Thomas Stearns Eliot: vita, opere e pensiero, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Thomas Stearns Eliot: vita, opere e pensiero e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! 6.14 THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT BACKGROUND AND EDUCATION Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis (Missouri) in 1888 and was educated at Harvard. He was American, but his cultural background was English and then European. He studied the English Metaphysical poets and John Donne; also, he learned Italian by studying Dante. In 1929 he devoted to him an essay, where he stated that Dante was the poet who best expressed a universal situation and praised him for his “clear visual images”, “the lucidity” of his style and “his extraordinary force to compression”. He stated that “more can be learned about how to write poetry from Dante than from any English poet”. In 1910, he began studying in Paris at the Sorbonne, where he attended Bergson’s lectures (=philosopher) and started to read the works of the French Symbolists. HOME LIFE AND CAREER At the outbreak of the First World War, he was studying at Oxford but stayed in London, where he published essays on philosophy (=teacher) and worked as a clerk in Lloyds Bank. In 1915 he married the British ballet dancer Vivienne Haigh-Wood, despite his parents’ worries about her mental instability. Eliot’s first important work was the collection of poems “Prufrock and Other Observations” (1917), which established him as an avant-garde poet. He founded and edited “The Criterion” (1922), an international literary magazine; in 1925 he became a director for the publishers Faber & Faber, printing his writings and encouraging the production of young poets, like Ezra Pound and W.H. Auden. His wife Vivienne was in poor physical and mental health and Eliot was living an emotional strain. In fact, he spent some time in a Swiss sanatorium, in Lausanne, under psychological treatment. Poetry became his refuge where he expressed all his horror at his unhappy home life and he transcended his situation to represent the general crisis of Western culture. He finished his masterpiece, “The Waste Land”, a long poem published in 1922 after Ezra Pound’s help. Later, Eliot dedicated it to him, known as “the better craftsman” (“il miglior fabbro”), a quotation from Dante’s “Purgatorio”. In 1925 he published “The Hollow Men”, a poem which is the sequel to “The Waste Land”’s philosophical despair, even if the seeds of his future Christian faith could be found. FROM THE CONVERSION TO THE LAST YEARS In 1927 Eliot became a British citizen and joined the Church of England, finding the answer to his uncertainties and to the modern world’s lack of faith and religion. The works that talk about religion are : “Ash Wednesday” (1930), a purgatorial poem; “Four Quartets” (1943); and 2 important plays, “Murder in the Cathedral” (1935), on the assassination of Thomas Becket, and “The Family Reunion” (1939). Eliot decided to separate from his wife, who was committed to a mental asylum, where she died in 1947; however, her death created a sense of guilt. Eliot’s writing became more concerned with the ethical and philosophical problems of modern society : this led him towards the theatre and he became one of the chief exponents of poetic drama. Also, in 1948 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in London in 1965. On the church wall, where there are his ashes, we can see his epitaph “In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning” (“Four Quartets”). WORKS Eliot’s work can be divided into 2 different periods : before and after the conversion to Anglicanism. - FIRST PERIOD = the works are characterised by a pessimistic vision of the world; spiritual aridity and lack of love have deprived life of all meaning. For example, some works are “Prufrock and Other Observations” (1917) and “The Waste Land” (1922). - SECOND PERIOD = the characteristics are purification, hope and joy. Some examples are : “Ash Wednesday” (1930), “Four Quartets” (1943); the plays “Murder in the Cathedral” (1935), on the assassination of Thomas Becket, and “The Family Reunion” (1939), on the guilt and expiation of a man haunted by the Furies. Also, both these plays are written in verse, have choruses in the manner of Greek tragedy and alternate colloquial and biblical rhythms. KEY IDEA : THE IMPERSONALITY OF THE ARTIST In his essays, Eliot concentrated on specific problems of style and technique. He shared with James Joyce the view of the importance for the artist to be impersonal and to separate “the man who suffers” from “the mind which creates”. Also, he declared that the poet has not a personality to express, but a particular medium; the emotion of art is impersonal. Thus the characters of his first works are archetypes of 20th-century human beings who turn their own subjective experience into a universal form with which anyone can identify. WORKS THE WASTE LAND The poem consists of 5 sections : - “The Burial of the Dead” : it deals with the coming of spring in a sterile land; theme = opposition between sterility and fertility, life and death; - “A Game of Chess” : it juxtaposes the present squalor to an ambiguous past splendour; - “The Fire Sermon” : the character of Tiresias is introduced; the theme of present ALIENATION is rendered through the description of a loveless mechanical, squalid sexual encounter; - “Death by Water” : it focuses on a drowned Phoenician sailor, Phlebas; theme = idea of a spiritual shipwreck; - “What the Thunder Said” : it evokes religions from East to West; a possible solution is found in a sort of sympathy with other human beings, but it doesn’t modify the general atmosphere of utter DESOLATION. THE SPEAKING VOICE “The Waste Land” is a central work in Modernism. It rejects any order or unity; it is a collection of indeterminate states of the mind, impressions, hallucinations… All the passages seem to belong to one voice relating to a multiple personality beyond the limits of space and time. This voice is Tiresias, the Theban prophet from the Greek dramatist Sophocle. Tiresias experienced blindness, the life of both sexes, he suffers with the women he observes… He is the knight from the Grail legend; he moves through London and a post-war Central Europe, deprived of its spiritual roots.