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T.S. Eliot Exemplar Essay - Module B HSC English Advanced

The following essay was written by Fenna Kroon, Project's English Resourcer!

Fenna Kroon

94 in English Advanced

English Advanced Module B Exemplar Essay - T.S. Eliot

Module b essay question.

“When you engage with works of quality you often feel, and continue to feel, that your internal planes have shifted, and that things will never quite be the same again.”

To what extent does this statement resonate with your considered perspective of TS Eliot’s poetry？

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HSC English Exemplar Essay Response

Good literature has the power to take us as readers on a journey with the author. This is evident in TS Eliot’s modernist suit of poetry TS Eliot: Selected Poetry, particularly ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ (Love Song) (1915) as well as ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925). These texts and their use of literary devices provide readers with a glimpse into another perspective from a time long gone. As a result, our own views and internal planes are challenged and altered. This change is permanent, exposing readers to ideas beyond their own. Thus, these poems have shaped the views of countless individuals and will continue to do so to a large extent.

When confronted with literature that is challenging and engaging, the individual has no option but to ponder its central messages. In ‘Love Song’, Eliot establishes this through prolific use of the Flanuer, connoisseur of the streets and a lonely, observing wanderer. Created within a context of mass urbanisation and mechanisation, this figure walks through new streets and society that is continually changing. Personally, this poem was finished shortly after the death of Eliot’s close friend, Jean Verdenel in the Gallipoli campaign in 1915 and hence this poem encapsulates the futility of conflict as well as modern society. This is evident in the opening lines as the flaneur says “Let us go then you and I / as the evening is spread out against the sky / like a patient etherised on a table.” This stark and confronting juxtaposition mirrors that of the title where ‘love song’, with musical and romantic connotations, is juxtaposed with ‘J Alfred Prufrock’ as a proper noun. This consequently results in readers immediately feeling uncomfortable as their expectations for what to expect within traditional poetry are crushed. Exacerbated through repetition as he writes “There will be time, there will be time.”, Eliot comments on how his society has made him passive, procrastinating the search for meaning with temporary satisfactions. He further comments on British high society, questioning whether “Should I, after tea and cake and ices, have the strength to force this moment to its crisis?”. Here, Eliot and the flaneur are begging themselves to find the strength to create their own meaning in society. Thus, they reach out to the audience to change their ways，acting as a cautionary tale for the ambivalence the two experience. Finally, this is exemplified as Eliot writes “I have seen moments of my greatness flicker” and the visual connotation of achievements as flickering like a candle indicate how Eliot believes that a modernist society inhibits individuals from being their own person and finding meaning. As John Xiros Cooper so effectively summarised, “[modernist society] make us passively abject.” This highlights how Eliot’s context minimised his ability to find peace and understanding. Within a world of upheaval, the individual becomes lost. Reading this as a contemporary audience, it is impossible to ignore our own suffocating society of change. Consequently, this poem allows for readers to understand the futility of their attempts of finding the meaning of life and existence. This ultimately shifts their internal understanding irrevocably and unchangingly.

Further, the futility of life and religion leave readers with no guidance or advice in finding continuity. This is evident in Eliot’s The Hollow Men, which uses an extended metaphor of the river Styx (the purgatorial border between life and death) and intertextual references to establish the meaningless nature of a life without faith. After suffering a nervous breakdown and institutionalisation in 1921, this poem is a manifestation of this desolation and pain. Evident as he writes “This is the dead land. This is the cactus land.” the allusion to Dante’s Divine Comedies, a text discussing hell and purgatory, it becomes evident that the setting of the poem is one of indecision and judgement. This is further established through the epigraph alluding to Guy Fawkes, “A penny for the old guy”and to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as he writes “Mistah Kurtz - he dead”. Both these allusions discuss legacy and how you’re remembered once you die. Fawke’s death is celebrated by children to this day, with Mr Kurtz repenting on his deathbed, begging “What have I done?”. Consequently, Eliot’s inclusion of these two epigraphs at the beginning of his poem create lingering questions of what death means and what an unsatisfying life means. Hence, as he writes “We are the Hollow men. We are the stuffed men.”, the inclusive language of ‘we’ draws all readers into the discussion of whether they’ve lived a worthy life. Eliot links this to religious pursuits as he writes “Lips that should kiss / form prayers to broken stone”. This alludes to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, comparing their romance to the paradoxical nature of religion. Providing both a mechanism for damnation in Hell as well as eternal salvation，Eliot questions whether a religious life would in any form change his circumstance. Xiros Cooper effectively expands on this, arguing that “We are not surprised when it ends with a defeated stammer”. Essentially, Eliot’s consistent allusions to other texts and metaphors to being ‘hollow’ create a questioning persona surrounding life and religion and its influence on judgement. Consequently, readers are forced to go on this journey with Eliot as they engage with this poem, considering their own answers relating to life, death and purgatory. And, once these questions are in your head, they are impossible to get out.

Having considered Eliot’s suite as a whole，it is evident that his poetry impacts readers on a fundamental level because it discusses issues pertinent to everyone. This is particularly true for The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Hollow Men, discussing the dangers of a changing society and purgatory itself respectively. As a result, the reader’s understanding of themselves and their broader society is fundamentally and permanently altered.

