Thomas Stearns Eliot and The Waste Land and texts, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Thomas Stearns Eliot and The Waste Land and texts e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Thomas Stearns Eliot - was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1888 and was educated at Harvard → American by birth - his cultural background was first of all English and then European - He also learned Italian by studying Dante → praised him for his ‘clear visual images’, ‘the lucidity’ of his style and ‘his extraordinary force of compression'⇒ ‘more can be learned about how to write poetry from Dante than from any English poet’ - In 1910 Eliot went to Europe and studied in Paris at the Sorbonne → he attended Henri Bergson’s → works of the French Symbolists. Home life and career - outbreak of the First World War → Eliot in London, at Oxford - essays on philosophy - started to work as a clerk in Lloyds Bank. - In 1915 he married the British ballet dancer Vivienne Haigh-Wood → mental instability ● Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) → Eliot's First important work⇒ avant-garde poet ● He founded and edited The Criterion (1922), an influential international literary magazine ● in 1925 he became a director for the publishers Faber & Faber (encouraging the production of young poets such as Ezra Pound) - Vivienne: poor physical and mental health → Eliot spent time in a Swiss sanatorium, in Lausanne, undergoing psychological treatment ● Poetry⇒ his refuge where he expressed all his horror this unhappy home life + transcended his personal situation in order to represent the general crisis of Western culture ● In Lausanne he finished his masterpiece⇒ The Waste Land (1922) after Ezra Pound had contributed to reduce it to its final form - Eliot later dedicated it to Pound himself, ‘il miglior fabbro’ ( the better craftsman), a quotation from Dante’s Purgatorio. ● In 1925 he published The Hollow Men, a poem read as a sequel to The Waste Land’s philosophical despair From the conversion to the last years - In 1927 Eliot became a British citizen + he joined the Church of England⇒ to answer to his own uncertainties and to the despair of the modern world’s lack of faith and religion ● His religious poetry blossomed in Ash Wednesday (1930), a purgatorial poem, and then in Four Quartets (1943) and two important plays, Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Family Reunion (1939) - Eliot decided to separate from his wife (committed to a mental asylum, she died in 1947) → sense of guilt within the soul of the poet ● In 1930s - 1940s → works of ethical and philosophical problems of modern society ● In 1948 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature - He died in London in 1965 → his ashes were interred in St Michael and All Angels Church in East Coker Works - Eliot’s work can be divided into two different periods: before and after the conversion to Anglicanism 1) The works of the first period are all characterized by a pessimistic vision of the world, without any hope, faith, ideals or values → hey depict a nightmarish land where spiritual aridity and lack of love have deprived life of all meaning - Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), Gerontion (1920), The Waste Land (1922) and The HollowMen (1925) 2) Purification, hope and joy are the key words of the works of the second period: - the poetry of Journey of the Magi (1927), Ash Wednesday (1930), Four Quartets (1943) and the plays Murder in the Cathedral (1935, assassination ofThomas Becket), and The Family Reunion (1939) ● plays written in verse, have choruses in the manner of Greek tragedy and alternate colloquial and biblical rhythms ● “programmatic criticism”—that is, criticism that expresses the poet’s own interests as a poet, quite different from historical scholarship, which stops at placing the poet in his background ● “objective correlative” in the context of his own impersonal theory of poetry; it thus had an immense influence toward correcting the vagueness of late Victorian rhetoric by insisting on a correspondence of word and object The impersonality of the artist ● Eliot was an influential literary critic → critical essays on authors, where he concentrated on specific problems of style and technique: - He shared with the modern novelist James Joyce⇒ the importance for the artist to be impersonal and to separate ‘the man who suffers’ from ‘the mind which creates’ ● Eliot declared: ‘The poet has not a personality to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality. The emotion of art is impersonal.’ The Waste Land ● great power the disenchantment, disillusionment, and disgust of the period after WWI ● In a series of vignettes, linked by the legend of the search for the Grail, it portrays a sterile world of panicky fears and barren lusts, and of human beings waiting for some sign or promise of redemption. ● poem’s style: highly complex, erudite, and allusive, the poet provided notes and references to explain the work’s many quotations and allusions ● five sections and proceeds on a principle of “rhetorical discontinuity” → 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”)⇒ ultimate theme of The Waste Land, concretized by the poem’s constant rhetorical shifts and its juxtapositions of contrasting styles ● a timeless simultaneous awareness of moral grandeur and moral evil ● the poem’s original manuscript of about 800 lines was cut down to 433 at the suggestion of Ezra Pound Burial of the Death - Eliot introduces the present situation of life → Surrealism, alienating, connected with meaningless → funeral service⇒ association of ideas - effigy planted → ancient ritual (a pray to make the garden fertile) → God makes the garden able to spourt - first section of The Waste Land → April is usually connected to the rebirth of nature, but Eliot turns that upside down - Then he breaks with the common view again by saying that winter, generally associated with cold temperatures, keeps human beings ‘warm’. - final episode → surreal → The speaker walks through London (populated by people who seem to be the ghosts of the dead → they stare only in front of their feet + have lost the ability to communicate to each other)