Riassunti letteratura inglese: T.S. Eliot

Thomas Sterne Eliot

Thomas Sterne Eliot was an American poet and expert in philosophy and languages (he learnt also ancient languages such 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 revolutionized English poetry so much, introducing new images that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948.

La Figlia che Piange

Introduction and background

After the title, there’s a quote from the Aeneid taken from the episode of Dido and Aeneas. The title misleads the comprehension of the meaning of this poem because it 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 she weave her hair and compose a work of art thanks to her movements, flowers, her body, and the sunlight. The woman becomes an aesthetic element. Flowers 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 has been hurt and she is showing her pain.

Part II

"I + conditional tense": he imagines a past scene that has caused her unhappiness. The use of "can" suggests that it is an episode of his own life and so the man is the artist, alias the poet who is speaking. She has been used by the man and also by the artist because he, as an artist, has exploited her grief for the purposes of art. Art seems to have more effect if it shows life in suffering and having pain. The use of ambiguity hides a certain ambiguity and a deliberate confusion in the reader because it can refer either to the man and the woman or to the poet and the man.

Part III

The use of simple past tenses is as if he is remembering the scene. It is autumn and as it is the season before winter, it can explain that somehow there will be a rebirth after winter. "Compelled my imagination" underlines that he is troubled by her vision because she is a mixture of beauty and pain. "I wonder how they should have been together I should have lost a gesture and a pose" (as an artist).