t.s. eliot_s voice and structure

7/27/2019 T.S. Eliot_s Voice and Structure

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T. S. Eliot: Tradition, Language, Voices and Structure

To begin with, the idea of Myth is extremely relevant in Eliots work since he uses it

throughout it. In the Waste Land the Quest Myth is at the core of it. Moreover, in the 1919 essay

The tradition and the individual talent, Eliot praises the literary tradition and the sense of

continuity within it, reinforcing the idea of the importance of the literary past and its integration to

the contemporary poetry. However, he argues that the literary knowledge must be used inmoderation and its means must be the enlightenment of the reader. In Waste Land, for instance, we

see how tradition is mixed with scenes from modern life (collage).

So Eliot criticized Romantics because all changed with their appearance. They provoked

disintegration with their emphasis on Emotion. He rewrites the canon becoming more interested in

tradition. He pursues the tradition of the poetic language performed by Wordsworthetc. Eliot as

well as poets like Yeats or Wordsworth fear isolation. The isolation refers to the way a complicated

or elaborated language that poets use may isolate them from the people because they might not

understand or know it. So, he praises the Metaphysical poets who made no division between

feeling/emotion and intellect/ thought. He refers to it as a unity of being which involves no

separation between important aspects of human mind.

Eliot talks about a different poetic language but still takes into account the revolution ofpoetic language performed by Wordsworth (as a Man speaking to men). Even so, the image of the

Romantic poet is different from the image of the man speaking to men, even though Wordsworth

means it. The Romantic poet distinctively has a special power that is visionary and prophetic. Eliot

rejects all this kind of powers. He performs a de-mystification of the figure of the poet. The poem is

the only way to get in contact with a disillusioned post war world. The poem is the hope that

remains.

Moreover, the poem does not represent reality or any kind of it. It is just a poetic game and

the poet only expresses a state of mind.

In thePreludes, Eliot uses a simple and ordinary language; however this language is filled

with skepticism and irony and is used not in an ordinary way.

Eliot wants to create an impact on the reader with his images, thus, for instance the idea that

the evening settles down it is not ordinary use of language though in this context. It adds

normality and calmness to the idea of evening after a time of some turbulent happenings.

Comparing it with the first line of thePrelude IIthe morning comes to consciousness we have

a contrast between an unconscious and a progressively conscious lyric voice.

There is a parallelism between thePreludes IandIIand the beginning of the The Love Song

of J. Alfred Prufrock. In the beginning ofThe Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, there is a I and a

You, however in the beginning of the Preludes there is a alienation and a progressive conscious

lyric voice in the Prelude II and an extremely conscious one in the Prelude III.

The final images and then the lightning of the lamps and the gap between the previous

lines and the last lines is also used to create a certain effect on the reader, this is mainly a contrastbetween the natural and the artificial world. However, the image of the artificial world is not

necessarily a negative vision towards the modern life. It is just a glimpse into the reality and an

attempt to enter the readers consciousness throughout this image.

Moreover, the use of the image the burnt-out ends of smoky days is also very interesting. It

refers to the concentrated definition of everyday modern life and the passing of time. It refers to the

life quickly and meaningless burning/wasting itself as the cigarettes. The days in a industrialized

world that burn quickly like cigarettes because of monotony and the damaging effects

industrialization. Burn out suggesting also fragmentation of human life.

Fragmentation is very recurrent in Eliots poetry, as we see in Waste land that many

fragments which echo an academic work or a canonical literary text. For instance, the excerpt at the

begginig of the Waste Land is from the Satiricon of Petronius. The Cumaean Sibyl to whom theexcerpt refers is the prophetic old woman (the most famous of the Sibyls) from the Greek

mythology.


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Mythology plays a relevant part in Eliots creation. The Quest myth is present in the Waste

Land, as the Fisher King quests a knight to find a grail or the Journey of the Magi in the The

Hollow Men.

Moreover, Eliot mixes natural images with the industrial/ artificial ones as in for instance:

steams and stamps and withered leaves about your feet/ And newspapers from vacant lots?. The

result of this image shows the mechanization of natural things. The natural objects are turned and

treated involuntarily as machines. The newspapers are like leaves and the horses, steam. Itrepresents the artificiality of the natural world in the industrialized city and the progressive

mechanization and dehumanization.

It is common and ordinary language that the reader will instantly understand, however this

language is used in an uncommon way- a de-familiarization is produced. It is the artificiality

invading the natural life.

There are three periods in T.S. Eliot's life as a writer, each of them characterised by one or

other influences. Nonetheless, regarding the lyric voice, we have many coincidences among them.

For instance, in most poems, like The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock second period, The

Waste Landthird period or Journey of the Magi fourth period, we do not find a single lyric

voice, but fragments of different voices belonging to different entities and delivering a diversity of

consciousnesses that in their interrelation make it possible to glimpse reality. Thus, Eliot's poetryfragments all kinds of bodies, independently of their characteristics, which makes these

characteristics, for instance gender, ambiguous.

The fragmentation of voices brings about, or rather is brought about by the fragmentation of

life and scenes: sordid parts of a city, burnt-out cigarette ends, the gesture of taking a hat, the

feeling of having hundred indecisions.... These scenes and points of view can be combined so that

order emerges from the whole poem helping us glimpse the reality beyond the fragments.

There is a predominant self-awareness, sometimes extreme, which is emphasised by the

impossibility of deepening in the relationship with other individuals. Furthermore, the use of

quotations in some poems spreads the number of voices. These quotations serve to Eliot's modernist

purposes: for instance in The Waste Land, the those are pearls that were his eyes comes from

The Tempest, but the magic so gracefully painted in Shakespeare's work is here transformed in a

trifling, vulgar act. His voices are therefore usually plunged in modernist insights, like irony when

comparing for instance decayed present and glorious past in The Waste Land, the predominance of

decayed settings, anti-romanticism, pessimism like in the last verse of The Song of Alfred

Prufrock when human voices wake up, we drown, as if the heroes were only possible in

dreams, shallowness we are superficial actor in our relationships with others,

Sometimes the reader faces dialogues and sometimes dramatic monologues. In Portrait of a

Lady and in La Figlia che Piange, for instance, there are dialogues between poetic voices, one

from a male and one from a female, the female is usually described and mangled by male voices,

who at the same time, are sometimes distorted by the females in The Love Song of Alfred J.

Prufrock, when a voice says of their eyes: eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase.The structure of Eliot's poems is connected with their essence. In The Waste Land it

emphasises the circularity of time. He uses chiasmuses and pastiches that confer originality to the

poems, parallelisms, repetitions used for instance to introduce dullness in the Preludes, constant

alliterations to emphasise or to create a special atmosphere, quotations that destroy the possibility of

there being a narrative poetic voice, internal rhymes that add a particular melody to the poem... all

these formal devices go hand in hand with content; its function and effect cannot be separated from

the content of the words individually, of groups of words and of the whole poem. In fact, Eliot

himself said that Poetry begins, I dare say, with a savage beating a drum in a jungle, and it retains

that essential of percussion and rhythm. There is also place for cacophony in his poetry, like in the

case of Sweeney Agonistes' Hoo ha ha Hoo ha ha Hoo Hoo Hoo KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK. He used mainly blank verse butsometimes also free verse.

In terms of structure, it happens the same with poetic voices: it is fragmented. In this way,


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we have The Waste Land, which changes from blank verse, to song, to what seems to be speech...

t.s. eliot_s voice and structure

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