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Poems & Poets

Tradition and the Individual Talent

BY T. S. Eliot

Introduction

Often hailed as the successor to poet-critics such as John Dryden, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot’s literary criticism informs his poetry just as his experiences as a poet shape his critical work. Though famous for insisting on “objectivity” in art, Eliot’s essays actually map a highly personal set of preoccupations, responses and ideas about specific authors and works of art, as well as formulate more general theories on the connections between poetry, culture and society. Perhaps his best-known essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” was first published in 1919 and soon after included in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920). Eliot attempts to do two things in this essay: he first redefines “tradition” by emphasizing the importance of history to writing and understanding poetry, and he then argues that poetry should be essentially “impersonal,” that is separate and distinct from the personality of its writer. Eliot’s idea of tradition is complex and unusual, involving something he describes as “the historical sense” which is a perception of “the pastness of the past” but also of its “presence.” For Eliot, past works of art form an order or “tradition”; however, that order is always being altered by a new work which modifies the “tradition” to make room for itself. This view, in which “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past,” requires that a poet be familiar with almost all literary history—not just the immediate past but the distant past and not just the literature of his or her own country but the whole “mind of Europe.” Eliot’s second point is one of his most famous and contentious. A poet, Eliot maintains, must “self-sacrifice” to this special awareness of the past; once this awareness is achieved, it will erase any trace of personality from the poetry because the poet has become a mere medium for expression. Using the analogy of a chemical reaction, Eliot explains that a “mature” poet’s mind works by being a passive “receptacle” of images, phrases and feelings which are combined, under immense concentration, into a new “art emotion.” For Eliot, true art has nothing to do with the personal life of the artist but is merely the result of a greater ability to synthesize and combine, an ability which comes from deep study and comprehensive knowledge. Though Eliot’s belief that “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality” sprang from what he viewed as the excesses of Romanticism, many scholars have noted how continuous Eliot’s thought—and the whole of Modernism—is with that of the Romantics’; his “impersonal poet” even has links with John Keats, who proposed a similar figure in “the chameleon poet.” But Eliot’s belief that critical study should be “diverted” from the poet to the poetry shaped the study of poetry for half a century, and while “Tradition and the Individual Talent” has had many detractors, especially those who question Eliot’s insistence on canonical works as standards of greatness, it is difficult to overemphasize the essay’s influence. It has shaped generations of poets, critics and theorists and is a key text in modern literary criticism.

In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to “the tradition” or to “a tradition”; at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of So-and-so is “traditional” or even “too traditional.” Seldom, perhaps, does the word appear except in a phrase of censure. If otherwise, it is vaguely approbative, with the implication, as to the work approved, of some pleasing archaeological reconstruction. You can hardly make the word agreeable to English ears without this comfortable reference to the reassuring science of archaeology.

Certainly the word is not likely to appear in our appreciations of living or dead writers. Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius. We know, or think we know, from the enormous mass of critical writing that has appeared in the French language the critical method or habit of the French; we only conclude (we are such unconscious people) that the French are “more critical” than we, and sometimes even plume ourselves a little with the fact, as if the French were the less spontaneous. Perhaps they are; but we might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism. One of the facts that might come to light in this process is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles any one else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity.

Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to any one who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not onesided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.

In a peculiar sense he will be aware also that he must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past. I say judged, not amputated, by them; not judged to be as good as, or worse or better than, the dead; and certainly not judged by the canons of dead critics. It is a judgment, a comparison, in which two things are measured by each other. To conform merely would be for the new work not really to conform at all; it would not be new, and would therefore not be a work of art. And we do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value—a test, it is true, which can only be slowly and cautiously applied, for we are none of us infallible judges of conformity. We say: it appears to conform, and is perhaps individual, or it appears individual, and many conform; but we are hardly likely to find that it is one and not the other.

To proceed to a more intelligible exposition of the relation of the poet to the past: he can neither take the past as a lump, an indiscriminate bolus, nor can he form himself wholly on one or two private admirations, nor can he form himself wholly upon one preferred period. The first course is inadmissible, the second is an important experience of youth, and the third is a pleasant and highly desirable supplement. The poet must be very conscious of the main current, which does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations. He must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. He must be aware that the mind of Europe—the mind of his own country—a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind—is a mind which changes, and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route , which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen. That this development, refinement perhaps, complication certainly, is not, from the point of view of the artist, any improvement. Perhaps not even an improvement from the point of view of the psychologist or not to the extent which we imagine; perhaps only in the end based upon a complication in economics and machinery. But the difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show.

Some one said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know.

I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my programme for the métier of poetry. The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim which can be rejected by appeal to the lives of poets in any pantheon. It will even be affirmed that much learning deadens or perverts poetic sensibility. While, however, we persist in believing that a poet ought to know as much as will not encroach upon his necessary receptivity and necessary laziness, it is not desirable to confine knowledge to whatever can be put into a useful shape for examinations, drawing-rooms, or the still more pretentious modes of publicity. Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum. What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.

What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science. I, therefore, invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide.

Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. If we attend to the confused cries of the newspaper critics and the susurrus of popular repetition that follows, we shall hear the names of poets in great numbers; if we seek not Blue-book knowledge but the enjoyment of poetry, and ask for a poem, we shall seldom find it. I have tried to point out the importance of the relation of the poem to other poems by other authors, and suggested the conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written. The other aspect of this Impersonal theory of poetry is the relation of the poem to its author. And I hinted, by an analogy, that the mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one not precisely in any valuation of “personality,” not being necessarily more interesting, or having “more to say,” but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations.

The analogy was that of the catalyst. When the two gases previously mentioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected; has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.

The experience, you will notice, the elements which enter the presence of the transforming catalyst, are of two kinds: emotions and feelings. The effect of a work of art upon the person who enjoys it is an experience different in kind from any experience not of art. It may be formed out of one emotion, or may be a combination of several; and various feelings, inhering for the writer in particular words or phrases or images, may be added to compose the final result. Or great poetry may be made without the direct use of any emotion whatever: composed out of feelings solely. Canto XV of the Inferno (Brunetto Latini) is a working up of the emotion evident in the situation; but the effect, though single as that of any work of art, is obtained by considerable complexity of detail. The last quatrain gives an image, a feeling attaching to an image, which “came,” which did not develop simply out of what precedes, but which was probably in suspension in the poet’s mind until the proper combination arrived for it to add itself to. The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

If you compare several representative passages of the greatest poetry you see how great is the variety of types of combination, and also how completely any semi-ethical criterion of “sublimity” misses the mark. For it is not the “greatness,” the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts. The episode of Paolo and Francesca employs a definite emotion, but the intensity of the poetry is something quite different from whatever intensity in the supposed experience it may give the impression of. It is no more intense, furthermore, than Canto XXVI, the voyage of Ulysses, which has not the direct dependence upon an emotion. Great variety is possible in the process of transmutation of emotion: the murder of Agamemnon, or the agony of Othello, gives an artistic effect apparently closer to a possible original than the scenes from Dante. In the Agamemnon , the artistic emotion approximates to the emotion of an actual spectator; in Othello to the emotion of the protagonist himself. But the difference between art and the event is always absolute; the combination which is the murder of Agamemnon is probably as complex as that which is the voyage of Ulysses. In either case there has been a fusion of elements. The ode of Keats contains a number of feelings which have nothing particular to do with the nightingale, but which the nightingale, partly, perhaps, because of its attractive name, and partly because of its reputation, served to bring together.

The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: for my meaning is, that the poet has, not a “personality” to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality.

