T. S. Eliot

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frances Dickey ◽  
Ria Banerjee ◽  
Christopher McVey ◽  
John Morgenstern ◽  
Patrick Query ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
American Girl ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Four Quartets ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
The Individual

Poet, dramatist, and critic Thomas Stearns Eliot (b. 1888–d. 1965) won fame for such poems as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), The Waste Land (1922), and “The Hollow Men” (1925), which ushered in and helped define the modernist era of literature. His critical writings also shaped literary taste and study in the 20th century. Born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, by a Unitarian family with deep roots in American history, he was educated at Harvard and wrote his first significant poems during his year abroad in Paris, 1910–1911. After completing most of the work for a PhD in philosophy, he found himself abroad again during the outbreak of World War I, and he decided to marry an Englishwoman, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, and put down roots in London. His first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), surprised readers with its modern vocabulary, free-verse rhythms, and compelling dramatic voices. While working as a teacher and then a banker, Eliot established himself as an authoritative new voice in literary criticism with essays including “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), “Hamlet” (1919), and “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921). He introduced terms that shaped literary study throughout the 20th century: “impersonality,” “the objective correlative,” and “dissociation of sensibility.” In 1920 he collected his early essays in The Sacred Wood and published another volume of poems, including “Gerontion.” His personal life was not happy; he regretted having married a woman he did not love instead of the American girl he left behind in Massachusetts, Emily Hale (during his lifetime he wrote over one thousand letters to her). Considered his greatest work and probably the most significant poem of the 20th century, The Waste Land (1922) expresses his personal emotional conflict in terms of the larger historical currents of the immediate postwar period: the aftershocks of war, a crisis of faith, changing gender roles, urbanization, and a sense of deracination from the past. Erudite, multilingual, and difficult to read, but also highly charged with feeling, this poem captured the spirit of the interwar era, received more sustained attention than any other literary work in the 20th century, and is known and quoted across the globe. Eliot further distinguished himself by converting to the Anglican church in 1927 and becoming its leading poet and dramatist with his conversion poem Ash-Wednesday (1930), the play Murder in the Cathedral (first performed 1935), and the long lyric sequence Four Quartets (1936–1941). He also became a British citizen, so he can be considered both an American and an English writer. In the 1930s and 1940s he turned more toward drama and engaged with cultural and social debates in his criticism from a Christian perspective. Eliot won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1948.

scholarly journals Echoes of the Vision of Hindu Philosophy in T. S. Eliot’s Writings

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 57-74
Author(s):  
Damauru Chandra Bhatta
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Four Quartets ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Yoga Sutras ◽  
Spiritual Nature ◽  
Love Song ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Living Objects

This paper makes an attempt to explore the echoes of the vision of Hindu philosophy in the selected works of T. S. Eliot. The works of Eliot such as his primary essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” and his primary poems such as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Gerontion,” The Waste Land, “Ash Wednesday,” “A Song for Simeon” and Four Quartets are under scrutiny in this paper. Eliot’s primary texts echo the vision of the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gita and the Patanjali Yoga Sutras of the Hindu (Vedic) philosophy. The vision is that rebirth is conditioned by one’s karma (actions). No one can escape from the fruits of his karma. One needs to undergo the self-realization to know the Essence (Brahman). When one knows the Essence, he is liberated from the wheel of life and death. Man himself is Brahman. The soul is immortal. The basic essence of Hindu philosophy is non-dual, which says that all the living beings and non-living objects are the manifestations of the same Ultimate Reality (Brahman). Eliot suggests that the knowledge of this essence can help humanity to promote equality and justice by ignoring discrimination and duality, to end human sorrows and to achieve real peace and happiness. This finding can assist humanity in the quest for understanding the meaning of human existence and the true spiritual nature of life to address the human sorrows resulted from the gross materialistic thinking.

scholarly journals Crisis of the Modern Age and the Way Out: An Examination of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 225
Author(s):  
Fatima Falih Ahmed Al-Badrani ◽  
Abdullah Fawaz Al-Badarneh
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Spiritual Values ◽  
God's Will ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Four Quartets ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Impact

The twentieth century was one of change and unrest. What characterises the age is that society, up to a high degree, was hostile to spiritual life. The spiritual values seemed to be neglected or totally abandoned for the material, more matter-of-fact values. This left society in a state of increasing confusion that was substantially realised in the outbreak of World War I. The impact of the war revealed the degeneration of the modern world with the breakdown of religion and moral and spiritual traditions. T. S. Eliot was fully aware of the ills of modern civilisation that surrounded people with a number of faiths established haphazardly to fight against the troubles of modern life. These faiths refer to political and social ideologies, parties, and allegiances. Eliot finds that all modern ideologies are poor and futile substitutions for religious faith. He finds that society should be built not upon power and its corruption, but upon a higher system of values which are mainly spiritual and moral. This research paper demonstrates how Eliot's Four Quartets affirms the possibility of spiritual regeneration and gives a positive projection of hope. The central theme of the poem is that if the heart of the individual is ever to be at rest, if his/her tormented apprehension about the transience of human life is ever to be calmed, it will be so when he/she accepts the conviction that humans’ peace is in God's will.

