos and devastation of his world, that can be compared with the very fragmentation of the poem: the poem is divided in fragments, as the world is destroyed by wars and modernity ( ≠ from “ il manifesto del futurismo” by Marinetti, 1915). But the fragmentation gives not the meaning: the meaning has to be searched in the whole poem, in the connection between one fragment and the other (= Hegel, “il vero è l’intero”). We have to point out that Eliot wrote this long poem when he was in Lousanne, sustaining his wife during the period of treatment for her mental health, then Eliot was in a particular bad moment of his life. This pessimistic view of the existence ( = Schopenhauer, Leopardi/ Joyce, Pirandello, Thomas Mann) is emphasized by the contrast with the past and the myth. As Joyce did in Ulysses, also Eliot used the Mythical method, whose aim is to give order to a messy present world, trough myths. Eliot wanted to contrast the meaningless life with the allusion of the Arthurian legend of Holy Grail, a metaphor for man’s searching a spiritual salvation in that world. Indeed the main narrator of the poem is Tiresias, a Theban prophet from a work of the Greek Sophocles, who was blind and experienced to be both genres, man and woman, fact that made him suffer. Tiresias is a symbol of many concepts: he predicted the destruction of Thebes, so it is a symbol of pessimism, and also the destruction of Thebes could represent the decadence of London. Another reference is to the blindness of the prophet, that represent the connection between past and present. The last reference is the lack of fertility of Tiresias, that represents the spiritual sickness of the present life. Another part that regards myth is the epigraph. The first who used epigraph was Joseph Conrad with “the horror”, and then was followed by Eliot. He put at the beginning of the work, an epigraph resumed from the Satyricon by Petronio: “For I saw with my own eyes the sybil of Cumae hanging in a cage and the boys were talking to her:” What do you want Sybil?” She answered: “I want to die”” The sybil of Cumae asked Apollo immortality, without asking eternal youth, then the sybil was condemned to live old forever. This is functional to the poem, because it represent the theme of degrade, the absent of future, and the death before the real death, that represent the modern society. We can notice features of “the waste land”, with the analysis of 2 extract: “the burial of the death” and “the fire sermon”. Especially in the first one, we find the union of different languages (English and French), and quotation by Baudelaire and Dante. There are many contrast in order to represent the decadence of man: April as the worst month, the negative one, when, instead, it had always been the most beautiful month (according to what Chaucer wrote), because it represented