I will quote a passage which is unfamiliar enough to be regarded with fresh attention in the light—or darkness—of these observations:

And now methinks I could e’en chide myself For doating on her beauty, though her death Shall be revenged after no common action. Does the silkworm expend her yellow labours For thee? For thee does she undo herself? Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships For the poor benefit of a bewildering minute? Why does yon fellow falsify highways, And put his life between the judge’s lips, To refine such a thing—keeps horse and men To beat their valours for her? . . .

In this passage (as is evident if it is taken in its context) there is a combination of positive and negative emotions: an intensely strong attraction toward beauty and an equally intense fascination by the ugliness which is contrasted with it and which destroys it. This balance of contrasted emotion is in the dramatic situation to which the speech is pertinent, but that situation alone is inadequate to it. This is, so to speak, the structural emotion, provided by the drama. But the whole effect, the dominant tone, is due to the fact that a number of floating feelings, having an affinity to this emotion by no means superficially evident, have combined with it to give us a new art emotion.

It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life. One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him. Consequently, we must believe that “emotion recollected in tranquillity” is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not “recollected,” and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is “tranquil” only in that it is a passive attending upon the event. Of course this is not quite the whole story. There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him “personal.” Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

δ δε νους ισως Θειοτερον τι και απαθες εστιν

This essay proposes to halt at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism, and confine itself to such practical conclusions as can be applied by the responsible person interested in poetry. To divert interest from the poet to the poetry is a laudable aim: for it would conduce to a juster estimation of actual poetry, good and bad. There are many people who appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in verse, and there is a smaller number of people who can appreciate technical excellence. But very few know when there is an expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.

The 1948 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, T.S. Eliot is highly distinguished as a poet, a literary critic, a dramatist, an editor, and a publisher. In 1910 and 1911, while still a college student, he wrote “ The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock ,” published in Poetry magazine, and other poems that are landmarks in the history of modern literature. Eliot’s most notable works include The Waste ...

A Short Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’

A reading of Eliot’s classic essay by Dr Oliver Tearle

‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ was first published in 1919 in the literary magazine The Egoist . It was published in two parts, in the September and December issues. The essay was written by a young American poet named T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), who had been living in London for the last few years, and who had published his first volume of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations , in 1917. You can read ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ here .

‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) sees Eliot defending the role of tradition in helping new writers to be modern. This is one of the central paradoxes of Eliot’s writing – indeed, of much modernism – that in order to move forward it often looks to the past, even more directly and more pointedly than previous poets had.

This theory of tradition also highlights Eliot’s anti-Romanticism. Unlike the Romantics’ idea of original creation and inspiration, Eliot’s concept of tradition foregrounds how important older writers are to contemporary writers: Homer and Dante are Eliot’s contemporaries because they inform his work as much as those alive in the twentieth century do.

James Joyce looked back to ancient Greek myth (the story of Odysseus) for his novel set in modern Dublin, Ulysses (1922). Ezra Pound often looked back to the troubadours and poets of the Middle Ages. H. D.’s Imagist poetry was steeped in Greek references and ideas. As Eliot puts it, ‘Some one said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know.’

In short, knowledge of writers of the past makes contemporary writers both part of that tradition and part of the contemporary scene. Eliot’s own poetry, for instance, is simultaneously in the tradition of Homer and Dante and the work of a modern poet, and it is because of his debt to Homer and Dante that he is both modern and traditional.

If this sounds like a paradox, consider how Shakespeare is often considered both a ‘timeless’ poet (‘Not of an age, but for all time’, as his friend Ben Jonson said) whose work is constantly being reinvented, but is also understood in the context of Elizabethan and Jacobean social and political attitudes.

Similarly, in using Dante in his own poetry, Eliot at once makes Dante ‘modern’ and contemporary, and himself – by association – part of the wider poetic tradition.

Eliot’s essay goes on to champion impersonality over personality. That is, the poet’s personality does not matter, as it’s the poetry that s/he produces that is important. Famously, he observes: ‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.’

This is more or less a direct riposte to William Wordsworth’s statement (in the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads in 1800) that ‘ poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings ’. Once again, Eliot sets himself apart from such a Romantic notion of poetry. This is in keeping with his earlier argument about the importance of tradition: the poet’s personality does not matter, only how their work responds to, and fits into, the poetic tradition.

‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ is a major work in Eliot’s prose writings, and perhaps his most famous essay. The argument he puts forward (summarised above) is perhaps surprising given modernism’s association with radical departures from artistic norms and traditions. As a modernist, Eliot might be expected to reject the great ‘canon’ or tradition of poetry that had gone before him.

But no: poetry, including Eliot’s own and that of his fellow modernists, derives its distinctiveness – and even its newness – from engaging with what earlier poets have done. Indeed, it is by drawing on the work of earlier writers and, as it were, standing on the shoulders of literary giants that a new poet asserts their own voice among the crowd.

And this is why Eliot’s other key argument in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ is relevant. The poet should not seek to be ‘original’ by disregarding tradition altogether, but by looking for minimal ways in which they can alter what has gone before and create something slightly different and fresh. And the poet should forget about expressing an individual ‘personality’ for the same reason: a poet should be plugged into the common shared tradition of poetry rather than thinking they are working alone.

Eliot’s example of Homer is pertinent here: we know nothing of the poet who wrote The Odyssey for certain, but we don’t need to. The Odyssey itself is what matters, not the man (or men – or woman!) who wrote it. Poetry should be timeless and universal, transcending the circumstances out of which it grew, and transcending the poet’s own generation and lifetime. (Eliot’s argument raises an interesting question: can self-evidently personal poetry – e.g. by confessional poets like Sylvia Plath, or Romantics like Wordsworth – not also be timeless and universal? Evidently it can, as these poets’ works have outlived the poets who wrote them.)

For Eliot, the more mature the poet, the more his mind is able to synthesise various influences and emotions to produce something varied and complex. These influences and emotions are worked into great poetry by the self: it is inaccurate to view Eliot’s essay as a critical rejection of ‘self’ altogether. If anything, he is arguing that great poetry is forged in the deeper self, rather than the surface ‘personality’ of the poet.

We might also bear in mind that Eliot knew that great poets often incorporated part of themselves into their work – he would do it himself, so that, although it would be naive to read The Waste Land as being ‘about’ Eliot’s failed marriage to his first wife, we can nevertheless see aspects of his marriage informing the poem.