Homogeneity, “glocalism” or somewhere in between?

2014 ◽  
Vol 48 (1/2) ◽  
pp. 288-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helene Cecilia de Burgh-Woodman
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Marketing Theory ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Pierre Loti ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Impact

Purpose – This paper aims to expand current theories of globalisation to a consideration of its impact on the individual. Much work has been done on the impact of globalisation on social, political and economic structures. In this paper, globalisation, for the individual, reflects a re-conceptualisation of the Self/Other encounter. In order to explore this Self/Other dimension, the paper analyses the literary work of nineteenth-century writer Pierre Loti since his work begins to problematise this important motif. His work also provides insight into the effect on the individual when encountering the Other in a globalised context. Design/methodology/approach – Drawing from literary criticism, the paper adopts an interpretive approach. Using the fiction and non-fiction work of Pierre Loti, an integrated psychoanalytical, postcolonial analysis is conducted to draw out possible insights into how Loti conceptualises the Other and is thus transformed himself. Findings – The paper finds that the Self/Other encounter shifts in the era of globalisation. The blurring of the Self/Other is part of the impact of globalisation on the individual. Further, the paper argues that Loti was the first to problematise Self/Other at a point in history where the distinction seemed clear. Loti's work is instructive for tracing the dissolution of the Self/Other encounter since the themes and issues raised in his early work foreshadow our contemporary experience of globalisation. Research limitations/implications – This paper takes a specific view of globalisation through an interpretive lens. It also uses one specific body of work to answer the research question of what impact globalisation has on the individual. A broader sampling and application of theoretical strains out of the literary criticism canon would expand the parameters of this study. Originality/value – This paper makes an original contribution to current theorisations of globalisation in that it re-conceptualises classical understandings of the Self/Other divide. The finding that the Self/Other divide is altered in the current era of globalisation has impact for cultural and marketing theory since it re-focuses attention on the shifting nature of identity and how we encounter the Other in our daily existence.

scholarly journals THE TEXT – THE READER – THE LITERARY WRITING: A COGNITIVE AND NARRATOLOGICAL PARADIGM

10.23856/3404 ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 36-46
Author(s):  
Lidiia Matsevko-Bekerska
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Active Participation ◽  
Cognitive Specificity ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Original Sense ◽  
Cognitive Narratology ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Individual

The article presents the study of some aspects in the specificity of the dialogue between the artistic text and the consciousness of the addressee. This issue is quite actively discussed in the modern literary criticism – both in theoretical approaches to analysis and in applied poetics studies. To a large extent, the methodological and terminological apparatus for examining the cognitive specificity of literature has been formed in classical narratological studies and refined in the latest developments. The article focuses on clarifying the essence of the reader as an important element of representing the consciousness, present in the artistic narrative. The specificity of the reader's presence is determined not only by its mediation status, but also by active participation in the creation and coexistence of several worlds: the intentional modus, its fiction embodiment, as well as the individual personal experience of their synthesis. Possible forms of the addressee’s presence in the space of the literary world are modelled in accordance with narrative coordinates. The specificity of each form of reader’s presence is determined by the conventional status, the narrative contour of the text, the objective intentional premises, as well as the ways of permeating into the artistic world, the ways of discovering the meaning, due to which the reading takes place as a holistic phenomenon. From the standpoint of cognitive narratology, every reader's projection has its own peculiarities that influence its place in the process of literary communication. It has been shown that the receptive significance of the literary work consists in the possibility of multiplying the meanings, implementation of the harmonious reader's understanding, corresponding to the original sense. With the increase of interval between the author and the reader, the content of the work is proportionally schematized, and with refinement of the scheme, every single interpretation acquires reliability.

scholarly journals T.S. Eliot and Josep Carner in Dialogue

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margalit Serra
Keyword(s):  
Literary Tradition ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Four Quartets ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Poetic Creation

The aim of this article is to show that Nabí’s poem, written by Catalan poet Josep Carner, contains allusions to the works of T.S. Eliot The Waste Land as well as to “Burnt Norton”, the first poem of Four Quartets. Allusion is a literary resource which is recurrent in both authors, to whom literary tradition is pivotal in the process of poetic creation. A thorough analysis of the main allusions of Nabí to these two poems of T.S. Eliot demonstrates that by means of allusion a dialogue between works of different times, languages and authors may be established.

