Addresses fragmentation and alienation characteristic of modern culture
General crisis of western culture
Seeking redemption in the cultural past
Looking back and remembering a time when European culture was whole and operative
Nostalgia
Major statement of modernist poetics
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Stylistically
Allusion
A variety of verse forms
Quotations in different languages
Collage of poetic fragments
Recalls the great forms of previous tradition
Creates an impossible elegy and a modernist collage
Broken free verse
Secondary criticism
I.A Richards
Praised Eliot for describing the shared post-war 'sense of desolation, of uncertainty, of futility, of the groundlessness of aspirations'
Sandra M Gilbert
Central theme: grief for lost male friend = poem elegiac in manner
'Those are pearls that were his eyes'
Eliot as an 'impassioned witness' to the post-war devastation
He is also a mourner, voicing the grief of the masses yet at the same time standing outside of their grief
'Crowds of people walking round in a ring'
Because he is a mourner driven by the need for consolation characteristic of writers of elegies, the speaker deploys conventional features of the pastoral elegy
The ironic discrepancy between nature's endurance as manifested in the returning spring and his own sense of mortal loss, 'April is the cruellest month, breeding...'
World itself debilitated by the loss of his friend
I had not thought death had undone so many'
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Themes
Infidelity
Changing nature of gender roles
Fragmentation of the psyche of
humanity
Literary history
Motifs
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Fragmentation
Demonstrates the fragmented human psyche
Juxtapose literary texts against one another
Barrage of sensory perceptions helps to recreate the sense of the shattered post-war human psyche
Symbols
Rats
Water (Death by water repeated)
haunted by literal body - Pearls that were his eyes
Unreal city
Paris, London
London takes its place as another 'unreal city' in a line of doomed metropolises and collapsed civilisations