Scarica T.S. Eliot e The Waste Land e più Temi in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! ELIOT LIFE 1888: He was born at St Louis, Missouri into an old New England family. He was educated at Harvard and did graduate work in philosophy at the Sorbonne, Harvard and Oxford. 1910: He studied in Paris at the Sorbonne. At the outbreak of World War I he settled in England, where he was for a time a schoolmaster and a bank clerk, and in 1925 he became a director for the publishers Faber & Faber, London. 1914: He met the american poet Pound with whom he would work closely on several major poems. 1915: He married the British ballet dancer Vivienne Haigh- Wood, but his unhappy marriage led him to a nervous breakdown. 1917: He established himself as an important avant- garde poet. 1922: He published The Waste Land. 1927: He became a British citizen and he converted to Anglicanism. Faith gave him the answer to his own uncertainties. The Anglican Church was important for his literary production because he changed his way of writing. 1930: For the next thirty years he was considered ‘the most dominant figure in poetry and literary criticism in the English-speaking world’. 1948: He received the Nobel Prize for literature. 1957: He married his second wife, Valerie Fletcher. 1965: He died in London. Works Before the conversion 1917 Prufrock and Other Observations. 1922 The Waste Land. It is said to be ‘the single most influential poetic work of the twentieth century’. (He wrote it while he was recovering in a sanatorium in Switzerland) 1925 The Hollow Men. (a sequel) Works After the conversion 1930 Ash-Wednesday. 1935-1942 Four Quartets. 1935 Murder in the Cathedral, a drama in verse. 1939 Family Reunion. Besides, he was an influential literary critic and wrote important essays. Eliot’s world and the 19th-century world Modern/T.S. Eliot’s world Chaotic, Futile, Pessimistic, Unstable, Loss of faith, Collapse of moral values, Confused sense of identity 19th-century world Ordered, Meaningful, Optimistic, Stable, Faith, Morality/Values, Clear sense of identity The Waste Land: content • It is an autobiography written in a moment of crisis in the poet’s life. • The main theme is the contrast between past fertility and present sterility. • It consists of five sections; it reflects the fragmented experience of the 20th-century sensibility of the great modern cities of the West and it emphasizes the lack of values in the modern world. • There are a lot of references to historical narratives (the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare). He uses a technique of fragmentation and reassembly of these historical narratives. • Quotations from literary works belonging to different traditions and cultures. • The mythical past linked to a new concept of history repetition of the same events. Thus the present and past exist simultaneously in the Waste Land (continuous shifts in time and space, reflecting free associations of the mind). The Waste Land: themes • The breakdown of a historical, social and cultural order destroyed by World War I. • He contrasts the meaningless of modern life to a mythical past. • Spring Symbols: different from Chaucer absence of rebirth. The Waste Land: style • Mixture of different poetic styles. First draft of The Waste Land, third section. • Association of ideas past and present are simultaneous. • Mythical method to give significance to present futility (old myths have lost their deep meaning). • Subjective experiences made universal. • Quotations from different languages and literary works. • Technique of implication: the active participation of the reader is required. • Use of the objective correlative. • Repetition of words, images and phrases used to increase musicality. The objective correlative: T.S. Eliot and Montale For Eliot, the ‘objective correlative’ a pattern of objects, events, actions, or a situation that can serve effectively to awaken in the reader an emotional response without being a direct statement of that subjective emotion. Text analysis - The Waste Land The burial of the dead is an extract taken from the first part of the poem The Waste Land: the focus is on the opposition between fertility and sterility, life and death. The 'Unreal city' the author is mentioning, referring to Baudelaire, is London: in fact Eliot describes a crowd which flows over London Bridge, the bridge that links the southern part of London to the City, the economical area of London. This is also the symbol materialism and consumerism. The city is made unreal by the 'brown fog of a winter dawn'. The dwellers are joined in a crowd, which means that they lost their own identity, they're subject to homologation and alienation: they fixed their eyes before his feet, just like robots. We can find other references to London: King William Street and Saint Mary Woolnoth, the church that keeps the hours with a dead sound. We know that the poet really heard the strokes of the church and the dark, gloomy sound that they produced; the church announces that it's nine o'clock, the time the clerks get to work. Eliot sees the situation as one which is not only typical of the London of 1922 but which
