Thomas Stearns Eliot, Dispense di Inglese

Scarica Thomas Stearns Eliot e più Dispense in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT  Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in 1888, in Missouri.  He can be considered at the same time an American and English writer.  At an early age he developed a passion for literature and began to write poems and short stories. He studied at Harvard University and then moved to France where he studied at the Sorbonne, in Paris, where he attended Henry Bergson’s lessons.  His extensive reading of John Donne, Dante and French Symbolists contributed to the formation of his style.  Soon after the end of World War I, he started a life-long friendship with the American poet Ezra Pound. He also contributed to the final shape and success of the “Waste Land”.  He got married to Vivienne Haigh-Wood and went to Europe. He worked in a bank in London, but at the same time he also started writing poems.  The first collection of poems is “Prufrock and Other Observations” (1917), that was really successful. He reached the international success in 1922, with the publication of “The Waste Land”.  He was also active as a critical essayst and gave contribution to the theory of literature (“The Criterion”).  There were also other intellectuals that wanted to help him, even if he always refused every help. He worked in the bank until he found a shop in a publishing company and he could better combine the activity as a writer and the job that allowed him to survive. In fact, in 1925, he left his post at the bank to join the publishing house “Faber & Faber” as an editor.  Another very important event of his life was when he decided to become Anglican and to take British citizenship. This is the reason why he is considered an European writer. The conversion is important because Elliot’s works before the conversion are characterized by crysis, loss, idea of contemporary world (typical of the 20th century). Instead, after the conversion, we see that something changes (he shows more hope) even if the features are more or less the same. However, the most original poem are the ones of the first period. “Murder in the cathedral” is an example of the second stage, but also a very interesting play.  Eliot started a new career as a dramatist.  In 1948 he received the Nobel Prize for his intellectual integrity, the originality of his poetic form and the mastery of his verse.  At the age of 68 he married Esmè Valerie Fletcher, his former secretary at Faber & Faber. After Eliot’s death in 1965, she contributed to preserving his legacy. Eliot’s poetry and his innovative ideas about literature represent a revolution in the literary panorama of the 20th century and have had a long-lasting influence on European and America culture. He is considered a leader of the Modernist movement. THEMES AND STYLE  The sterility of the modern world: in his early poems, Eliot recorder the disorder, futility and meaninglessness of his contemporary world. He expressed disgust and disillusionment at humankind devoid of values and alienated, suffering and waiting torpidly for some sign of redemption. The city where most of his poems are set, London, dark and foggy, testifies to the emptiness of his inhabitants. They are emotionally, intellectually and spiritually inert, isolated and unable to communicate, trapped in their monotonous, routine-like existence full of pain and uncertainties.  Towards salvation: after his conversion to Anglicanism, Eliot’s vision of reality took on less bitter tones and the subject matter of his writings became more focused on spiritual concerns and Christian beliefs. “Ash Wednesday”, considered his firs long conversion poem, deals with the difficulty of achieving faith, but expresses hope for human salvation too. Eliot’s dramatic production also has a redemptive ending. “Murder in the Cathedral”, his most famous play, is an example of his religious sensibility.  Time and tradition: Eliot, like Joyce, is also one that experiments a lot with the language: use of myth, use of words, use of traditional and innovative meters, use of different languages. He shows interest in the use of time, typical of the 20 th century, not considered as the clock time (linear time) but as a time that has multiple dimensions and that connects present, past and future. His last poetical effort, “The Four Quartets”, revolves around the idea of time considered in its multiple dimensions as clock-time (which measures the sequence of past, present and future) or subjective time (which mixes up past memories, present events, future desires), as an historical time or eternity. Time is viewed in relation to arts and their nature; it is explored in connection with the fundamental and archetypal human experiences, such ss birth, procreation, death, salvation and damnation. This is also connected to the use of mythical method that, like Joyce, he uses in his works. This means that in his works we usually find references to other works, of other periods and cultures. This provides the framework of his works to contrast this sense of crysis and this idea of something that is missing in the contemporary world, compared to different periods of the past. This is also due to a particular idea he had of traditions. In one of his works “Tradition and individual talent”, he talks about the role that the new work of art has in the new panorama. When a new work of art is created, this has any influence from the past. There is always a sort of exchange in his works that can be interpreted in a European contest, but also in different contests. This creates a sort of connection between present, past and future because if something hadn’t been created, literature would be different. Consistent with his theory, Eliot brought together past and present, making wide use of quotations and drawing materials from any past period in any language. Thus the poet transcended his personal sphere to merge with the tradition of European literature.  