T.S. Eliot:

Points of Departure

Some difficulties with T.S. Eliot's poetry

 (taken from Robert DiYanni's essay,"T.S. Eliot" in Modern American Poets: Their Voices and Visions)

• The heavy use of allusion• borrowings from foreign languages• The structural mode of juxtapositon• mystical and paradoxical ideas about time, death, and

spirituality• references to history, philosophy, and literature

    --especailly medieval and Renaissance drama, classical literature of Greece  and Rome

• utilizing those references within the context of the poetry

Difficulties, 2

• fragmentary nature of the poetry with its lack of connection between sections, stanzas, lines, and sentences--unity and coherence must in many ways be supplied by the reader.

• highly imagistic• the poems often assume musical structures• juxtaposing crude and disgusting details of the

present with the more wholesome images of the past.

• poetry should reflect the complexities and ambiquities of experience

Difficulties, 3

• the poetry, like music, doesn't always require rational understanding; a poem can be apprehended emotionally if not comprehended intellectually

• Eliot's belief that poetry should be difficult and that great poetry need not be understood in every line and detail to be appreciated

Eliot Pro or Con

• The poem has been described as THE modernist masterpiece.

• DiYanni claims it is the “single most widely read and most frequently analyzed American poem of the twentieth century.

• “It is, for many, the most challenging poem of the century, and probably the most important.”

• “The Wasteland is important not only as a poetic achievement in its own right, but also as a remarkable influence on an entire generation of poets. . . . “

• Perkins claims the poem is endowed with “imaginative intensity and suggestion” “almost visionary intensity.

Eliot Pro and Con, 2

• Has been described as a “mad medley”

• Amy Lowell called it a “piece of tripe”

• Parasitic on past styles

• Formless

• Academic

• Anti-democratic

• Defeatist

Some Points of Departure

• “. . . No previous poem gave so vivid an impression of the contemporary, urban metropolis.” –Perkins

• The technique resembles avante-garde cinematic montage

• Fragmentation, juxtaposition, use of vignettes• The use of memory to contrast past with present

—Grail Legends, The Golden Bough and fertility rituals

Points of Departure, 2

• Modern Sexuality

• Cultural Decay/Cultural Exhaustion

• Possibilities for regeneration/Hope

• Experimental Poetry