ASSIGNMENT 19:
T.S. Eliot, selected poems
Henry Adams described the intellectual challenge of confronting "a world without design," a world in which experience
seemed to have gone beyond the knowledge of the senses, beyond causality, beyond human scope. It would take a heroic act of
intellect to comprehend such a world, Adams implies; and in his own attempt to comprehend it in terms of his life-story,
perhaps Adams managed, at last, to embody that kind of modern heroism.
In his poetry T.S. Eliot confronts the same modern world that Adams describes. The signs of that confrontation are figured
everywhere in the poems: the disconnectedness of Eliot's lines, their fragmentation, makes a vivid contrast with the continuity
of Robert Frost's thinking in poems like "Mowing" and "After Apple-Picking." Also, while Frost's speakers in the dramatic poems
(for example, "Home Burial") may fail to communicate effectively to each other, Eliot's speakers address a still greater failure
of communication. In "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," the speaker feels vastly misunderstood, and will at one point say:
"That's not what I meant at all." That frustration recalls certain figures in Frost's poems. Yet Eliot's character Prufrock goes
still further, imagining himself near the poem's end as nothing more than "a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors
of silent seas." This is alienation carried to its outer limit-of absolute silence.
Moreover Eliot's modern speakers acknowledge the virtual demise of heroism. In the most general terms, the heroic would name
that capacity of the human being to achieve effective agency on the world-historical stage. The hero is an agent of meaningful
change in the world. For American writers after Franklin or Emerson, the heroic has always named that category of self-reliant,
self-made individuals who have the gumption, and both the physical and intellectual power, to oppose a strong majority. Eliot's
poetry signals a profound shift away from that idealism, and acknowledges everywhere the failure, not just of heroic agency,
but of ideas about the individual.
How then does Eliot define modern man? What shapes and defines the identity of this person? One way of approaching such
questions is to pay close attention to Eliot's style. Even on a cursory reading one will notice, perhaps above anything else,
that Eliot's seems a highly learned poetry. That is, it makes liberal reference to countless works of traditional literature:
the Greek and Roman classics, Biblical scripture, Dante, Shakespeare, Tennyson, poets writing in French and German, many
others. As such it's a poetry that achieves a trans-historical as well as a trans-national presence: it's a strikingly
"international style" (a term used by designers to define modernist architecture, but useful here as well). If we think about
it even for a minute, this seems an extraordinary thing. After all, Eliot's speakers seem--on these terms--to embody "the best
that has been thought and said" in Western civilization. They represent the summative achievement of European intellectual
history. Why then are they so disengaged, alienated, bored, and impotent? If modernity has made it possible for a person to
summarize that history, through modern media and educational institutions that disseminate knowledge in more accelerated and
centralized forms than ever before, then why does modern man fail at his heroic tasks?
Another thing one will notice about Eliot's poems is that, in addition to and right alongside of the references to
traditional literature, we find everywhere in the poems references to modern mass society. For Eliot, the modern city, and
London in particular, symbolizes mass society. And what are the results of one's existence in the mass? In "Prufrock" it can
perhaps be seen in the "women who come and go, talking of Michelangelo." They are speaking of an elite-cultural figure, an
artistic hero of the Renaissance; yet in Eliot's poem "Michelangelo" seems to exist on virtually the same plane as the
various "sawdust restaurants," cigarette butts, and other mass cultural places and products. This is a way of observing that
for Eliot the experience of modernity is that of a vast leveling. The achievement of mass society would seem, in this view, to
consist of a valueless culture, in which hierarchical distinctions of worth and substance have evaporated, perhaps into the
"yellow fog" of Eliot's opening images in "Prufrock."
Reading Assignment
- T.S. Eliot, selected poems (pp. 1393-1395).
Writing Assignment
- What does Eliot's title, "The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufock," lead readers to expect? By contrast, what do readers
encounter in the poem?
- Read the (translation of the) Dante quotation Eliot uses as an epigraph to "Prufrock." What does it suggest about
the theme of the poem that follows?
- The speaker in "Prufrock" asks, "Do I dare disturb the universe?"; and later he thinks of moving towards "some
overwhelming question." Does he ever state, or imply, what that "question is"? If yes, what is it? If no, why not?
- How do Eliot's three final lines for "Prufrock" bring that poem's main themes to a (tentative?) conclusion?
- If we were to say that the aged speaker of Eliot's poem "Gerontion" addresses us from "a decayed house" that is
allegorically representative of modern Europe, then what would this poem be saying to its readers?
- What is the perspective of "Gerontion" on possibilities for heroism? Why?
- Reading "The Hollow Men" in the light of the two quotations Eliot uses as epigraphs (one from Conrad's Heart of
Darkness, the other referring to Guy Fawkes, the English revolutionist of 1605), what themes does Eliot emphasize
in this poem?
- Note that in this poem, as elsewhere, Eliot stands quotations from elite cultural texts right alongside those from
popular culture. Comment on the contrastive functions of some of these references in the poem.
- Discuss the ways that Eliot uses lines from "The Lord's Prayer" as a subtext for our understanding of "The Hollow Men."
Other Sites of Interest
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