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What type of poetry is T.S. Eliot known for?
Modernist movementHe is best known as a leader of the Modernist movement in poetry and as the author of such works as The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943).
What was Eliot's writing style?
He use stream-of- consciousness to show the chaos in of the modern man's thinking. In addition, he uses many techniques such as imagism, repetition, fragmentation and other modernist techniques. All these techniques help depict the modern life for the reader and reflect its status in real manner.
What is the nature of Eliot's poetry?
Eliot (1888-1965) 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.
What are the characteristics of T.S. Eliot's poetry?
T.S. Eliot's “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” carries the characteristics of modernist poetry such as objective correlative, fragmentation, free verse and irregular rhyming. It suggests a direct break with English romantic poets, such as Coleridge and Wordsworth (Levis, 75).
What are the themes of T.S. Eliot poetry?
T. S. EliotBy Theme.Alienation.Time.Mortality.Regeneration.Tranquility.
What defines modernist poetry?
Modernism developed out of a tradition of lyrical expression, emphasising the personal imagination, culture, emotions, and memories of the poet. For the modernists, it was essential to move away from the merely personal towards an intellectual statement that poetry could make about the world.
What is the purpose of Eliot's poetry?
Eliot. In his poetry and criticism, Eliot provides a theory of the usefulness of poetry as a means by which to better understand oneself and others, thereby overcoming the isolation otherwise inherent in the human condition.
What is T.S. Eliot's most famous poem?
1. The Waste Land. Probably Eliot's most famous work, this long poem is also, for our money, his best – though many devotees of Four Quartets would disagree.
What were T.S. Eliot's philosophical beliefs?
Grounding himself in the absolute authority of Anglo-Catholic Christianity, Eliot posited religion as the source of all cultures, describing how these cultures develop through the dynamic interactions of unity and diversity, tradition and novelty, and individual perspective and cultural context.
What kind of poem is Prufrock?
“Prufrock” is a variation on the dramatic monologue, a type of poem popular with Eliot's predecessors. Dramatic monologues are similar to soliloquies in plays.
What makes the waste land a Modernist poem?
The Waste Land is also characteristic of modernist poetry in that it contains both lyric and epic elements. Modernism continued the tendency, begun in romanticism, to prize lyric highly, but many modernist poets also sought to write in the traditionally highest form, epic.
What are the characteristics of modern poetry?
Modern poetry is written in simple language, the language of every day speech and even sometimes in dialect or jargon like some poems of Rudyard Kipling (in the jargon of soldiers). 2. Modern poetry is mostly sophisticated as a result of the sophistication of the modern age, e. g. T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land".
What is the writing style of Robert Frost?
Frost mastered blank verse (i.e., unrhymed verse in iambic pentameter) for use in such dramatic narratives as “Mending Wall” and “Home Burial,” becoming one of the few modern poets to use it both appropriately and well.
What influenced TS Eliot's writing?
He was greatly influenced by Divine comedy. He liked the poet's language and his spiritual outlook. He even streamlined some parts of Dante's poem. Eliot's poems contain, not only references to Dante's character but also include some lines of Dante.
What is WH Auden style of writing?
Stylistically, the poems are fragmentary and terse, relying on concrete images and colloquial language to convey Auden's political and psychological concerns. Auden's poems from the second half of the 1930s evidence his many travels during this period of political turmoil.
Who is similar to TS Eliot?
Allen Ginsberg. 3,373 followers. ... Emily Dickinson. Author of 887 books including The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. ... Robert Frost. Author of 374 books including The Poetry of Robert Frost. ... Lewis Carroll. 7,360 followers. ... E.E. Cummings. 3,790 followers. ... Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 752 followers. ... John Keats. ... William Blake.More items...
Where was T.S. Eliot educated?
T.S. Eliot attended Smith Academy, St. Louis, and Milton Academy, Massachusetts. He received a B.A. from Harvard in 1909. He spent the year 1910–11...
What is T.S. Eliot best known for?
T.S. Eliot was an American-English poet, playwright, literary critic, and editor. He is best known as a leader of the Modernist movement in poetry...
How did T.S. Eliot influence the world?
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...
What did Eliot study?
From 1911 to 1914 he was back at Harvard, reading Indian philosophy and studying Sanskrit.
Where did Eliot go to school?
His family allowed him the widest education available in his time, with no influence from his father to be “practical” and to go into business. From Smith Academy in St. Louis he went to Milton, in Massachusetts; from Milton he entered Harvard in 1906; he received a B.A. in 1909, after three instead of the usual four years. The men who influenced him at Harvard were George Santayana, the philosopher and poet, and the critic Irving Babbitt. From Babbitt he derived an anti-Romantic attitude that, amplified by his later reading of British philosophers F.H. Bradley and T.E. Hulme, lasted through his life. In the academic year 1909–10 he was an assistant in philosophy at Harvard.
What did Eliot teach at Highgate School?
