THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) ● Poet, playwright and critic, Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on 26th September 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri. ● He studied at Harvard University, where he began to write his first poetry. ● In 1910 he moved to Paris, where he studied at the Sorbonne, before returning to Harvard where he achieved a doctorate. ● He moved to England in 1914, got married and began to work first as a teacher and then at Lloyd's Bank. ● He met the famous American poet and critic Ezra Pound (1885-1972) in London and with his help began to publish his work. ● In 1925 he left his job at the bank for a position with Faber and Faber, a respected London publishing house which he later directed. ● In 1927 Eliot became an Anglican and a British citizen. ● Considered one of the leading figures of the Modernist movement, Eliot wrote a series of important poetical works, including The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915), the collection Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) and his great poetic masterpiece, The Waste Land (1922), which established his reputation as a leading avant-garde poet. ● Other important works followed: The Hollow Men (1925); Ash Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1943). ● Eliot also wrote seven plays, best known among which is Murder in the Cathedral (1935). ● While still at college Eliot was impressed by the French Symbolists from whom he took the ability to combine intellectualism and sensuous language but his style was far more original and innovative. ● His works presented a wide range of cultural references and he used a variety of techniques like pastiche and juxtaposition. ● His early work created images of disillusioned modern man and his psychological fragility in the years after the First World War: a lonely, intellectual figure who was incapable of expressing himself in the ruins of modern culture. ● His later poems became less pessimistic as Eliot explored art and spirituality with a use of language that exploited the sounds and musicality of words. ● Throughout his production Eliot succeeded in combining intellectual, aesthetic and emotional elements. ● He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. ● Eliot died in London on 4th January 1965. The Waste Land (1922) THE STRUCTURE OF THE POEM ● The Waste Land is composed of five parts, each with a different title and theme. ⮚ In Part 1, entitled The Burial of the Dead, the author presents a series of juxtapositions, such as the ones between life and death, fertility and sterility, hope and despair. ⮚ Part 2, named A Game of Chess, introduces the theme of the sterility of modern life in contrast with the splendour of the past. ⮚ Part 3, called The Fire Sermon, deals with the theme of love, which is presented as mere, fruitless sexual desire. ⮚ In Part 4, entitled Death by Water, Eliot describes the decomposition of a drowned sailor in the sea and further develops the theme of modern sterility. ⮚ Part 5 is entitled What the Thunder Said and presents the theme of the spiritual journey of humanity through the desert of modernity. The title suggests the idea of a possible revelation, which never comes. ● The poem is written in free verse and is characterised by a high level of experimentation in the choice of the verse form, in the length of lines and in the use of punctuation. ● The language, too, is particularly varied and contains a number of different tones, from the solemn to the colloquial. A MODERNIST POEM ● The description of the structure of the poem shows one of its main features: Eliot's poem rejects any kind of narrative structure and contains a huge variety of different and apparently disconnected themes. ● This structural fragmentation makes Eliot's poem one of the best examples of Modernist poetry and represents the historical fragmentation of Western civilisation. ● Eliot's poem is full of quotes from ancient and classical sources such as Dante, Shakespeare and the Bible. ● All of these sources, however, are juxtaposed in an apparently incoherent way and represent the relics of a world that has been destroyed by modernity, which Eliot represents as a sterile and arid land. ● The result is a poem in which boundaries are blurred, meanings are not clearly defined, characters are not clearly represented and events cannot be easily located in a specific time or place. ● Eliot's poem seems to be structured as a series of 'broken images' which do not tell a definite plot, but are juxtaposed to the chaos of the modern world. THE GENERAL MEANING OF THE POEM ● The Waste Land is a very complex work, the title of which refers to the situation in Europe after the Great War, seen as a cultural and spiritual desert. ● The work moves away from traditional verse forms, using a mixture of different voices, combining cultured allusions to classical literature and ancient myths with references to sordid popular culture as it presents shallow, deeply ordinary people leading meaningless lives. ● The only hope that can be found lies in personal responsibility and a faith in cultural continuity based on European values. ● Eliot provides a wealth of footnotes to his text, which is rich in difficult literary and historical allusions understandable for the cultured elite. THE ROLE OF MYTH ● One of the most peculiar features of The Waste Land is the constant juxtaposition between the contemporary world and the world of classical myths. ● In his poem Eliot makes frequent references to the myth of the Holy Grail - the holy cup which was used to collect Christ's blood and which became a symbol of man's spiritual quest for salvation, to the myth of the Fisher King - the legendary figure of a king whose sexual impotence casts a spell on his land - and to the many rites of fertility that were celebrated in the ancient world. ● Similarly to what Joyce does in Ulysses, Eliot uses these ancient myths to add a layer of spirituality and wisdom to the squalid reality of the modern world. THE OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE ● The 'objective correlative' stands at the very heart of the poetic method used by Eliot in The Waste Land. ● In his poem Eliot does not describe the sterility of Western civilisation in clear terms, but juxtaposes a series of apparently incoherent images and symbols whose aim is to produce the idea of 'sterility' in the reader's mind. ● The theory of the objective correlative in literature was developed by Eliot in his critical writings- it was defined by Eliot as 'a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion' that a writer seeks to evoke in the reader. ● The purpose of the objective correlative is, thus, to express a character's emotions by showing rather than by describing them and to create emotion through external factors and evidence.