And in ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’, Eliot would acknowledge that the poet of poets, Shakespeare, must have done such a thing: the Bard ‘was occupied with the struggle – which alone constitutes life for a poet – to transmute his personal and private agonies into something rich and strange, something universal and impersonal’.

For Eliot, great poets turn personal experience into impersonal poetry, but this nevertheless means that their poetry often stems from the personal. It is the poet’s task to transmute personal feelings into something more universal. Eliot is rather vague about how a poet is to do this – leaving others to ponder it at length.

Lyndall Gordon observes a curious paradox regarding Eliot in this regard, in her biography of Eliot, The Imperfect Life of T. S. Eliot . She points out that although Eliot claimed that drama was less personal than poetry, the cover of drama actually gave Eliot the freedom to expose his private crises. We might extend such an idea to the earlier work, too, and see a character like J. Alfred Prufrock, not as a stand-in for young Eliot per se , but as a Laforgue -inspired mask which Eliot could adopt in order to transmute private attitudes or emotions into something more universal. In other words, Eliot knew that the best way he could plumb the depths of his own emotions and experiences was by speaking as someone else. As Oscar Wilde said, ‘Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth.’

About T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) is regarded as one of the most important and influential poets of the twentieth century, with poems like ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1915), The Waste Land (1922), and ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925) assuring him a place in the ‘canon’ of modernist poetry.

Modernist poets often embraced free verse, but Eliot had a more guarded view, believing that all good poetry had the ‘ghost’ of a metre behind the lines. Even in his most famous poems we can often detect the rhythms of iambic pentameter – that quintessentially English verse line – and in other respects, such as his respect for the literary tradition, Eliot is a more ‘conservative’ poet than a radical.

Nevertheless, his poetry changed the landscape of Anglophone poetry for good. Born in St Louis, Missouri in 1888, Eliot studied at Harvard and Oxford before abandoning his postgraduate studies at Oxford because he preferred the exciting literary society of London. He met a fellow American expatriate, Ezra Pound, who had already published several volumes of poetry, and Pound helped to get Eliot’s work into print. Although his first collection, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), sold modestly (its print run of 500 copies would take five years to sell out), the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, with its picture of a post-war Europe in spiritual crisis, established him as one of the most important literary figures of his day.

He never returned to America (except to visit as a lecturer), but became an official British citizen in 1927, the same year he was confirmed into the Church of England. His last major achievement as a poet was Four Quartets (1935-42), which reflect his turn to Anglicanism. In his later years he attempted to reform English verse drama with plays like Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1949). He died in London in 1965.

Continue to explore Eliot’s work with our short summary of Eliot’s life , our introduction to his poem  The Waste Land , our exploration of what makes his poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ so ground-breaking , and our pick of the best biographies and critical studies of Eliot . If you’re studying poetry, we recommend these five helpful guides for the poetry student .

Below is a short video written and presented by Tearle, which introduces a few of the key themes of Eliot’s most famous poem, The Waste Land . It explores how Eliot’s poem puts his theory of ‘tradition’ into action through using lines from Shakespeare and classical antiquity.

Image: T. S. Eliot (picture credit: Ellie Koczela), Wikimedia Commons .

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5 thoughts on “A Short Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’”

Reblogged this on O LADO ESCURO DA LUA .

A very interesting piece analyzing Elliot’s thoughts about poetry. Thank you.

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HSC English Module B Study Guide: T.S. Eliot Part 1

Learn how to tackle Eliot's poetry for Module B with our comprehensive two part study guide.

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In this article, we are going to look at what a Module B essay requires, before moving on to some preliminary themes in Eliot’s poems.

The Module B essay has a terrifying reputation. In the HSC the questions are notoriously specific, meaning that it is difficult to simply use a prepared essay. It is small wonder that many students find it the most overwhelming of the modules. Not only are its demands esoteric in comparison to the other modules, you also have to study prickly texts.

In reality, a module B essay’s requirements are not that much different to the other modules. And panicking and fretting over things only leads to muddled responses, or a failure to write at all. Heaped onto the textual analysis and consideration of context found in other modules, Mod B has the added considerations of CANONICAL STATUS , TEXTUAL INTEGRITY , and CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES . The question I am asked most frequently by students each year is “Pat, what’s TEXTUAL INTEGRITY ?” NESA doesn’t explain it clearly at all, but understanding and discussing it is essential to getting a Band 6.

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Looking for part 2? Read the next part of this study guide :  HSC English Module B Study Guide: T.S. Eliot Part 2 [Free Textual Analysis]

Textual Integrity and Canonical Status

What you need to do to achieve a Band 6 mark is present a well-structured response that demonstrates how the TEXTUAL INTEGRITY of the selection of Eliot’s poetry establishes its CANONICAL STATUS . To do this, your essay must demonstrate how a selection of themes from the text, coupled with form, create a unified whole that has a lasting value or significance.

But what is TEXTUAL INTEGRITY ?

NESA is vague on this. The syllabus definition is:

“The unity of a text; its coherent use of form and language to produce an integrated whole in terms of meaning and value.”

What does this actually mean? Well, this is a convoluted way of saying that the text has coherence: a unity of ideas and form. For example, if you pretended to be a poet struggling to show a dysfunctional and unhealthy society you might choose to use a lot of enjambment and slant rhyme to represent this dysfunction structurally.

Eliot actually does this, an example can be found in stanza two of Preludes (1911):

Eliot T.S, Preludes. (1911)

The morning comes to consciousness Of faint stale smells of beer From the sawdust-trampled street With all its muddy feet that press To early coffee-stands.

In this stanza, the persona is presenting the workers’ daily struggle. The workers wake hungover from too much booze the night before and they need coffee to struggle through the day. The persona perceives that the workers are trapped in a horrible and unnatural routine: they drink to forget their woes at night, and suffer the consequences the next morning. This is represented in the broken flow of the lines: all except the final line are enjambed. The enjambment breaks the continuity of the lines; they seem to flow on the page but are fragmented when spoken.

The rhyme is unnatural, too. ‘Consciousness’ seems to rhyme with ‘press’, but the rhyme is only partially there – it sounds funny and not quite right. This is called a slant, or half, rhyme. Taken together these are examples of the text’s TEXTUAL INTEGRITY. We can argue that these combine to “present an integrated whole in terms of meaning and value.”

