T. S Eliot
 a long poem (434 lines) by Modernist writer
Thomas Sterne Eliot;
 Written in 1922 – a seminal year for
Modernism;
 Regarded as one of the most important
poems of the 20th century;
 Depicts life post-WW1.
In what ways
might it be
considered a
‘wasteland?’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hl5O
qQVaD9Y
Watch this short documentary and
add to your notes.
What is the poem about?
the
‘’ sex-horror
stems from the false
intimacy that desire
can forge in the
place of genuine
connection
‘a chart of [the] devastated world’
of post war Britain ... a feeling of
universal ruin ... The moral, sexual
and spiritual decay – the sterility
and deep intellectual uncertainty
... Widespread questioning of
confidence, and the failure of
science, sociology, religion,
politics and the arts to provide a
consistent metaphysical view of
modern man.’
Stephen Coote, Penguin Critical
Studies
Disdain at
unchecked
sexuality
Spark
Notes
The
decay
of
moder
n
society
It is about the
failure of men
and women to
get through to
one another
It is about spiritual
dryness, about the
kind of existence in
which no regenerating
belief gives
significance and value
to men's daily
activities, sex brings
no fruitfulness, and
death heralds no
resurrection” Norton
Anthology
 Unlike Atwood’s ‘speculative fiction,’ Eliot’s
text is not ‘speculative’ but descriptive of the
state of Britain (Europe) post war.
 In what ways might it therefore be
‘dystopian’?
 What do you already know about Modernism
as a style?
 Started in the 1880s and gained strength in the 1910s and 1920s (post
war);
 Reacted against Victorian styles (chronology, ‘safe’ endings,
melodrama);
 Focused on society/ the individual and criticism of both;
 Played with language, form and structure and tried to ‘make it new’
(Esra Pound);
 Often elitist, drawing on high-culture texts and using intertextuality; did
not appeal to the masses (as Victorian literature did);
 Important modernist writers: T. S Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Katherine
Mansfield, James Joyce, Esra Pound, Ernest Hemingway;
 Other artists: Bertholt Brecht in drama, and artists like Pablo Picasso
and Duchamp.
Want to know more? Read/ look at some of their work/ read about The
Bloomsbury Group/ watch Life in Squares.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nlg4
6kIGm_Q&list=PL7D797EBD172C452D
How would you
describe the
modernism aesthetic?
Understanding of the Modernist Style
Rejection of Victorian:
The Hay-Wain by John Constable, painted in 1821
Authority
Narrative
Realism
In favour of:
Three Musicians by Pablo
Picasso, painted in 1921
Fragmentation
Subjectivity
Fractured
Montage
Alienation
Juxtaposition of Antiquity and
Modernity
Despairing at the modern world, Eliot turned
to the Golden age of British Literature, to
Shakespeare, to Edmund Spenser,
contrasting their beauty to what he
perceived to be the paucity of the rise of
mass culture.
In an essay on James Joyce’s Ulysses, he
described what he called the Mythical
Method.
The plunge of civilization into this abyss of
blood and darkness ... Is a thing that so gives
away the whole long age during which we
have supposed the world to be, with
whatever abatement, gradually bettering,
that to have to take it all now for what the
treacherous years were ... Really making for
and meaning is too tragic for any words.
Henry James
In a letter written the day after Britain
entered World War One
‘Eliot seems to
capture the
modernist zeitgeist:
i.e., that of crisis and
rupture — the sheer
absence of one,
totalizing view of the
world’
Professor Gerald
Lucas
 Listen to/ read the first part of the poem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPB_1
7rbNXk
 In what ways:
- Does it depict post ww1 Europe?
- Is is Modernist?
Don’t expect to understand most/ much of
it…yet (and don’t worry that you don’t).
Montage:
Montage is the selecting,
editing and positioning of
two or more shots of film
together.
Sergei Eisenstein
theorised about the
effects possible due to
the juxtaposition of
different images.
Eisenstein directed the
silent film ‘The Battleship
Potemkin’ with its famous
‘Odessa Steps Sequence’
(watch from nine
minutes)m
As you watch the final
three minutes of the
Odessa Step scene,
consider the effects
Homework:
Read Eliot’s essay ‘Ulysees, Order and Myth at
http://people.virginia.edu/~jdk3t/eliotulysses.ht
m
Make notes on:
• Eliot’s need for past literature in post war Britain;
• What Eliot is saying about the essence of human
nature;
• The effects of his use of a past literature;
• How he uses his literary heritage to comment on
the present.