Scarica Thomas Stearn Eliot e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Thomas Stearn Eliot. Thomas Stearn Eliot was born in Missouri in 1888. He studied at Hardvard, The Sorbonne in Paris and Oxford. When the First World War break out he went to London were he started to work as a clerck and after as a director for Faber & Faber. His first important work was the collection of poems: Prufrock and Other Observations. Unhappily married, he suffered from a nervous breakdown. He wrote his masterpiece “ The Waste Land” while recovering in a sanatorium in Lausanne. Poetry was his only refuge, where he transcended his personal situation. The Waste Land was published in 1922 after a revision by Ezra Pound. Eliot later dedicated to Pound “il miglior fabbro”. In 1925 he published The Hollow Men a poem read as a sequel to The Waste Land. In 1927 he became a British citizen and in the same year he joined the hurch of England, finding the answer to his own uncertaunties. Eliot was also an influential literary critic. Most of his critics are collected in books, The Sacred Wood and Selected Essays where he spoke about specifics problems of style and technique. He shared with James Joyce the view about the importance for the artist ro be impersonal. Eliot declared: The poet must not express his personality but he must be a medium. The characters of Eliot’s first work provide us a universal experiemce in which anyone identify. In 1848 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in London in 1965. Eliot - The waste Land The waste land consists of 434 lines divided into five sections: 1=The Burial of the Dead which centres on the opposition of life and death; 2= A game of Chess who rapresent the opposition between squalor and splendour; 3= The Fire Sermon where the most important theme is the present alienation; 4=Daeth by water which reinforces the idea of a spiritual shipwreck; 5=what the Thunder Said which evokes religions from east and west. Fragmentation= the poet uses fragmented images for the Bible,Shakespeare and Dante to mirror the old tradition of the society. All the fragmentary parts are connected by one main theme so the contrast between the fertility and sterility of the present world. Allusion and a new concept of history= Eliot had a concept of tradition and history which he saw as the ripetition of the same events of classicism. The present and the past exist simultaneously in The Waste Land Mythical method= In the modern society however, old myths are present. Eliot innovative style= The style of The Waste Land is fragmentary because of the mixture pf different poetic styles like quatrains and free verse. The meaning of cubist images is not in the single fragment but in the whole. Metaphors and symbols were replaced by eliot who adopted the technique of the objective correlative. From the French Symbolist poet, Jules Laforgue,Eliot derived the technique of juxtaposition (the ripetitions of word)