You can also discuss TEXTUAL INTEGRITY in terms of the thematic cohesion of Eliot’s corpus. Eliot consistently critiques modernity, the corruption caused by liberalism, and the individual’s struggle against diffidence and loneliness. Or if that doesn’t interest you, you can consider his use of intertextuality and form to convey and reinforce meaning. These are present in Eliot’s interpolation of folk songs (such as in Prufrock and Hollow Men ) and classical literature (in all of the poems) in his work or the mastery of different forms he demonstrates in his poems.

If you are still unsure what textual integrity is, you must read our Essential Guide to Textual Integrity .

The other thing you need to discuss is the text’s CANONICAL STATUS .

A text can attain canonical status because of its use of form. Perhaps it is considered ground-breaking in its use of the sonnet form, or it is lauded as being the best example of a ballad. Some texts gain their canonical status because they do all of these things. You need to decide and discuss if Eliot’s poetry fits these descriptions. For a text to have lasting value, it has to be widely lauded and have appeal to audiences over a range of periods. A text’s appeal to a range of audiences can lie in its thematic relevance to audiences. You need to figure out if it is speaking to, or perhaps challenging, a society’s values over time.

Canonical texts engage with universal human concerns such as the human condition (the affliction of being human – traumatic, I know!) often these are presented through big existential question like “what is the meaning of life” or “is there a god.” Or these concerns are personal ones such as “why do I procrastinate,” “why is life a struggle” or “why am I an outsider.”

To decide a text’s CANONICAL STATUS you want ask yourself questions like:

• Is this theme relevant to a wide group of individuals?
• Is this poem conveying a universal human concern?
• Does this text engage with the human condition?
• Does this poem use form in interesting or unique ways?
• Does this text combine form and meaning? Is it using form to develop meaning?

If you’re would like to learn more about critical reception, read our post on Understanding Module B: Critical Reception, Context, and Significance .

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T.S Eliot’s Themes

An important aspect of canonical status is a text’s use of themes. If these themes are universal, then the text has a universal relevance. This will contribute to the text’s place in the canon. So what themes are there in the set poems? Let’s have a look:

Written by Matrix English Team

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Home › Analysis of T.S. Eliot’s Metaphysical Poets

Analysis of T.S. Eliot’s Metaphysical Poets

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 5, 2020 • ( 1 )

There are a handful of indisputable influences on Eliot’s early and most formative period as a poet, influences that are corroborated by the poet’s own testimony in contemporaneous letters and subsequent essays on literature and literary works. Foremost among those influences was French symbolist poet Jules Laforgue, from whom Eliot had learned that poetry could be produced out of common emotions and yet uncommon uses of language and tone. A close second would undoubtedly be the worldrenowned Italian Renaissance poet Dante Alighieri, whose influences on Eliot’s work and poetic vision would grow greater with each passing year.

A third influence would necessarily come from among poets writing in Eliot’s own native tongue, English. There, however, he chose not from among his own most immediate precursors, such as Tennyson or Browning, or even his own near contemporaries, such as W. B. Yeats or Arthur Symons, and certainly not from among American poets, but rather from among poets and minor dramatists of the early 17th century, the group of English writers working in a style and tradition that has subsequently been identified as metaphysical poetry.

The word metaphysical is far more likely to be found in philosophical than literary contexts. Metaphysics is the branch of philosophical inquiry and discourse that deals with issues that are, quite literally, beyond the physical (meta- being a Greek prefix for “beyond”). Those issues are, by and large, focused on philosophical questions that are speculative in nature—discussions of things that cannot be weighed or measured or even proved to exist yet that have acquired great importance among human cultures. Metaphysics, then, concerns itself with the idea of the divine, of divinity, and of the makeup of what is called reality.

That said, it may be fair to suspect that poetry that is metaphysical concerns itself with those kinds of issues and concerns as well. The difficulty is that it both does and does not do that. Thus, the question of what metaphysical poetry does in fact do is what occupies Eliot’s attention in his essay to the point that he formulates out of his considerations a key critical concept that he calls the dissociation of sensibilities.

Eliot’s essay on the English metaphysical poets was originally published in the Times Literary Supplement as a review of a just-published selection of their poetry by the scholar Herbert J. C. Grierson titled Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler . In a fashion similar to the way in which Eliot launched into his famous criticism of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in “Hamlet and His Problems” by using an opportunity to review several new works of criticism on the play as a springboard to impart his own ideas, Eliot commends Grierson’s efforts but devotes the majority of his commentary otherwise to expressing his views on the unique contribution that metaphysical poetry makes to English poetry writing in general and on its continuing value as a literary movement or school. Indeed, as if to underscore his opposition to his own observation that metaphysical poetry has long been a term of either abuse or dismissive derision, Eliot begins by asserting that it is both “extremely difficult” to define the exact sort of poetry that the term denominates and equally hard to identify its practitioners.

After pointing out how such matters could as well be categorized under other schools and movements, he quickly settles on a group of poets that he regards as metaphysical poets. These include John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Abraham Henry Cowley, Richard Crashaw, Andrew Marvell, and Bishop King, all of them poets, as well as the dramatists Thomas Middleton, John Webster, and Cyril Tourneur.

As to their most characteristic stylistic trait, one that makes them all worthy of the title metaphysical, Eliot singles out what is generally termed the metaphysical conceit or concept, which he defines as “the elaboration (contrasted with the condensation) of a figure of speech to the farthest stage to which ingenuity can carry it.”

Eliot knows whereof he speaks. He himself was a poet who could famously compare the evening sky to a patient lying etherized upon an operating room table without skipping a beat, so Eliot’s admiration for this capacity of the mind—or wit, as the metaphysicals themselves would have termed it—to discover the unlikeliest of comparisons and then make them poetically viable should come as no surprise to the reader.

Eliot would never deny that, while it is this feature of metaphysical poetry, the far-fetched conceit, that had enabled its practitioners to keep one foot in the world of the pursuits of the flesh, the other in the trials of the spirit, such a poetic technique is not everyone’s cup of tea. The 18th-century English critic Samuel Johnson, for example, found their excesses deplorable and later famously disparaged metaphysical poetic practices in his accusation that in this sort of poetry “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.” Eliot will not attempt to dispute Johnson’s judgment, though it is clear that he does not agree with it. (Nor should that be any surprise either. Eliot’s own poetic tastes and techniques had already found fertile ground in the vagaries of the French symbolists, who would let no mere disparity bar an otherwise apt poetic comparison.)

