1. Modernism and T.S. Eliot

2. Modernism Period: late 19th century- 1945 (end WWII)
Radical shift in aesthetic and cultural sensibilities—modernists rejected Victorian notions of beauty, morality, and religion.
Wide-spread influence: art, music, literature

3. Pre-Modern (Victorian,Romantic) Values
Ordered
Meaningful
Optimistic
Stable
Faith
Morality/Values
Clear Sense of Identity

4. Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Brueghel, 1560’s

5. Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, Marcel Duchamp, 1912

6. Igor Stravinsky
His work, Rite of Spring, caused an uproar, inciting riots.
Experimented with tones, meter, rhythm, and dissonance
Rite of Spring, first performed on May

7. T.S. Eliot
Youngest of seven children in moderately wealthy family in St. Louis, MO
Attended Harvard, secretary of The Advocate
Spent a post-graduate year in Paris, entered intellectual scene (Henri Bergson, Pablo Picasso, Emile Durkheim)
Returned to Harvard to study philosophy (but took many courses in Sanskrit and Hindu as welll)
Met Ezra Pound in London in 1914, Pound was impressed by Eliot.
Married Vivien Haigh-Wood and settled in England, where he edited an avant-garde magazine called the Egoist.
1917- began work as a continental document evaluator at Lloyd’s Bank because of his knowledge of languages.

8. Life and Writing
Published Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917, supported financially by the Pounds.
Became the American darling of the British intellectual elite: Yeats, Pound, painter Wyndham Lewis, Bertrand Russell,etc.
The Wasteland was published in 1922 to much acclaim, 434-line poem
Offered editor position at Criterion in London—central to London’s literary scene
Continued to write poems, plays and literary essays
Died in 1965—epitaph reads (from Four Quartets) : "In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning."

9. 1962 Oil Painting by Sir Gerald Kelly

10. Terms to know
Metonymy: word exchanged for another closely associated with it (“suits” for officials)
Synecdoche: referring to part of a thing that represents the whole (“hands” for workmen)
Syntax: sentence structure, refers to sentence length, beginning, arrangement of ideas, and patterns.
Tone: the writer’s attitude toward the subject, himself/herself, or the audience

11. Eliot reads “Love Song”
Audio