For a year Eliot taught French and Latin at the Highgate School; in 1917 he began his brief career as a bank clerk in Lloyds Bank Ltd. Meanwhile, he was also a prolific reviewer and essayist in both literary criticism and technical philosophy. In 1919 he published Poems, which contained the poem “Gerontion,” a meditative interior monologue in blank verse; nothing like this poem had appeared in English.
What was Babbitt's attitude?
From Babbitt he derived an anti-Romantic attitude that, amplified by his later reading of British philosophers F.H. Bradley and T.E. Hulme, lasted through his life. In the academic year 1909–10 he was an assistant in philosophy at Harvard.
What is Dante's book essay?
These book-essays, along with his Dante (1929), an indubitable masterpiece, broadened the base of literature into theology and philosophy: whether a work is poetry must be decided by literary standards; whether it is great poetry must be decided by standards higher than the literary.
How to express emotion in art?
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for that particular emotion; such that, when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.
What was Alfred Prufrock's first publication?
His undergraduate poems were “literary” and conventional. His first important publication, and the first masterpiece of Modernism in English, was “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915): Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Subscribe Now.
How did Eliot write his play?
Regarding his method of playwriting, Eliot explained, "If I set out to write a play , I start by an act of choice. I settle upon a particular emotional situation, out of which characters and a plot will emerge. And then lines of poetry may come into being: not from the original impulse but from a secondary stimulation of the unconscious mind."
Why did Eliot love literature?
First, he had to overcome physical limitations as a child. Struggling from a congenital double inguinal hernia, he could not participate in many physical activities and thus was prevented from socialising with his peers. As he was often isolated , his love for literature developed. Once he learned to read, the young boy immediately became obsessed with books, favouring tales of savage life, the Wild West, or Mark Twain 's thrill-seeking Tom Sawyer. In his memoir of Eliot, his friend Robert Sencourt comments that the young Eliot "would often curl up in the window-seat behind an enormous book, setting the drug of dreams against the pain of living." Secondly, Eliot credited his hometown with fuelling his literary vision: "It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done. I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London."
What happened to Eliot in 1914?
A connection through Aiken resulted in an arranged meeting and on 22 September 1914, Eliot paid a visit to Pound's flat. Pound instantly deemed Eliot "worth watching" and was crucial to Eliot's fledgling career as a poet, as he is credited with promoting Eliot through social events and literary gatherings.
What did Eliot do at Smith Academy?
He began to write poetry when he was 14 under the influence of Edward Fitzgerald 's translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. He said the results were gloomy and despairing and he destroyed them. His first published poem, "A Fable For Feasters", was written as a school exercise and was published in the Smith Academy Record in February 1905. Also published there in April 1905 was his oldest surviving poem in manuscript, an untitled lyric, later revised and reprinted as "Song" in The Harvard Advocate, Harvard University 's student magazine. He also published three short stories in 1905, "Birds of Prey", "A Tale of a Whale" and "The Man Who Was King". The last mentioned story significantly reflects his exploration of the Igorot Village while visiting the 1904 World's Fair of St. Louis. Such a link with indigenous peoples importantly antedates his anthropological studies at Harvard.
What did Eliot distance himself from?
In his 1934 pageant play The Rock, Eliot distances himself from Fascist movements of the 1930s by caricaturing Oswald Mosley 's Blackshirts, who "firmly refuse/ To descend to palaver with anthropoid Jews". The "new evangels" of totalitarianism are presented as antithetic to the spirit of Christianity .
Where did Eliot teach?
He subsequently taught at the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire.
Where did Eliot go to college?
Whilst a member of the Harvard Graduate School, Eliot met and fell in love with Emily Hale. Eliot was awarded a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, in 1914. He first visited Marburg, Germany, where he planned to take a summer programme, but when the First World War broke out he went to Oxford instead.
What is the poem Portrait of a Lady about?
Portrait of a Lady it’s a poem in three parts, dealing with the three dramatic confrontations of the lady and young men whom she loves. It reveals the picture of an intelligent young man with his inner conflicts , fears and uncertainties, dodging an elderly woman trying to exercise her charms on him for an illicit and unequal love relationship . The poet wishes to satirise his own milieu and urban society through the story of the old woman and the young man.
What is the central figure of the poem Gerontion?
Gerontion, a broken and decayed old man , is the central figure and what passes through his consciousness, forms the substance of the poem. The thoughts of the old man reflect the essential barrenness of modern civilization. He is quite disillusioned about himself and about the purpose of the modern world. Modern life is vain and futile like the days passed by the old man.
Is the love song of Alfred Prufrock a poem?
Alfred Prufrock marks a complete break with the nineteenth-century poetic tradition. It is not really a love song though love is the underlying theme. It records the indecision, hesitation and postponement of the proposal of the lover. The poem is rather psychological, intended to dissect the suppressed feelings of the lover, especially his cowardice and resolution.
What was Eliot's first collection of poems?