Rather, Eliot finds that this kind of “telescoping of images and multiplied associations” is “one of the sources of the vitality” of the language to be found in metaphysical poetry, and then he goes as far as to propose that “a degree of heterogeneity of material compelled into unity by the operation of the poet’s mind is omnipresent in poetry.” What that means, by and large, is that these poets make combining the disparate the heart of their writing. It is on that count that Eliot makes his own compelling case for the felicities of metaphysical poetry, so much so that he will eventually conclude by mourning its subsequent exile from the mainstream of English poetic practice. It is this matter of the vitality of language that the metaphysical poets achieved that most concerns Eliot, and it is that concern that will lead him, in the remainder of this short essay, not only to lament the loss of that vitality from subsequent English poetry but to formulate one of his own key critical concepts, the dissociation of sensibility.

The “Dissociation of Sensibility”

Eliot argues that these poets used a language that was “as a rule pure and simple,” even if they then structured it into sentences that were “sometimes far from simple.” Nevertheless, for Eliot, this is “not a vice; it is a fidelity to thought and feeling,” one that brings about a variety of thought and feeling as well as of the music of language. On that score—that metaphysical poetry harmonized these two extremes of poetic expression, thought and feeling, grammar and musicality —Eliot then goes on to ponder whether, rather than something quaint, such poetry did not provide “something permanently valuable, which . . . ought not to have disappeared.”

For disappear it did, in Eliot’s view, as the influence of John Milton and John Dryden gained ascendancy, for in their separate hands, “while the language became more refined, the feeling became more crude.” By way of a sharp contrast, Eliot saw the metaphysical poets, who balanced thought and feeling, as “men who incorporated their erudition into their sensibility,” becoming thereby poets who can “feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose.” Subsequent English poetry has lost that immediacy, Eliot contends, so that by the time of Tennyson and Browning, Eliot’s Victorian precursors, a sentimental age had set in, in which feeling had been given primacy over, rather than balance with, thought. Rather than, like these “metaphysical” poets, trying to find “the verbal equivalents for states of mind and feeling” and then turning them into poetry, these more recent poets address their interests and, in Eliot’s view, then “merely meditate on them poetically.” That is not at all the same thing, nor is the result anywhere near as powerful and moving as poetic statement.

While, then, the metaphysical poets of the 17th century “possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience,” Eliot imagines that subsequently a “dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered.” Nor will the common injunction, and typical anodyne for poor poetry, to “look into our hearts and write,” alone provide the necessary corrective. Instead, Eliot offers examples from the near-contemporary French symbolists as poets who have, like Donne and other earlier English poets of his ilk, “the same essential quality of transmuting ideas into sensations, of transforming an observation into a state of mind.” To achieve as much, Eliot concludes, a poet must look “into a good deal more than the heart.” He continues: “One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY

The point of this essay is not a matter of whether Eliot’s assessment of the comparative value of the techniques of the English metaphysical poets and the state of contemporary English versification was right or wrong. By and large, Eliot is using these earlier poets, whom the Grierson book is more or less resurrecting, to stake out his own claim in an ageless literary debate regarding representation versus commentary. Should poets show, or should they tell? Clearly, there can be no easy resolution to such a debate.

Eliot would be the first to admit, as he would in subsequent essays, that a young poet, such as he was at the time he wrote the review at hand, will most likely condemn those literary practices that he regards to be detrimental to his own development as a poet. Whatever Eliot’s judgments in his review of Grierson’s book on the English metaphysical poets may ultimately reveal, they are reflections more of Eliot’s standards for poetry writing than of standards for poetry writing in general. That said, they should serve as a caution to any reader approaching an Eliot poem, particularly from this period, since he makes it clear that he falls on the side of representation as opposed to commentary and reflection in poetry writing.

In addition to its having enabled Eliot to stake out his own literary ground by offering, as it were, a literary manifesto for the times, replete with a memorable critical byword in the coinage dissociation of sensibility, as Eliot’s own prominence as a man of letters increased, this review should finally be credited with having done far more, over time, than Grierson’s scholarly effort could ever have achieved in bringing English metaphysical poetry and its 17th-century practitioners back to some measure of respectability and prominence. For that reason alone, this short essay, along with Tradition and the Individual Talent and Hamlet and His Problems , has found an enduring place not only in the Eliot canon but among the major critical documents in English of the 20th century.

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Essay On TS Elliot (Module B)

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This was my HSC and trial essay for Module B Critical Study of Literature (TS Eliot). I got 16/20 for this essay – it’s not a perfect essay but should be a good guide and starting point for anyone preparing!

T.S. Eliot’s depiction of the degradation of humanity through his modernist poetry not only demonstrates an insightful encapsulation of humanity’s inability to articulate meaning in a world of chaos, but metaphorically embodies the contextual struggles of Eliot’s own time. Despite Eliot’s firm belief in New Criticism, from a contemporary examination, his work is highly reflective of the world events and personal struggles Eliot carried throughout his writing career. His exploration of universal ideas such as alienation and humanity’s disconnection from themselves and the world around them, as seen in Rhapsody on a Windy Night and The Hollow Men, was inspired by a sense of loneliness and alienation from a childhood of limited interactions with others due to physical disability, as well as living through the dehumanising horrors of WWI. This resonates with modern audiences, particularly in the world’s current climate, who too have witnessed the sordid state of humanity and can relate to Eliot’s sentiments of disillusionment and misery.

The notion of disconnection, both from ourselves and the world around us, is a prevalent component of the degradation of humanity and has been an increasing burden on mankind. This notion is incorporated throughout Eliot’s poem Rhapsody on a Windy Night, significantly emphasised in the simile, “as a madman shakes a dead geranium”, in which the dead geranium, a plant generally adept at survival, is symbolic of man’s disconnection from the natural world. This is additionally evidenced in the imagery, “remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter, slips out its tongue and devours a morsel of rancid butter”, perfectly elucidating man’s abandonment of living creates other than themselves. This is particularly significant to current audiences, who have lived through the decimation of the environment, the extinction of many animal species and global warming as consequences of man’s disconnection from the natural world. The notion of disconnection is further exemplified in the allusion, “La Lune Ne Garde Aucune Rancune”, translating to “the moon holds no grudges”. This significantly illustrates the disconnection of humanity, as even their own moon is disconnected and has given up on Earth.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — T.S. Eliot — Analysis Of T.S. Eliot’s Poem The Waste Land

