To say that "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is a typical romantic ode to the wonders of love, as the title may suggest, is quite far from the truth. To the contrary, this poem enters the straggling mind of J. Alfred Prufrock, a...
In a radical attempt to forge a new poetic medium, the poetry of TS Eliot possesses an enduring appeal due to its ability to lament universal concerns of the modern era while also subverting conventional literary content and structure. The poems ‘Rhapsody on a Windy...
The work of T. S. Eliot frequently presents society as degenerate and infertile. The deterioration of the post-war world is represented through the oppression and suffering of women – a concept explored most notably in Eliot’s 1922 work The Waste Land, but also in a...
Introduction The poetry of T.S Eliot often portrays an unsettling, ominous portrayal of inherent modern-day turmoils as he depicts an atmosphere fuelled by anxieties yet is futile, and through his works he ponders the internal struggle of the modern man. The modern era saw an...
T.S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land is widely considered the most influential work of the twentieth century. Composed of five compelling parts, Eliot’s genius work forms an intricate collage of modern society. Many scholars view The Waste Land as Eliot expressing his fear and...
The Love Song is a poem about a man whose conscious mind is revealed. Eliot presents Prufrock, to be in a dilemma in making a love proposal but is restricted by his fear of rejection. His personality is portrayed as pessimistic, and he feels that...
T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is a modern journey into and dissection of the mind of a society man, J. Alfred Prufrock. Prufrock is pushed in two opposite directions by his desires: his desire to have the favor of the woman...
The award-winning, genre-defining poet Thomas Stearns Eliot is known not only for his poetic masterpieces, but also for his literary criticism. He spent years of his life studying with Harvard professors “renowned in poetry, philosophy and literary criticism, and the rest of his career was...
There are few well-read people today who would not recognize the name T.S. Eliot. Known for his brilliant Modernist poetry, Eliot was also a prominent 20th century critic and playwright. Though his literary accolades spreads far and wide, his personal life remains a complex, overwhelming,...
T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), is considered one of the most influential poems of the modernist movement, even maintaining its influence after the second world war and during the subsequent growth of post-modernism. Modernism, a cultural and literary movement, swept Western Europe in the...
Christopher Okigbo’s poetry has often been compared to that of T. S. Eliot, partly because Okigbo uses Eliot’s signature linguistic devices such as exploiting metaphor to create a densely symbolic dimension to his poetry. In addition, he also appears at times to be consciously invoking...
Discussion In The Waste Land, Eliot utilizes women as a window to show the dissolution and distortion of love and desire. Eliot creates a progression from invitation, to violation, to automation through the use of three distinct female characters: the hyacinth girl, Philomela, and the...
Eliot’s “The Waste Land” is perhaps a prime example of the experimentation in poetic technique occurring during the period encompassing the Modernist movement. Loathed and adored by critics and students alike, the complexities of technique, language (or languages), subject matter and the sheer length of...
T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is the story a man contemplating emergence from his solitude into the world, a man capsized by the fear of being misunderstood. In this poem Eliot employs the quest motif in an ironic fashion to explore...
Introduction The Love Song of John Alfred Prufrock, The Wasteland, and The Hollow Men poems are written by Thomas Stearns Eliot. In the beginning of the poems, all of them have epigraphs. And this paper aims to analyze the background of the poet, background of...
In T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Prufrock is a man who is emotionally in conflict with himself. Although Prufrock is growing old, he feels the need to attract women but scares of being rejected or having an unstable relationship as in...
In many respects, T. S. Eliot’s poems “articulated the disillusionment of a younger post-World-War-I generation with the values and conventions—both literary and social—of the Victorian era” (American National). Eliot used The Waste Land and The Hollow Men to illustrate his feelings of a brutal age...
The speaker of T.S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” is one of the magi of the title, who delineates his arduous journey to witness the birth of Christ. What is interesting is that the tone of this poem is not of wonderment, but of powerlessness....
Among the fragmented layers and voices of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land there is a distinct cry for humanity to accept the comfort of a greater level of intelligence – God. This is dramatically reinforced in the lamenting howl of The Hollow Men. References...
T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land depicts a modern society engulfed in absolute chaos and plagued by the complications of industrialization. Image clusters from the poem vividly describe littered streets overcrowded with people, while the text itself reads abruptly and harshly. Thus, Eliot’s poem strongly...
T.S. Eliot once remarked that poetry must be difficult. The sentiments of this are expressed in much of his poetry and in his esoteric style, especially in Rhapsody on a Windy Night. If read literally, Rhapsody presents a bewildering scene of confusing, albeit beautifully-written nonsense....
There is no denying it—our world is on the brink of a severe environmental crisis. Critical issues like pollution, global warming, overpopulation, natural resource depletion, waste disposal, loss of biodiversity, deforestation, and urban sprawl need to be resolved, or else our earth will no longer...
In his seminal poem “The Wasteland,” T.S. Eliot vividly externalizes what he perceives to be a very internal death of pandemic proportions. Calling upon a vast catalogue of religion, classical writings, music and art, the work depicts an entire Western culture virtually dead spiritually in...
T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land begins with a latin epigraph that refers to the story of the prophetess to Apollo, Sibyl of Cumae. Apollo wanted to take the prophetess as his lover and offered her anything she wanted in return. Sibyl asked to live as...
Within T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” the influences of society and how it can affect the general personality of the public is reflected in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Countee Cullen’s “Yet Do I Marvel”. Eliot uses the contradiction of hollow and stuffed men to...
The essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” by T. S. Eliot incorporates many ideas sympathetic to those found in Pound’s poetry, thus allowing Pound to be comprehended more completely by one who has first read Eliot’s essay. If one were to read Eliot’s essay, he...
T.S. Eliot’s “Whispers of Immortality” is a close examination of life and death. Penned during the war-torn years between 1915 and 1918, Eliot’s quatrain poem cites the writers John Donne and John Webster as examples of metaphysical poets whose work depicts an understanding of mortality...
Compared to the poetry prior to the 20th century, the poetry of T.S. Eliot rings vibrant, unconventional and inventive. Eliot’s poem “Journey of the Magi” is typical of his style and illustrates how Eliot’s poetry changed the genre forever. In its compression of image and...
To understand T.S. Eliot as a writer, one must look at his own view of creative writing and his passion for tradition. Eliot’s idea of tradition can be misinterpreted: “Most often it is perceived as a smug and pompous intransigence to change…backward-looking traditionalism, self-satisfied with...
Poetry, as a genre of literature, is broadly defined as “The art or work of a poet”, or “Imaginative or creative literature in general” (Oxford English Dictionary). With a definition so broad in context, poets are able to conceive their own literature as poetry by...
“Only those who wil"l risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
“Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough.”
“If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?”
Date
26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965
Activity
Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor. Considered one of the 20th century's major poets, he is a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry.
Works
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), The Waste Land (1922), Four Quartets (1943), Murder in the Cathedral (1935)
Style
Eliot is synonymous with modernism. Everything about his poetry bespeaks high modernism: its use of myth to undergird and order atomized modern experience; its collage-like juxtaposition of different voices, traditions, and discourses; and its focus on form as the carrier of meaning.
Influence
T.S. Eliot exercised a strong influence on Anglo-American culture from the 1920s until late in the century. His experiments in diction, style, and versification revitalized English poetry, and in a series of critical essays he shattered old orthodoxies and erected new ones.
Quotes
“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
“Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough.”
