TS ELIOT

The first phase of the Eliot's poetry is given by the theme of the loneliness of the man, abandoned by a God in which he doesn't believe anymore, extraneous to the society tha 141b14b t surrounds him. The picture of a society in decadence, deprived of ethic, incapable to act, alienated.

His main work, before his conversion, is "the waste land" (1922): it talk about the failure of man to find a reason to live. The aridity of the land is a symbol of the aridity in the life of a man without God. Its poetry describes a world deprive of meaning, in which it doesn't follow the birth of new certainties to the collapse of the traditional values.

This work expresses vividly his conception of the sterility of modern society in contrast with societies of the past. Eliot believed that modern society lacked a vital sense of community. The waste land of the poem is modern European culture, which had come too far from its spiritual roots. In Eliot's poem, human beings are isolated. Because of the variety and relative obscurity of Eliot's allusions, readers must work through the poem's footnotes several times to appreciate it, but the general impression of isolation, decadence, and sterility comes through in every reading. He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948.

Eliot uses myth, structuring his poem in terms of the Grail quest. Through the use of myth, he is able to make his poem more universal and give his subject the importance of an epic.

The Waste Land is engulfed in myth. However, it seems more likely that the use of myth is very deliberately used to elevate the stature of the work. It is especially through the Mythical allusion that the contrast between present and past appears: to the meaningless, to the "waste" life of the present, Eliot opposes allusion of the Holy Grail , a metaphor for men's search for spiritual salvation. Eliot alludes to various ancient religions as well as to the medieval legend of the Holy Grail, finding in them the common thread of the mythic cycle of the death and resurrection of gods. More specifically, he found the story of the Fisher King, a mythic figure whose loss of power or fertility produces a corresponding drought in his kingdom. Only through the death of this king and his replacement by a new, young, and vigorous knight can the land be restored to fertility.

In 1917 Eliot published "Prufrok" , a harvest of poetries that descibes life in a world that has no illusions o beliefs. The main character has none of the qualities that can make him proud of living.

In 1927 he wrote "Ash Wednesday", a poem of regeneration and repentance.

His greatest poem after his conversion is "Four Quartets", it represent the end of his journey from desperation to salvation.

In 1935 he published "Murder in Chatedral", the action develops in Canterbury in 1170: the main character is Thomas Beckett, an archbishop returns after seven years of exile in France. He is committed to cure the dissension that divides the church and the state, but he is opposed by the ecclesiastical party represented by his priests and the reality party represented by the officers of Henry II of England. Its internal conflict is express from  four figures , that represent: the love of the pleasures, the desire of the power, the reasons for the feudal barons, the pride of the holiness. Beckett rejects them all and the morning of native preaches to the people in the cathedral of Cantherbury. Attacked by the king's riders sent to kill him, he doesn't try to run away and he is murdered. The riders justify their action, the priests thank God that has given them another Saint to the church, the people full of dismayed dark invokes the divine mercy.

Eliot was the main character of the "Age of Anxiety" and of the twenties: he was an influential poet, a playwright and literaty critic. He doesn't express his own feelings, but he is a medium for other people's emotion.

Also Eliot was influenced by Bradley, that was a philosopher and according to him there is a deep connection between religion and morality; by Baudelaire about the french symbolism; by Dante's Divina Commedia because it is a long allegorical poem and Dante represents the better example of spiritual intellectual, it represents what he would have liked to be; but he was influenced above all by Ezra Pound: an american imagist poet. According to him feelings and the emotional response of the reader should resoult from the juxaposition of images.

Eliot moreover introduced the "correlative objective", he believed that the poetry had to be impersonal, but it had to transmit something however and it's the image that transmits feelings. According to which the individual emotions of the poet owe to universally objectify him in perceivable concrete images.