The Modernist Literature

Zindagi V.Rathod

Roll no. 13

Sem. I

Paper no. E-C- 301: The Modernist Literature

Year -2011

Topic:

The Unity of The Poem

Submitted to:-

Dr.Dilip Barad

Department of English,

Bhavnagar University.

About Poet

               Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St.Louis, Missouri, in I888. He was a Descendent of an old New England family whose first member in America, Andrew Eliot (I627-I704), emigrated from East Coker, England. Future members of the family either entered the ministry or business.

In I9I7 his first volume of verse, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published. It immediately established him as a major poet, and he became, with his fellow American Ezra Pound, a leader of the revolt against the Georgian school of poetry.

Introduction:

               “The Waste Land” in I992 brought Eliot acclaim from readers and critics on both sides of the Atlantic. He was hailed as the voice of his generation and one of the greatest poets of the century. In I927, the poet became e British citizen and about the same time converted to the Anglican Catholic faith. He declared himself an Anglican in religion, a royalist in politics, and a classicist in Literature.

              The poem is criticized as asset of short poems tacked together, a piece of literary carpentry, pompous parade of erudition, a sort of scholarly nonsense….

              It is because of fragmentary and formlessness of the poem. Its collage of various vignettes, various pictures put together….
              There is, in Eliot’s work, a remarkable unity. Each volume of poetry that he published marked a distinct stage in his spiritual development. Until about I930 and the publication of “ash Wednesday,” it was not clear to Eliot’s admirers that he was a religious poet.

T.S.Eloit has used a number of devises to impart of unity to this poem.

Ø Tiresias as a Unifying Link:

Tiresias – a mythical character: Tiresias, in Greek mythology, a seer, or prophet, from Thebes, said to have been struck blind by the goddess Athena because he had seen her bathing. Athena compensated Tiresias with the gift of prophecy. Tiresias played a prominent part in Theban legends, delivering prophecies to Oedipus, king of Thebes.

Ø Importance of Tiresias: He is connecting link between past and the present. He is bi-sexual, he has had most varied experience and so he symbolizes human consciousness, the knowledge and experience acquired by the race through the ages.

Ø Tiresias, blind and spiritually embittered, old and impotent, who is the protagonist of the poem in The Waste Land, wandering about in great quest, stands for modern man in quest of true spiritual light and viable moral values.

Ø He is spectator and reporter of the happenings.

Ø What he sees is the substance of the poem.

Ø He had the burning experience of the fire of lust both as a man and a woman, so he was the fittest person to comment on the same.

Ø He is the fittest representative of complete humanity burning in the fire of lust because he is both man and woman…

Ø The whole poem is Teresa’s stream of consciousness.

.         2.   Oneness of characters and experience: Not only does Tiresias melt into the other character of the poem, but the melting of the characters, into each other is, of course, as aspect of the general process. Thus Elizabeth, the Hyacinth girl and three Thames Nymphs, melt into each other. The effected created is a sense of oneness of experience, and of the unity of all periods.

Ø      3. The Mythical Method: The mythical method consists in seeking analogies for the present in the past. The advantages:

Ø     Myths form the part of collective consciousness. It helps poet in communicating his meaning with minimal explanation.

Ø     It shows that the present spiritual predicament is an ever-recurring phenomenon and so a universal significance is imparted to it.

Ø        Refer to theme of sexual perversion and use of myth – three waste land used as objective correlatives to express poets emotions for the current waste land which is Europe after world war.

     4. The sequence of Pictures- modern technique of cinematography:

Ø Successive Clippings, after a few readings fix tmselves in memory and convey a coherent whole of meaning.

Ø This sequence of pictures is central to the poem.

Ø         5. Continuity of Time:

Ø       The development in Modern psychology has changed the concept of time – the past, the present and the future are viewed as a continuing whole.

               6. The Structure:

Ø The structure is that of spiral up and down. The poem proceeds with deeper and deeper probing into the modern malaise.

“The Waste Land” is a profoundly moving evocation of the horror of meaningless existence.

 From the perspective of Eliot’s later work, we can recognize that the despair the poet expresses has its roots in the absence of religious faith.

Though Eliot’s poetry was clearly rooted in his own spiritual experiences, it cannot be considered personal poetry.

Eliot’s own state of mind, for instance, during the period in which he wrote “The Waste Land” is made to reflect the spiritual crisis of his generation and also to see that crisis as a common experience throughout human history during periods in which religious faith is flickering.

During the forty odd years since the publication of “The Waste Land”, critics and scholars have explicated the many erudite and esoteric allusions and myths that Eliot crammed into that poem, but perceptive readers of the poem during the I920s were deeply moved by it even if they did not recognize all the allusions and    quotations.

Eliot’s characteristic device of juxtaposing startling images is derived from the French symbolists, particularly Laforague.

Eliot rejected the Georgian poet’s emphasis upon meter and rhyme because he believed that verse technique had to develop from the feeling and thought of the poem rather than being superimposed upon them.