Analysis of T.s. Eliot's Poem The Waste Land

• Categories: T.S. Eliot The Waste Land

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Published: Oct 25, 2021

Words: 2305 | Pages: 5 | 12 min read

Bibliography

• Broyand, Anatole. “Books of The Times”, The New York Times. )3. Nov. 1971. Web. 30. Mar. 2020.
• Eliot, T.S. “The Waste Land”, Elliot’s Waste Land Tripod. 1922. Web. 30. Mar. 2020.
• Johnson, Anthony L. “‘Broken Images’: Discursive Fragmentation and Paradigmatic Integrity in the Poetry of T.S Eliot”. Poetics Today. Vol. 6. No.3. 1985. Pp. 399-416. Web. 13. Apr. 2020.
• Kaveney, Roz. “T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land describes a sickness, without a prescription”. The Guardian. 21. Apr. 2014. Web. 30. Mar. 2020
• Lynch, Suzanne. “Out of the Wasteland: the first World War and Modernism”. The Irish Times. 15. May. 2015. Web. 30. Mar. 2020.
• McAloon, Jonathan. “TS Eliot’s The Waste Land remains one of the finest reflections on mental illness ever written”. The Guardian. 13. Feb. 2013. Web. 01. Apr. 2020.
• Menand, Louis. “Practical Cat – How T.S Eliot became T.S Eliot”. The New Yorker. 12. Sept. 2011. Web. 01. Apr. 2020.
• Spacey, Andrew. “Analysis of the Poem “The Waste Land” by T.S Eliot”. Owlcation. 06. Jan. 2020. Web. 30. March. 2020.
• Stevenson, Randell. “Broken mirrors: The First World War and modernist literature”. British Library. 25. May. 2016. Web. 2. Apr. 2020.
• Ryder, Sean. “The Waste Land: Composition and Reception”, Blackboard. Web. 13. Apr. 2020.

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T.S. Eliot's modernist masterpiece, 'The Waste Land,' is a dense and enigmatic poem that relies heavily on vivid and evocative imagery to convey its themes and messages. In this essay, we will explore the crucial role that [...]

T.S. Eliot's poem, 'The Waste Land,' is a modernist masterpiece that weaves together a tapestry of literary and historical allusions. In this essay, we will embark on a journey to explore the intricate web of references within [...]

T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is a modern journey into and dissection of the mind of a society man, J. Alfred Prufrock. Prufrock is pushed in two opposite directions by his desires: his desire to have the [...]

Eliot's "The Waste Land" is perhaps a prime example of the experimentation in poetic technique occurring during the period encompassing the Modernist movement. Loathed and adored by critics and students alike, the complexities [...]

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Compared to the poetry prior to the 20th century, the poetry of T.S. Eliot rings vibrant, unconventional and inventive. Eliot's poem "Journey of the Magi" is typical of his style and illustrates how Eliot's poetry changed the [...]

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TS Eliot Essay

This is an example of a high range response of a TS Eliot essay. As a critical study, the respondent must assess his work as a whole and be aware of the broader contextual impact of the work. This response is for the 2013 English HSC.

Explore how time and place are used in Eliot’s poetry to shape the reader’s understanding of modernity.

In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO of the poems set for study.

T.S. Eliot’s poetry examines how individuals in modernity are trapped by materialistic values, limiting their experiential perspectives to particular times and places. In a world riddled with uncertainty in the wake of vast ideological and political changes spurred on by the scientific enlightenment and subsequent industrial hegemony of Western imperial nations, the poet’s work often contrasts traditional metaphysical ideals with the vacuum of modern nihilism.  Whereas Eliot’s first professionally published poem The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock TLSJAP (June 1915) philosophically wrestles in uncertainty with the relentless power of this new world, his later work The Hollow Men THM (November 1925) succinctly critiques the limitations of a solely modernistic value system.

Even in Eliot’s earliest work, his reverence for past wisdom and curiosity for non-physical places are evident.  The infinitely internal and publicly shy poet begins TLSJAP by intertextually invoking Dante in its original latin format, inviting the audience into a version of hell through the eyes of a poet in the Late Middle Ages. Dante’s protagonist believes that if someone were able to escape hell, “this flame would keep still without moving any further.” However, as the protagonist and all who hear him are trapped in the allegory of “those undergrounds” or for a figurative interpretation, the hell of one’s own mind; he is able to “answer you” (himself), “without fear of infamy” as the poet would be unable to suffer rejection or ridicule from within the confines of his own psyche. It is in this way that Eliot is able to express both his interpersonal sense of isolation where he does not “dare” to disturb other people in a social setting as well as the dread and confusion that develops from symbolically daring to “disturb the universe” through existential inquiry. By reading his poetry, the audience is invited into a realm that both emphasises the physical constraints of modern materialistic reality where literally and figuratively, “in a minute there is time”, whilst simultaneously using the wisdom of the ancients to query the “hundred indecisions … hundred visions and revisions” that transcend individual experience and instead serves as a reminder of the many facets of existence where the universe paradoxically has “time to murder and create” across time and space .

At the turn of the nineteenth century the “madman who lit a lantern” screeching “Whither is God?” had left a deep existential void for Western thinkers in modernity. Eliot wrestles with Nietzsche’s assessment of the encroaching societal nihilism in TLSJAP by positing: “But as if a magic lantern threw nerves in patterns on a screen”. The simplicity of the simile and Eliot’s recurring motif of lamp light symbolises humanity’s limited capacity for creation in “the chambers of the [sublime] sea”, where the folly of modern man’s hubris is alluded to with “Prince Hamlet” and the rise of Western materialism serving as the precursor “to swell progress” symbolically in the modern world. Ultimately this merely serves as a temporary respite for what the “worshippers of the machine” choose to forget,  as “human voices” are the only one’s viewed as rational enough to “wake us” in a time where man is the master and creator of all until “we drown”, the finality of death being inevitable to a 20th Century intellectual mind. Modernity serves as a stage for examining the absurdity of existence with a self conscious protagonist who is ironically concerned with whether he will “part” his hair or wear his “trousers rolled” whilst simultaneously grappling with metaphysical questions like having “squeezed a universe into a ball” of consciousness. J. Hillis Miller interprets as an “opaque sphere” of subjectivity where each “Lazarus” (human) who has been brought into existence in their own “impenetrable” bubble of experience and understanding, is stuck in the timeless angst of their own mind as their impending death looms.

