Letteratura inglese Elliot, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Letteratura inglese Elliot e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! ELLIOT (1888-1965) Life Born in Missouri, studied at Harvard, Srbonne and Oxford - cosmopolitan education, he had a deep preparation in all fields. Married with a british lady, he became an english citizen - anyway he was not happy with his marriage, poetry was his only escape, with which he could transcend his personal feeling in order to represent the crisis of the western culture. With this background, he wrote The waste Land, his major work, published in 1922. As an answer to his uncertainties, he converted to Anglicanism. He was an inflential literary critic, mainly concentrating on the importance of the artist to be impersonal, turning the subjective point of view of the character into a universal experience with which anyone could relate. He received a nobel prize in 1948. Works We distinguish his works between before and after his convertion. - Works before: Preufrock and other observations, The Waste Land, The Hollow Man - Works after: Ash-Wednesday, Four quartets, Murder in the cathedral The Waste Land The event that influences his life and his production is the first world war. After the brutality of the war, every aspect of life is futile. He had deep pessimism, loss of faith, no stability, loss of moral values. Structure 434 lines divided in 5 sections: - l:The Burial of the Dead - opposition between sterility and fertility - II: A Gameof Chess - juxtaposistion present squalor to the splendid past - Ill: The Fire Sermon - loveless and squallid amplex represents the present alienation - IV: Death by Water - idea of a spiritual shipwreck - V: What the Thunder Said - evokes religions, a possible solution is simpathy between humans but the general desolation doesn't change Fragmentation After the crisis that war brings, fragmentation dominates both life and poetry. The poet uses fragmented images of historical narratives to mirror his society’s reliance on old traditions. The fragmantation is the result of a mix of different styles. There is a main theme: the contrast between the fertility of a mythical past and the spiritual sterility of the present world, peopled by alienated characters. The war destroyed the historical, cultural and social order - war delets men and everything they produced in the past (such as music, licterature ecc.), now he cannot produce art anymore. Men look at the past and he feeld nostalgic about it. In the first part of the poem we see a comparison with Chausser's spring: - Chausser's spring: sweetest season, the rebirth of the soul - Eliot’s spring: cruelest season, it bring back to life something that was dead (so in it's natural dimension) for a life full of sorrows and pain - bringing back something futile is seen as something unnecessary and cruel act Coexistence between past and present The mythical past appears with quotation and allusions to different traditions and culture. He sees history as a repetition of the same events all over again, so the past is a concrete premise for the present. The poetic culture is a living unit of all the poems written in different historical periods In The Waste Land past and present coestist, the free associations of ideas and thoughts that happen in the mind are the causes of the shifts in time and space that can be often found in the poem. Myth The myth was the lecture of the spiritual attitudes of the past, but in the present, though it still exists, it lost all of his values and deep meaning. Through the mythical allusions we see the constrast between past and present. The myth gives orderto the futility of the modern world. Style We have a mix of different styles, with fragmentation - the reader doesn't have to concentrate on one fragment, but on the whole work. The reading of the poem needs the active participation of the reader, who experience the same world as the writer - it's difficult to understand because of all the different techniques: - Quotations: he uses them a lot, and usually in their original language - Objective correlative: the use of metaphores or similes for communicating phylosophical reflections or feelings - it's used with a monologue or a description, to provide a vision or a feeling of the lyrical ‘l’ - Juxtaposition: squalid elements are juxtaposed with poetic ones, and trivial with sublime - Repetition of words: used to give musicality to the poem THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD (final part of the Waste Land) London = unreal city He sees men walking but they seem like the souls in Dante's Inferno, walking looking down. He talks about past, the punic war, because men can only talk about what it's already done - they can do nothing in the present. History repeats itself, the contemporany war is just like allthe wars before, and the problems that it causes are always the same. THE FIRE'S SERMONES It's an amplex between two people that means nothing, there is no emotion. It's the description of an action but with all the unrelated thoughts that the characters are having during it. The modern author writes all the things that passes through the mind of the characters - he doesn't concentrate on what the character is saying but on his random thoughts, then he concentrate on another character and so on. It's a set of perceptions written down. It's an interior monologue, that can be direct or indirect.