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T. S. Eliot'S Modernism in Thewaste Land: Asha F. Solomon
T. S. Eliot'S Modernism in Thewaste Land: Asha F. Solomon
ABSTRACT
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was born in St. Louis, Missouri, of an old New England
family. He was educated at Harvard and did graduate work in philosophy at the Sorbonne,
Harvard, and Merton College, Oxford. He settled in England, where he was for a time a
schoolmaster and a bank clerk, and eventually literary editor for the publishing house Faber &
Faber. Later, he became a director of this famous publishing house.During the seventeen years
of its publication (1922-1939), he edited the exclusive and influential literary journal Criterion.
In 1927, Eliot became a British citizen and about the same time entered the Anglican Church.
Eliot has been one of the most daring innovators of the twentieth-century poetry. Never
compromising either with the public or indeed with language itself, he has followed his belief
that poetry should aim at a representation of the complexities of modern civilization in language
and that such representation necessarily leads to difficult poetry. Despite this difficulty his
influence on modern poetic diction has been immense. Eliot is a poet from the Modernist period,
which is from around World War I to World War II. The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot’s masterpiece,
is a long, complex poem about the psychological and cultural crisis that came with the loss of
moral and cultural identity after World War I. When it was first published, the poem was
considered radically experimental. Eliot dispenses with traditional verse form. He presents
sordid images of popular culture with erudite allusions to classical and ancient literature and
myths. The title itself indicates Eliot’s attitude toward his contemporary society, as he uses the
idea of a dry and sterile wasteland as a metaphor for a Europe devastated by war and desperate
for spiritual replenishment.
The World War from 1914 to 1918 was a defining moment in the world history. It not only had a
lasting and profound effect on the literary sensibilities of a generation but also gave a new
dimension to theirsociety.The war brought about a greatsurge of literary output. Poets such as
Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Ivor Gurney created a new form of poetry, as they
attempted to give expression to the horrors of war. Literature became the key medium through
which the experience of modern warfare was articulated. Writers of the period were acutely
aware of the sense that they were significant agents of a modernist movement. Poets such as Ezra
Pound and TS Eliot, and writers such as James Joyce, DH Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, were
profoundly self-conscious about what they were trying to achieve.
In April 1914, just three months before the outbreak of war, a young American poet from
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Harvard arrived in England. TS Eliot was already emerging as a significant poetic presence,
having been identified by American poet Ezra Pound, who was to remain a close friend. In 1915
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his first significant poem, The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, was published, but it was The
Waste Land, published in 1922, that Eliot is most known for. Widely regarded as the most
influential poem of the 20th century, the 432-line poem is a work steeped in the shadow of
World WarI. The title of the poem is an allusion to the devastation of the war and the poem
itself, a metaphor for the devastated landscape of post-war Europe.But the First World War also
it, “The poem is not the critic‟s own and not the author‟s (it is detached from the author at birth
and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it). The poem belongs to
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the public.” The Waste Land made use of allusion, quotation (in several languages), a variety of
verse forms, and a collage of poetic fragments to create the sense of speaking for an entire
culture in crisis; it was quickly accepted as the essential statement of that crisis and the epitome
of a modernist poem.
borrowed fragments make up the poem.He wrote that the parallels Joyce draws between his own
characters and those of Homer‟s Odyssey constitute a “mythical method,” which had “the
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REFERENCES
i. Bergenzi, Bernard. T. S. Eliot, Collier Books, New York New York, 1972
ii. Cuddy, Lois A., and David H. Hirsch, eds. Critical Essays on T. S. Eliot, The Waste
Land. G. K. Hall & Co., 1991.
iii. Kenner, Hugh, ed. T. S. Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays. Prentice Hall Inc., 1962.
iv. Martin, Graham. ed. Eliot in perspective. Humanities Press, 1970.
v. Ricks, Christopher. T. S. Eliot and Prejudice.University of California Press, 1988.
vi. Unger, Leonard. T. S. Eliot. University of Minnesota Press, 1970.
vii. Pericles Lewis's Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2007), pp. 129-
151.
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