Art, understanding of

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Lyas
Keyword(s):  
Alternative View ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Economic Organizations ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Church

Art engages the understanding in many ways. Thus, confronted with an allegorical painting such as Van Eyk’s The Marriage of Arnolfini, one might want to understand the significance of the objects it depicts. Similarly, confronted with an obscure poem, such as Eliot’s The Waste Land, one might seek to understand what it means. Sometimes, too, we claim not to understand a work of art, a piece of music, say, when we are unable to derive enjoyment from it because we cannot see how it is organized or hangs together. Sometimes what challenges the understanding goes deeper, as when we ask why some things, including such notorious productions of the avant garde as the urinal exhibited by Marcel Duchamp, are called art at all. Some have also claimed that to understand a work of art we must understand its context. Sometimes the context referred to is that of the particular problems and aims of the individual artist in a certain tradition, as when the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields is understood as a contribution by its architect to the vexing problem of combining a tower with a classical façade. Sometimes the context is social, as when some Marxists argue that works of art can best be understood as reflections of the more or less inadequate economic organizations of the societies that gave rise to them. The understanding of art becomes a philosophical problem because, first, it is sometimes thought that one of the central tasks of interpretation is to understand the meaning of a work. However, recent writers, notably Derrida (1972), query the notion of the meaning of a work as something to be definitively deciphered, and offer the alternative view of interpretation as an unending play with the infinitely varied meanings of the text. Second, a controversial issue has been the extent to which the judgment of works of art can be divorced from an understanding of the circumstances, both individual and cultural, of their making. Thus Clive Bell argued that to appreciate a work of art we need nothing more than a knowledge of its colours, shapes and spatial arrangements. Others, ranging from Wittgenstein to Marxists, have for a variety of different reasons argued that a work of art cannot be properly understood and appreciated without some understanding of its relation to the context of its creation, a view famously characterized by Beardsley and Wimsatt (1954) as the ‘genetic fallacy’.

The Long Poem

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Jaussen
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Long Poems ◽  
Historical Rhetoric ◽  
Organizational Principles ◽  
Poetic Work

In its most basic sense, the ‘long poem’ refers to any extended poetic work, from the long lyric to the epic. Within the context of modernism, the long poem emerged as a significant genre, channeling the authority and scope of the epic yet rejecting many traditional epic devices. Most notably, many modernist long poems abandoned narrative, replacing it with other organizational principles, ranging from symbolism to collage. The practice became particularly significant within the context of Anglo-American modernism, largely due to the influence of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, although the long poem can also be considered a transnational genre, with examples in French, such as Saint-John Perse’s Anabase (1924), and Spanish, like Federico García Lorca’s sequence Poeta en Nueva York (1940). One of the most famous and influential examples of the genre is Eliot’s The Waste Land, published in 1922. Adapting mythological themes, literary allusions, and a symbolic framework, Eliot’s work combined the traditional historical rhetoric of earlier long poetics, from Chaucer to the Arthurian legends, with the language and concerns of World War I England.

Resetting the Type: An Exploration of the Historical Sense in Mrs. Dalloway

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Savannah Pignatelli
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Collaborative Relationship ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Talent ◽  
A Performance

Scholars often study instances of intertextuality within Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which they connect to both classical and contemporary authors. Though some of these scholars have noted a connection between Mrs. Dalloway and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, there has been little criticism that attempts to explain how this connection affects the meaning within Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia Woolf’s diaries reveal that she crafted her novel during the period in which she developed a personal and collaborative relationship with T.S. Eliot and his poem The Waste Land: Eliot recited the poem to Leonard and Virginia Woolf in June of 1922, two months before Virginia began writing Mrs. Dalloway, and she set the type for The Waste Land herself in 1923. In my paper I will examine how Mrs. Dalloway interacts with Eliot’s work, including his theoretical text “Traditional and the Individual Talent.” Meaning, in Eliot’s model, is cumulative and cultural. By tapping into the larger historical dialogue embodied by “tradition” meaning is transformed, created anew, challenged, and reproduced. In many ways, Mrs. Dalloway is a performance of Woolf’s ability to exercise Eliot’s concept of the historical sense. More importantly, however, Woolf’s appropriation of “tradition” allows her to collaborate with past authors to create meaning in the face of a changed world.

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