In 1917, his first collection of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published. This collection instantly gained him success, and he became the foremost poet of Avant-garde. In 1922, Eliot published The Waste Land. With the publication of this poem, the reputation of Eliot as a mythic proportion grew instantly.
What is Eliot's literary style?
Eliot’s personal experiences shaped his literary style. Thus all of his poems have incredible styles. The literary style of Eliot differs from the contemporary writers , particularly William Butler Yeats. Yeats, most of the time, was unable to express his mood in his works. The main aim of Eliot’s writing was to touch the lives ...
Why is Eliot's poem more realistic?
David Daiches said about Eliot that Eliot’s poems are the combination of philosophical, mythical, and Christian imagery; by employing these things, Eliot finds out the poetic way to describe the modern dilemma poetically.
How did Eliot bring dramatic effect to his poem?
Eliot brings dramatic effect in his poem by using repetition and symbolism. However, he did not make his poem appear like drama. In order to describe the unusual ideas, he gave vivid imagery in his poetry. Moreover, the dramas Eliot wrote are so intense that critics often call it exaggerated. Moreover, it is really difficult to distinguish between Eliot as a poet and Eliot as a critic. Despite being the famous poet and writer of his time, Eliot is often criticized for his writing style.
How does Eliot's poem Four Quartets work?
Eliot’s poem “Four Quartets” is different from the rest of his poem as it does use the technique of symbolism and repetition. In order to make the pattern appear in the poem, repetition is used. Similarly, to make the readers better understand the work, symbolism is used. Repetition and symbolism in the poem help the reader to associate themselves with it and thereby to make it more interesting.
How does Eliot manipulate the phrases of his poem?
Eliot remarkably manipulates the phrases of his poem, handles the pauses and stops, and shifts the formal and informal speech. All these techniques show his skills, and he continued using it throughout his works. The poem “Four Quarters” is the perfect example of Eliot’s use of these techniques and mystical methods.
What is the perfect example of Eliot's use of these techniques and mystical methods?
The poem “Four Quarters” is the perfect example of Eliot’s use of these techniques and mystical methods. He creates a wonderful sense of illusion in the poem by relating himself to it. In the poem The Waste Land, Eliot illustrates his love for religion and pulls himself away from the difficult life of humans.
Overview
Thomas Stearns Eliot OM (26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965) 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.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a prominent Boston Brahmin family, he moved to England in 1914 at the age of 25 and went on to settle, work, and marry there. …
Life
The Eliots were a Boston Brahmin family, with roots in England and New England. Eliot's paternal grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, had moved to St. Louis, Missouri, to establish a Unitarian Christian church there. His father, Henry Ware Eliot (1843–1919), was a successful businessman, president and treasurer of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company in St Louis. His mother, Charlotte Champe …
Poetry
For a poet of his stature, Eliot produced a relatively small number of poems. He was aware of this even early in his career. He wrote to J.H. Woods, one of his former Harvard professors, "My reputation in London is built upon one small volume of verse, and is kept up by printing two or three more poems in a year. The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect in their kind, so tha…
Plays
With the important exception of Four Quartets, Eliot directed much of his creative energies after Ash Wednesday to writing plays in verse, mostly comedies or plays with redemptive endings. He was long a critic and admirer of Elizabethan and Jacobean verse drama; witness his allusions to Webster, Thomas Middleton, William Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd in The Waste Land. In a 1933 lecture he said "Every poet would like, I fancy, to be able to think that he had some direct social u…
Literary criticism
Eliot also made significant contributions to the field of literary criticism, and strongly influenced the school of New Criticism. He was somewhat self-deprecating and minimising of his work and once said his criticism was merely a "by-product" of his "private poetry-workshop". But the critic William Empson once said, "I do not know for certain how much of my own mind [Eliot] invented, let alone how much of it is a reaction against him or indeed a consequence of misreading him. H…
Critical reception
The writer Ronald Bush notes that Eliot's early poems like "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", "Portrait of a Lady", "La Figlia Che Piange", "Preludes", and "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" had "[an] effect [that] was both unique and compelling, and their assurance staggered [Eliot's] contemporaries who were privileged to read them in manuscript. [Conrad] Aiken, for example, marveled at 'how sharp and complete and sui generis the whole thing was, from the outset. The …
Influence
Eliot influenced many poets, novelists, and songwriters, including Seán Ó Ríordáin, Máirtín Ó Díreáin, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, Bob Dylan, Hart Crane, William Gaddis, Allen Tate, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Trevor Nunn, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Russell Kirk, George Seferis (who in 1936 published a modern Greek translation of The Waste Land) and James Joyce. T. S. Eliot was a strong influence on 20th-century Caribbean poetry written in English, inclu…
Honours and awards
Below is a partial list of honours and awards received by Eliot or bestowed or created in his honour.
These honours are displayed in order of precedence based on Eliot's nationality and rules of protocol, not awarding date.
• Nobel Prize in Literature "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry" (1948)