Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)
- Born in St Louis, Missouri, from a family of English descent. Though an
American by birth, his cultural background was at first English and then
European. In fact he learned Italian by studying Dante.
- At the outbreak of the First World War he settled in London. In 1915
he married the British ballet dancer Vivien Haigh-Wood, despite her
mental instability.
- Vivien was in poor health and Eliot was under emotional strain. He
spent some time in a Swiss sanatorium, in Lausanne, undergoing
psychological treatment and here he finished The Waste Land; poetry
was, in fact, his only refuge where he expressed all his horror at his
unhappy home life. This long poem was published in 1922 after the
American poet Ezra Pound had contributed to reduce it to its final
form, and Eliot later dedicated it to Pound himself, "il miglior fabbro the better craftsman", a quotation from Dante's Purgatory.
- In 1927 he became a British citizen and in the same year he joined the
Church of England, finding the answer to his own questionings and to
the despair of the modern world lacking faith and religion.
- He wrote religious poems, Ash-Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets
(1935-1942) and two important plays, Murder in the Cathedral (1935)
on the assassination of Thomas Becket, and Family Reunion (1939).
- Eliot finally decided to separate from his wife, who was committed to
a mental asylum, where she died nine years later in 1947.
- In 1948 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
- He died in London in 1965.
The Waste Land (1922)
- An amazing anthology of indeterminate states of mind, of impressions,
hallucinations, situations and personalities.
- There’s one voice relating to a multiple personality beyond the limits
of space and time: there’s Tiresias, the Theban prophet from
Sophocle's plays who experienced blindness and the life of both sexes,
and there’s the knight from the Grail legend who moves through London
and a post-war Middle Europe, which has been deprived of its spiritual
roots.
- The Waste Land consists of five sections.
The sterility of the present
- All these fragmentary parts have one main theme: the contrast
between the fertility of a mythical past and the spiritual sterility of
the present world. This poem reflects the breakdown of a historical,
social, and cultural order destroyed by the war and by those forces
operating under the name of modernity.
The new concept of history
- The mythical past appears in the references and quotations from many
literary works belonging to different traditions and cultures, and
religious texts, like the Bible and Hindu sacred works. This use of
quotations reflects the concept Eliot had of tradition and history, that
is, the repetition of the same events, and of "classicism", that is, the
ability to see the past as a concrete premise for the present and "the
poetic culture" as a "living unity" of all the poems written in different
periods. Thus present and past exist simultaneously in The Waste
Land, just as they do in the mind, and the continuous shifts of time and
space are caused by the free associations of ideas and thoughts.
The innovative stylistic devices
- The style of The Waste Land is fragmentary because of the mixture
of different poetic styles, such as blank verse, the ode, the quatrain,
the free verse, thus reproducing the chaos of present civilisation: the
meaning is not in the single fragment but in the whole.
- Metaphor and symbol replace direct statement; to this purpose, Eliot
adopted the technique of the objective correlative, that is the attempt
at communicating philosophical reflections and feelings by means of a
simile, of a description or a monologue by a character in order to
provide a vision of the world or a feeling of the lyrical "I". For example
in The Fire Sermon the objective correlative of the squalid, passionless
present age is the banal and loveless scene of the seduction of a typist
by her lover.
- From the French Symbolists Eliot derived the technique of
juxtaposition: squalid elements are juxtaposed with poetic ones, trivial
elements with sublime ones. Another device widely used by Eliot is the
repetition of words, images and phrases from page to page: they all give
the impression of the increasing musicality of the poem.
The mythical method
- Eliot contrasts the meaninglessness of life with allusion to the
Arthurian legend and the Quest for the Holy Grail, a metaphor for
man's search for spiritual salvation.
- "It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a
significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is
contemporary history
Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)
The Waste Land (1922)
The Hollow Men (1925)
Ash-Wednesday (1930)
Four Quartets (1935-1942)