Scarica Thomas Stearns Eliot e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) Life ● 1888: he was born in St. Louis, Missouri. ● 1910: he studied in Paris at the Sorbonne. ● 1915: he married the British ballet dancer Vivienne Haigh-Wood. ● 1917: he established himself as an important avant-garde poet. ● 1922: he edited The Criterion, an intellectual magazine. His professions included being a poet, a critic and an editor. ● 1925: he became director for the publishers “Faber & Faber”. ● 1927: he acquired British citizenship and converted to Anglicanism. ● 1930: for the next thirty years he was considered as “the most dominant figure in poetry and literary criticism in the English-speaking world”. ● 1948: he received the Nobel Prize for literature. ● 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”. ● 1925: The Hollow Men. ➢ After the conversion ● 1927: Ariel Poems. ● 1930: Ash-Wednesday. ● 1935-1942: Four Quartets. ● 1935: Murder in the Cathedral. ● 1939: Family Reunion. T. S. Eliot’s world and the 19th-century world Modern/T. S. Eliot’s world 19th- century world Chaotic Ordered Futile Meaningful Pessimistic Optimistic Unstable Stable Loss of faith Faith Collapse of moral values Morality/Values Confused sense of identity Clear sense of identity The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Poetic form: a dramatic monologue. Content: the protagonist’s realization of death within life, the lost opportunities in his life and the lack of any spiritual progress. The speaker: a middle-aged passive, aimless man. He is linked to: 1. physical and intellectual inertia. 2. inability to communicate with his fellow-beings. Style: juxtaposition of poetic images with everyday phrases and images; objective correlative instead of direct statements. The Waste Land ➢ content It is an autobiography written in a moment of crisis in the life of the poet. It consists of five sections; it reflects the fragmented experience of the 20th-century sensibility of the great modern cities of the West. It is an anthology of indeterminate states of the mind, hallucinations, impressions, personalities blended and superimposed beyond the boundaries of time and place. The speaking voice is related to various personalities: Tiresias, a knight from the Grail legend, the Fisher King. ➢ themes The disillusionment and disgust of the period after World War I. Contrast between past fertility and present sterility. The mythical past linked to a new concept of History repetition of the same events. Spring Symbols: different from Chaucer absence of rebirth. April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. (I section) ➢ style Association of ideas: past and present are simultaneous. Mythical method to give significance to present futility. Subjective experiences made universal. Use of Juxtaposition Quotations from different languages and literary works. Fragmentation. Technique of implication: the active participation of the reader is required. Objective correlative. Repetition of words, images and phrases. The objective correlative: T. S. Eliot and Montale For Eliot, the “objective correlative” is 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. What The Thunder said Meriggiare pallido e assorto (“Ossi di Seppia”) Here is no water but only rock Rock and no water and the sandy road Meriggiare pallido e assorto presso un rovente muro d’orto,
