T.S. Eliot - Keywords

T.S. Eliot - Keywords

1. Images

   • separated images, fragments of modern life (give realistic view of life)
   • "sense of sudden liberation...from time limits and space limits" (Ezra Pound)
   • compress allusions and evoke several levels of experience simultaneously

2. Concentration

   • difficult reading, a challenging strategy, which helps the reader to play an active role
     • Eliot wrote: "Poetry in our civilization must be difficiult."

3. Victiorian Unity has been lost in the modern world

4. Ellipsis and Juxtaposition

   • logical links missing in on or more sentences
   • opposition of images

5. ELIOT'S PURPOSE

   • to provide the reader with a multi-faceted vision of reality, united by the mythical frame

6. OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE

   • "A set of object, a situation, a chain of events" suggesting a particular emotion in order to evoke a disired emotional response in the reader
     • as the poet cannot communicate his emotions directly to the reader has to find some object suggestive of it in order to evoke the same emotion he felt
   • is a technique
     • Eliot uses also "association of ideas" as technique

7. STYLE AND LANGUAGE

   • innovative
   • rejection of the traditional poetical images and structures
   • introduction of symbolical images often out of any context
     • quotations in 6 languages and allusions (sometimes obscure) to philosophical and religious traditions
     • open to various interpretations
   • reader must focus on the symbolic power of the images and gradually the message will become clear
   • free verse

8. THEMES

   • meaningful link with the past which makes look the present more squallid
   • emptiness of modern life
     • existential void which cannot be filled
     • people may try to fight against it by looking for temporary fillers like love, religion...but every turns out to be vain
   • alienation
     • = feeling of estrangement from society
     • common to modern man
   • incommunicability
     • = we live in crowded cities but don't know one anothers
   • quest
     • = represents the destiny of modern man always looking/waiting for someone
     • symbolic spiritual piligrimage to restore hope
   • The Damaged Psyche of Humanity
   • STERILITY
     • feelings and emotions no longer possible
     • natural
       • = land is dry and unfruitful
     • social
     • spiritual
       • lack in any beliefs or values
   • nihilism

9. social criticism

10. MYTH

    • only device to provide unity