Broken images: He uses also a lot of references that make his works really complex. There is not a beginning and an end, there is no plot, but there are a series of voices and people that talk. We don’t have a story but a lot of flashing images. In fact, Eliot’s poems are mosaics of apparently disconnected, often juxtaposed, fragments, “a heap of broken images” as he described contemporary society. His fragments and images are taken from different domains: scenes of everyday life, literary quotations, mythological allusions, references to the holy scriptures of different religions, including the Sanskrit mantra from “Upanishad” that concludes “The Waste Land”. “WHAT THE THUNDER SAID” – THE WASTE LAND Elliot also uses different themes. He himself explains that “three themes are employed: the journey to Emmaus (the place where the apostoles headed after Jesus’s death), the approach to the Chapel Perilous (in the legend of the Holy Grail it is the chapel Parsifal had to find to save his king and his land) and the present decay of Eastern Europe. What the Thunder said opens with a series of images that recall the Passion of Christ, but references to the Gospels are woven together with allusions to other ancient myths, first of all that of the Quest for the Holy Grail. 1st: The idea, as the introduction says, is to describe the moment after Christ’s death, the reaction after his death. There are also elements that give the idea of aridness, desert, in which we can see the use of the objective correlative: using images that should refer to a feeling or a situation. 2nd: Very evident the idea of these images connected to sterility and the use of repetitions. The idea is to stress the idea that we only find rocks (something arid), and not water. There is the idea of going up the mountains, that maybe symbolically means looking for Heave, hoping to find water, but there is no water. The idea is the hope that however is always disappointed: he tries to think if there were water, what would happen. What would be different, but there is no water. The condition of mankind is so difficult that he cannot even think about his situation. There are a lot of words repeated (rocks, sand, mountain). There is not even silence, because the thunder that should announce rain (but rain doesn’t come) is only something that breaks the silence but without any meaning. So, there is not even solitude, that during the romantic period was associated to introspection and meditation. The noise of the thunder is not considered to be positive, because it announces something that doesn’t come. This passage is similar to Beckett because there are repetitions, the sort of circular structure (starts and ends with “there is no water”). 3rd: he starts with “sound high in the air” that could be a reference to the thunder, but he associates this sound so something maternal because nature is seen as fertility and life. Then there is the image of a group of hooded people (idea of pilgrims or soldiers). The image of the city over the mountains is the hope to find people and a connection to them. You have to consider that men of the 20th century feel alone in this condition, because, even if everyone is in the same situation, the fact that there is no communication, makes everyone a single individual. This is also what Beckett will do in “waiting for Godot” in which there are two characters that talk to each other but without a communication. Also in the other passage we see the group of people that everyday went to work in the city. Also Dickens says “they go out at the same hour, they go back at the same hour” but everyone fixed his eyes without looking at the other people, as if everyone was stuck in this condition. He inserts the names of different cities that represent different aspects of men’s life: Jerusalem (Christian religion), Athens (classical culture), Alexandria library, culture), Vienna (capital of empire), London (modern city), as if the life and civilization of men was characterized by a series of towns that marked the progress for cultural and religion reasons, but then gradually decayed. “APRIL IS THE CRUELLEST MONTH” – THE WASTE LAND It is the first part of the “Waste Land”, taken from “The Burial of the Dead”, which centres on the basic opposition between sterility and fertility, life and death. It is the beginning of the poem, that doesn’t have a plot but is a series of different images, so it shows the fragmentation, typical of the 20th century. There are different characters that talk and different ages. The main idea, that is what Eliot wants to express in his poems as the title “The Waste Land” suggests, is the idea of sterility of the modern world, especially after the Firs World War, but also due to the changes of the beginning of the century. 