Exploration of the Works and Themes of T.S. Eliot

Concept of objective correlative

• Hamlet and his problems (1919): here the author explains his conception of the objective correlative, an object, a situation, or a chain of events, which describes a specific emotion or state.
• The Waste Land (1922): a poem that contains fragmentary passages, which seem to belong to only one voice incarnated in many bodies, the one of Tiresias, the Theban prophet of Sophocle’s plays, the knight of the Grail’s legend, who was born as a man and as a woman, and now lives in post-war England. The poem is divided into five sections: The Burial of the Dead, A Game of Chess, The Fire Sermon, Death by Water, What the Thunder said. The central theme of the poem is the contrast between the sterility of the present and the fertility of the past. Referring to his religious influences, Eliot develops a new conception of history. He considers the past as a premise for the present, and for this reason contained in it, just as continuous associations cause the shifts of time and space; he considers the artist tied to his predecessors, because the originality of his works has to deal with all the works that came before him, and the new ones, once out, will also influence the vision of the ones of the past.

Use of myth in Ulysses

• Ulysses, Order and Myth (1923): an essay where Eliot explains the use of the myth to give order to his narration and to perfectly describe the complete loss of control of modernity.
• The Hollow Men (1925): a sequel to The Waste Land

• Murder in the Cathedral (1935): a play about the assassination of Thomas Becket.

• Family Reunion (1939): on a man haunted by the Furies.

Description of The Sacred Wood

• The Sacred Wood: in which an essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” describes the impersonality of art and of the artist, and his sense of the past.