Thomas Stearns Eliot 1888-1965

Life He was born in St Louis, Missouri. 1888 He studied in Paris at the Sorbonne. He came into contact with SYMBOLISM. 1910 He married the British ballet dancer Vivienne Haigh-Wood. 1915 He established himself as an important avant-garde poet. 1917 1922 He published The Waste Land.

Vivienne In 1917 he married a mentally unstable dancer. He had to go into a Swiss clinic to undergo a psychological treatment due to the influence that his wife's illness had on him. He made her hospitalized in an institution for mental patients. He divorced and remarried.

He was in the Bloomsbury group, but then he converted to Anglo- Catholicism “I had a shameful and distressing conversation with the poor and dear Tom Eliot, who can be called dead for all of us from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic, believes in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was really shocked. A corpse seems to me more credible than him. I mean, there's something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God. “ Virginia Woolf - T.S Eliot

He became a director for the publishers Faber & Faber. 1925 He acquired British citizenship and converted to Anglicanism. 1927 For the next thirty years he was considered as the most dominant figure in poetry and literary criticism in the English-speaking world. 1930 1948 He received the Nobel Prize for Literature. 1965 He died in London.

Before the conversion  He had a pessimistic vision of the world Works Before the conversion  He had a pessimistic vision of the world 1917 Prufrock and Other Observations. 1922 The Waste Land. It is said to be the single most influential poetic work of the twentieth century. 1925 The Hollow Men.    Cover for the first edition of Prufrock and other Observations.

Works After the conversion the keywords of the works of the second period  purification, hope, joy 1930 Ash Wednesday. 1943 Four Quartets. 1935 Murder in the Cathedral, a drama in verse. 1939 The Family Reunion.     A contemporary edition of Murder in the Cathedral.

Eliot’s world and the 19th-century world Modern / Eliot’s world 19th-century world Chaotic Ordered Futile Meaningful Pessimistic Optimistic Unstable Stable Loss of faith Faith Collapse of moral values Morality / Values Confused sense of identity Clear sense of identity

The impersonality of the artist Eliot shared with the modern novelist 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’. ‘The poet has not a personality to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality.’ ‘The emotion of art is impersonal.’

Eliot and the “Objective correlative” It is a poetic form that takes its inspiration from objects, landscapes, natural events and makes them a metaphor of an existential condition. a pattern of objects, events, actions, or a situation that can serve effectively to awaken in the reader an emotional response without being a direct statement of that subjective emotion

Montale - Ossi di seppia Example of what “Objective correlative” is The cuttlefish bones abandoned on a sunny beach evoke feelings of death, abandoned rubble. The objective correlative has a meaning that is not directly explained by the author.

Montale - Ossi di seppia «Bottle shards» Association between an Adjective and a concrete term to indicate not only the bottle but also the sensation perceived by this image: pain, insecurity and the fear of being hurt

Objective correlative “There are a series of situations or events that have the function to evoke an emotion.”

The Waste Land: content It is an autobiography written in a moment of crisis in the poet’s life. It consists of five sections; it reflects the fragmented experience of the 20th-century sensibility of the great modern cities of the West. It is a collection of indeterminate states of the mind, hallucinations, situations and personalities. All the fragmentary passages seem to belong to one voice relating to a multiple personality beyond the limits of space and time. He is Tiresias, the Theban prophet, who experienced blindness and the life of both sexes; a knight from the Grail legend, who moves through London and post-war Central Europe.

5. The Waste Land: themes The breakdown of a historical, social and cultural order destroyed by World War I. Contrast between the past fertility and the present sterility. The mythical past linked to a new concept of history repetition of the same events. Classicism ability to see the past as a concrete premise for the present

The Waste Land: style Mixture of different poetic styles reproducing the chaos of modern civilisation. Technique of implication: the active participation of the reader, who experiences the same world as that of the speaker/poet, is required. Use of the objective correlative. Quotations from different languages and literary works because of his concept of history and classicism. Repetition of words, images and phrases used to increase musicality. Association of ideas past and present are simultaneous.  First draft of The Waste Land, third section.

The Waste Land: style Mythical method: in modern society old myths are present, but they have lost their deep meaning. It is especially through the mythical allusions that the contrast between present and past appears. This method was a way of giving significance to present futility. Subjective experiences made universal. First draft of The Waste Land, first section.

THE WASTE LAND The burial of the dead, About upper class Biblical tone A game of chess, The sermon of fire, Death by water, What the thunder said About upper class Biblical tone Dante-Baudelaire Lower class Elizabethan theatre> Cleopatra and Antonio “The chair she sat in, like a burnished throne” incipit Budda’s sermon against luxury; Fire = purification Water: after burning is symbol of pain

The Waste Land: Section I - The Burial of the Dead The setting in place: London, peopled by the ghosts of the dead. Contrast between past and present: the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage and the clashes of WW1 The episode concludes with a famous line from the preface to Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal: the reader shares the poet's sins.

The Waste Land: III Section - The Fire Sermon The speaker: Tiresias, a figure from classical mythology. He has both male and female features, he is blind but can foresee the future. Tiresias observes a young typist, waiting for her lover, a dull and slightly arrogant clerk. Main action: a loveless sexual encounter between this couple. At the end the typist is glad the encounter is over and done.

The Wasted Land. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD Meanings Anglican funeral service Burial of the image of God Burial of men in contemporary world Four Characters- their point of view Dramatic monologue Fragments in many languages. Tower of Babylon. Allegory for the cosmopolitanism of modern Europe APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

The Wasted Land and The Canterbury Tales “APRIL is the cruellest month.” April = Rain = Fear Upside-down vision of nature. April = they have to wake up Winter = keep them warm “Whan that April with his shoures soote.” Spring = joy, rebirth April = Rain =Water = Purity April = peace

Marie is speaking- aristocracy Meditation on season. APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch. Marie is speaking- aristocracy Meditation on season. She speaks in German Mix of races, languages, religion. Topic of memory-past+present. Invocation of time and nature to make a reference to the memories.

Style Water Variety of voices speaking Several languages Allusions and references to: Dante Baudelaire Shakespeare Fertility fear of rebirth Sex sterility

LINES 13 -18 It's not entirely clear why Eliot inserts Marie into the beginning of his poem, but there are a couple running theories. First, there was a widespread scandal in 1889 (Eliot would have been less than a year old) when the archduke was found dead with his mistress, leaving a gaping hole in the Austrian royal line of succession. Whoops. This story could set off the motif of dead royalty that Eliot uses in this poem to symbolize the collapse of traditional forms of government and the "rule of the mob" in the 20th century. Also, the countess Marie also barely avoided being killed when a socialist workers' movement swept across Bavaria and encouraged the killing and imprisoning of anyone of Marie's high class. Once again, we've got notes of the decline of traditional, high culture in a modern sea of stupid, violent, and worst of all, average people Either way, legend has it that Eliot and Marie once met, so maybe he's just using their brief encounter as poetic fodder, and nothing more. These lines close with Marie talking about how awesome and free you feel in the mountains, to which we say obvi.