1 st paragraph : He talks about “April”, that is generally the associated spring, the period in which nature blooms, in which we see a rebirth of life. In general, it is a positive idea, associated to life. Instead, he says that “it is the cruellest month” because it is the month in which he remembers more than in other months the condition of modern men. The land is dead, the roots are sterile, it remembers the human condition. In Eliot, differently from Beckett, there is memory of the past, so the condition of the modern men appears even worse, compared to their cheerful past. There is also a sort of desire of change towards the future, but we don’t know if it will be possible. There is a combination of words referring to life (“spring rain”, “breathing”) and words referring to sterility (“dead land”, “dull roots”). It means that in the 20th century there is only death. The beginning of this poem is (according to Barbara) similar to the “Canterbury Tails”, in which, in the prologue, we see the element of April as the month with flowers, rain (symbol of life). However, here April is mentioned but in a different way. He opposes April with winter, the idea of warm and of snow (recalls Joyce). “dried tubers” always reminds the idea of sterility and death, similar to the images Montale uses. From line 9, we see a sort of narrative part because there are some characters, and it could be interesting to imagine who they could be. It is talking about people that in summer are in Germany (“Starnbergersee”, “Hofgarten”). In fact, there is also a sentence in German. This is the example of the fact that Eliot, like Joyce, often uses quotations but also whole sentences in another languages. He mixes details, and historical events. There is a sort of flash of a scene in which we see people in summer in Germany. From “arch- duke” we can understand they are noble people. They are talking in German, saying they are not Russian: after the Russian revolution, aristocratical people escaped from Russia and headed to Europe. It is someone that is a refugee in another country. “Marie” could be a cousin of the king Ludwig II of Baviera, that went crazy and killed himself. Eliot refers to aristocratic people that had to leave the country because of the events connected to the beginning of the 20th century (Russian revolution or WWW1). “in the mountains, there you feel free” remind of Leopold Bloom tells Molly “you are a flower of the mountain”: idea of woman associated to nature. At the end of the first paragraph there is also the end of the first flash. 2 nd paragraph : expresses the idea of sterility and desert. There is always a combination of the idea of life and the idea of death (“branches grow out of this stony rubbish?”). First of all, he says that each one wonders about the meaning of the form the life of the 20 th century has adopted, then he answers saying “son of man” (that remind the religious/biblical language) and saying that what he is asking cannot be answered because he knows only a “heap of broken images”. The series of broken images is the great existence of the past (Hegel tries to give shape of the whole reality), while in the 20th century this is no more possible because what you see is only small pieces of reality, so you cannot give a answer that explains everything. The idea of heat that is not warm or life, but the idea of desert, is very similar to Montale. The only hope is the little shadow under the rock. In brackets, we see an invitation to join someone under the rock, in the shadow, as if it could be shelter to something else. If you can fear under this rock, you can see something different from you shadow. In fact, if you see only your shadow it means you are alone, it symbolizes the loneliness of the men of the 20 th century. According to the moments of the day, the shadow can be behind or in front of you: shadow behind means past, shadow in front of means future, so hope for something that will come. Present instead is just “fear in a handful of dust”. 3 rd paragraph : “unreal city” is a quotation from Baudelaire. He is talking about the people of London, modern life is also the monotonous life of people that go to the office everyday. It can be a modern version of what Dickens said in “Coketown”: they go out under the fog and they work from 9 to 5. “I had not thought death had undone so many” is a quotation from Dante (Inferno 3 “Io non avrei creduto che morte tanti li avesse disfatti”). So he translates this sentence from Dante and associates present and past through the mythical method. It seems like people are forced to go to work, as people in Hell are forced to work. “And each men fixed his eyes before his feet” is also another quotation from Dante (Inferno 4 “sospiri colpi e rari ne esalavano”). This monotonous life is similar to what Dickens said but with a wider meaning, life in general: people are not even looking around them, where they are going or what they are doing (“fixed eyes”). There are references to real places of London (“King William Street” “Siant Mary Woolnoth”). In Virginia Woolf there was the striking of the clock, while here the “stroke of nine” represents the beginning of a meaningless and senseless day. Another association of past and present can be seen at the end, when he imagines stopping someone that is going to work and saying to him that they were together in an ancient battle of the past between Romans and Carthaginians (another example of the mythical method). Stetson could be Ezra Pound, the poet that gave a lot of advices to Eliot and the final shape to “The Waste Land”. He calls him Stetson because it was the type of the hat Ezra Pound wore. “Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?” is a reference to Egyptian mythology because the body of the god called Osiris, after his murder, was cut in different cities and buried in different parts of the country. His wife Isis transformed these places in holy places where wheats could grow. From that we have life, it is an image of death and rebirth. “Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s a friend to men” is another quotation to a writer of the past of the 17th century called John Webster who wrote “The white devil”. In the end, “you! Hypocrite lecteur!” is a quotation from Baudelaire, he involves the reader, everyone shares the same destiny.