Riassunti letteratura inglese: T.S. Eliot

THOMAS STERNE ELIOT

He was an American poet and expert in philosophy and languages (he learnt also ancient languages as Sanskrit); essayist dramatist and poet. Everything he writes is a face of his career and his own world. His sophisticated ideas reflect on the language and on the verb tenses he uses. He gives an enormous influence upon his generation and he is revolutionized English poetry so much introducing new images that he is won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948.

La Figlia che piange

After the title, there’s a quote by the Aeneid taken by the episode of Dido and Aenea

The title miss-led the comprehension of the meaning of this poem because it is has no relation with the theme, and so it can be considered only an anticipation of the presence of a female character.

He uses verb tenses in a very complicated way even if he is American!

Background: a man and a woman are leaving one another but it is not a reciprocal farewell. Why? because he is leaving her and maybe because he cannot

accept what she offers to him; maybe it is also a recollection of a personal memory of a betrayal (a murder of his feelings and soul), and this can be read in the quote.

Part I:

Urn is an explicit reference to the Ode by Keats. Strong commands with the (can) imperative but he also gives various possibilities to the girl and suggests weave her hair her to and compose a work of art thanks to her movements, Flowers her body and the sunlight (woman becomes an aesthetic element). can represent what the woman is offering to the man and they're symbols of love, life, fertility and rebirth. She is beautiful because she is been hurt and she is showing her pain.

Part II:

I + conditional tense: he imagines a past scene that has caused her I unhappiness. The use of can suggest that it is an episode of his own life and bruised so the man is the artist, alias the poet who is speaking. She is been used and by the man and also by the artist, because he, as artist, has exploited her grief for the purposes of art. Art

seems to have more effect if it shows lifewein suffering and having pain. The use of hides a certain ambiguity and adeliberate confusion in the reader because it can refer either to the man andthe woman or to the poet and the man.

Part III: simple past tenses as if he is remembering the scene. It is autumn and as it isthe season before winter, it can explain that somehow there’ll be a rebirthCompelled my imaginationafter winter. underlines that he is troubled by herI wonder how they shouldvision because she is a mixture of beauty and pain.

have been together I should have lost a gesture and a pose+ (as an artist)specify that if they didn’t leave, the artist wouldn’t have had that work of art.

Sufferings turn life into art and without life and pains there is no art. In thelast two lines the artist feels guilty because he is responsible of hurting thewoman and not respecting her as a person. That is the real act of betrayal.

[The same is for Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare]

and for the painting titled "Ophelia" by Millais]

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

It is a poem which has been written after World War I and dedicated to one of his friends who had been killed during the war. As soon as World War I become dangerous, he moved to London.

Its main theme is the destruction of modern civilization through a new imagery that will have its main high point in "The Waste Land", a place where there are no values, no religions, no beliefs, and people are left with anything. That is the hell of the modern world.

The protagonist never manages to do his love song and that is ironic!

You and I, I a patient etherised upon a table, like Dante and Virgil; and as ether is the gas used to make someone sleep before an operation. Modern city (London) described as if he is having a walk in that city and its description half-deserted streets, muttering retreats, cheap hotels prostitution), sawdust (probable reference to

andrestaurants with oyster-shells.There’s always an overwhelming question to which he cannot answer. And so,he is perplex because it implies an infinite number of questions about meaningof life, which is something enormous for us. This is what actually paralysesPrufrock and all the human beings. These questions he poses let us explore hismind (concept of existentialism).

In the room the women come and go talking about Michelangelo: it is like asing-song rhythm. The women are not actually talking about art, but it is anexercise of conversation to escape from their reality and forget everythingconcerning life. It indicates the futility and superficiality of people at thattime.

Description of the fog as if it was an animal: inanimate things are more aliveThe faces that you meetthat animate human beings! indicates that peoplewear masks when they meet other masked people: that is to say that we donot project our real image, but a false identity (falsity of society!)

For a hundred

indecisions Do I dare?and These lines affirm that he is a man imprisoned in his own thoughts and he cannot do anything because he thinks too much! He is even asking himself if he has the courage to do something! He descend the stair has not the courage to of the room where the woman is, because he has a bald spot in his hair, and he is afraid of people who'll recognise him and will judge him. He is completely paralyzed by people's opinions about his physical appearance, his clothes, and whatever he does. So, does what I do disturb the universe? the overwhelming question returns: That is the main reason why he has visions and revisions. Consequently, life is meaningless and the only thing he can do is drink coffee. pin (when I am Social opinions him like an insect or a butterfly in a collection pinned), but he is not materially pinned, his pins are made of language, phrases and expressions that underline his characteristic in a standard modality. In this world, he is ugly and irrelevant.

because society assigned him this label. How should I begin? / If I should speak.../ Should I have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? / should I have the courage to do the love song? He is I'm no prophet, wondering about everything, but so he doesn't know what he the Eternal Footman will do. The only thing he knows is that is waiting for him snickering and laughing in a nasty way because the footman is the servant of Death saying that you'll have to go out from the room sooner or later. He is afraid because he cannot escape Death and its Footman. Prince Hamlet He is really confused and full of doubts, but he is not at all! Why? Because Hamlet is associated with the kind of person who cannot take any decisions at all and who cannot even act on his decisions. How's to be an old man now? eat a peach? Part his hair behind? Walk on the beach? Can he Have pants rolled? its None of the woman speaks to him, the mermaids

too!Mermaids: here’s a reference to another kind of Sea, where men are naked without any kind of value. That is the modern human condition.

He is woken up by human voices.

THIS POEM CAN BE CONSIDERED AS A DIAGNOSY OF ELIOT’S MIND ITSELF AND ALL HUMAN MINDS.