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, American-English poet, playwright, literary critic, and editor, was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on 1888. He lived in St. Louis during the first eighteen years of his life and attended Harvard University. In 1910, he left the United States for the Sorbonne, having earned both undergraduate and masters degrees and having contributed several poems to the Harvard Advocate. After a year in Paris, he returned to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in philosophy, but returned to Europe and settled in England in 1914. The following year, he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and began working in London, first as a teacher, and later for Lloyd's Bank. Eliot was to pursue four careers: editor, dramatist, literary critic, and philosophical poet. He was probably the wisest poet of his time in the English language. The Waste Land With the publication in 1922 of his poem The Waste Land, Eliot won an international reputation. The Waste Land expresses with great power the disenchantment, disillusionment, and disgust of the period after World War I. In a series of vignettes it portrays a sterile world of panicky fears and barren lusts, and of human beings waiting for some sign or promise of redemption. For a poem about the desert, "The Waste Land" sure has a lot of water flowing through it. Yes, the waste land is dying from lack of water, but the drowned sailor has also died because of too much water. Water becomes most important in the later stages of the poem, when Eliot focuses more and more on the barrenness of the land, where there "is no water but only rock . It's here that water becomes a symbol of the fertility that the waste land no longer has, and without this fertility, there can be no hope for anything new or beautiful to grow. The structure of The Waste Land is modernist, it consists of five sections and proceeds on a principle of “rhetorical discontinuity” that reflects the fragmented experience of the 20th-century sensibility of the great modern cities of the West. Eliot expresses the hopelessness and confusion of purpose of life in the secularized city, the decay of urbs aeterna (the “eternal city”). This is the ultimate theme of The Waste Land, concretized by the poem's constant rhetorical shifts and its contrasting styles. The poem's style is highly complex, erudite, and allusive, and the poet provided notes and references to explain the work's many quotations and allusions. This scholarly supplement distracted some readers and critics from perceiving the true originality of the poem, which lay rather in its rendering of the universal human predicament of man desiring salvation. April is the cruelest month in the Waste Land, because, in the non- Wasteland as for Goeffrey Chaucer, it is a time of fecundity and renewal. It is when the snow melts, the flowers start to grow again, and people plant their crops and look forward to a harvest. April is when the hearts of the young turn to thoughts of love. And, truth be told, the hearts of the old aren't usually very far away. April is when we dare to hope. April also has religious connotations, or an excuse to go out and buy more chocolate in the shape of eggs . But for T.S. Eliot it is "the cruelest month” because, as spring brought signs of new life and renewal, Europe was in a crumbling, dying mess in the wake of World War I. “Death by Water” The shortest section of the poem, “Death by Water” describes a man, Phlebas the Phoenician, who has died, apparently by drowning. Eliot shows the significance of water as a means of purification and re-birth. There are two associations-one from Shakespeare The Tempest and the other from the ancient Egyptian myth of the god of fertility. The death of Phlebas, the Greek sailor, is an example of people who devote themselves to worldly pursuits. Their youth and strength ultimately will be consumed by death. The poet tells the story of Phlebas, a young and handsome sailor who was drowned after leading a boring business career. He was caught in a whirlpool and passed through various stages. There is no chance of re-birth for the sailor who represents the modern man, because there is no desire to follow spiritual values. The rejection of higher values is the cause of the inevitable decay of modern civilisation. The moral is that all men are travellers subject to the lure of change, decay and death. The sailor has forgotten the cry of sea-gull, the roaring of the rough waves and his business affairs. His body rose and fell in the waves and ultimately he was sucked by the whirlpool of death.