As a critic, Eliot’s THM draws inspiration from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, to the poet, the value placed on materialism in the modern world is viewed as hollow, much like an ivory tusk that has been removed by Kurtz as he parades around as a god before his untimely demise. Eliot parodies the shortsightedness of modern man by referring to him as someone with a “Headpiece filled with straw”, an allusion to “pagan rituals” according to Grover Smith. Once more through literary fragmentation the poet slips into and out of his own context to explore the subjectivity of meaning from a relativistic perspective; to the poet, the “quiet and meaningless” voices of men are paralleled with “wind in dry grass” and “rats’ feet” which to a 20th Century modernist would have no inherent purpose. The symbolic “cactus land” that modern man inhabits and “At five o’clock in the morning” in futility goes “round the prickly pear”, a parody on the “divine” tree which places the nihilistic thinker in a position that resembles Sisyphus with his rock. The solitude of city life is apparent as the poet wonders whether it is “like this” in “death’s other kingdom” where the machine men are “walking alone”, babies “trembling with tenderness” in a “hollow valley” that only values  “stone images” which glorify the materialistic might of the Western world.

It would be a disservice to assess THM without reflecting on Eliot’s most well known work The Waste Land; a poem that critiques the modern notion of progress without consideration, a time and place that lacks “roots” to “clutch” onto the “stony rubbish” that has been constructed by the “Son of man”. Again, the poet considers past wisdom that to the modern individual is “more distant” than a “fading star” as the “twilight kingdom” of death is treated with little regard in modernity, a time where materialists are “Sightless, unless / The eyes reappear”, a primitive “hope” for a species of “empty men” who have destroyed themselves with war. As if in a game of hide and seek, Eliot seeks the places where the symbolic “Shadow” of meaning resides. By placing the audience’s mind in “deliberate disguises” like “crowskin”, Eliot emphasises through pathetic fallacy man’s connection to the “voices” that are apparent to the poet “Between the conception / And the creation”, the metaphysical place being the “Kingdom” of the “multifoliate rose”, infinite time and potential.

Eliot grips his audience in a place that knows no time, the infinitely creative mind; he does this as he earnestly considers the events and thinking of his personal context and the wisdom that has illuminated the modern mind as the cult of progress developed and devalued the knowledge that came before. By seeking knowledge in the angst of his own mind as well as that of contemporary thinkers who had influenced global events, the poet is able to look beyond the veil of time and space in order to appreciate the sublime. He empathises with modernity, a time which whimpers into nothingness as the bombs fall and the business men circle in their suits but reminds the respondent to consider their own roots when seeking meaning.

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T.S. Eliot Guide: Troubled Characters In A Disturbing World

The marking scheme directs examiners to look for reference to desolate settings, uneasy atmospheres, disturbed characters,  changing environments, collapse of culture and values, and the poet’s pessimistic voice.

T.S. Eliot’s poetry portrays struggling characters from many different angles in a changing world, full of violence and decay. Eliot describes these vicissitudes through elaborate imagery, dynamic structure, vivid language, at times sophisticated and at times vulgar, use of allusions and use of direct and indirect speech. His characters are faced with an era of expanding urban landscapes, devastation of war and destruction of old values and traditions. T.S. Eliot doesn’t hide his own pessimism as we feel his presence through some of his characters. I will use The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, from The Waste Land II. A Game of Chess, Journey of the Magi, Preludes and The Four Quartets East Coker IV to illustrate this.

✔ notes as detailed below on The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, Preludes, Aunt Helen, from The Waste Land II. A Game of Chess, Journey of the Magi, from Landscapes III Usk, IV Rannoch, by Glencoe, from The Four Quartets East Coker IV

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• Post author: Martina
• Post published: December 6, 2015
• Post category: English / Poetry / T.S. Eliot

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HSC Module A: 20/20 Essay notes for The Tempest and Hagseed

Hsc module b: band 6 notes on t.s. eliot’s poetry.

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• journey of magi

Module B is also called a ‘critical study of literature’. Hence, it is important to:

1.   Make personal and intellectual connections with the text. You must try to have your own ideas about what the composer is trying to convey. For Eliot’s poetry, many students only focus on its bleak and depressing aspects, yet it is extremely important to also perceive its subtle allusions to hope and salvation, especially in later works.

2.   Understand textual integrity – that means you must look at the texts as a cohesive unit, or as a whole. Focus on the connections in the prescribed suite of poetry – the scrutinising “eyes”, the monotony of modern life, decadence of social values, etc.

3.   Take note of the context and structure of each poem – although this is not module A, understanding the context of each poem allows you to comprehend the significance and artistry of Eliot’s poems. For example, without knowing anything about Modernism, how is it possible to appreciate how well Eliot captures the lethargy and decay in his era?

Historical Context: The Early 1900s

Historically, Eliot’s poetry captures the turmoil of a generation transitioning from the Romantic era to the demoralised landscape of Modernism. Modernism became even more prominent after World War I, where the value of human life and civilisation was heavily questioned by the general public. This period in time was generally associated with subverting Victorian/Romantic ideals, secularity (deviance from religion), industrialism and technological advancement. In particular, technological advancements became synonymous to social upheaval for many in the late 1800s to early 1900s, for people feared their efficiency will change society too much for people to ever adjust to.

Literary Context:

History is often reflected in literature. During the Modernist era, composers became more experimental, often rebelling against well-established conventions to reflect reality more closely. Not only is this evident in the structure of Eliot’s poetry, it is also quite obvious in his titles (e.g. The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Preludes , Rhapsody on a Windy Night).

Personal Context

Traditionally, Eliot’s ‘early works’ include:

·      The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

·      Preludes

·      Rhapsody

And his ‘later’ works include:

·      The Hollow Men

·      Journey of the Magi

By ‘Journey of the Magi’, Eliot had become an Anglican, hence the heavy religious references.

There are many themes in Eliot’s poetry, but try to avoid ones that are too vague/overdone.

For example, instead of writing a paragraph on ‘uncertainty’, make it more nuanced and specific, e.g. uncertainty because of paradigmatic shifts. That way, not only have you shown your personal understanding of his poetry, your essay will also stand out against essays which demonstrate only a superficial understanding of the poems.

Some prominent, yet interesting points you could write about in your essay include:

·      Paradigmatic shifts and uncertainty

·      Loss of spirituality and secularity

·      Superficiality and materialism

·      Loss of purpose and search for meaning

·      Physical setting of the Modernist landscape reflecting psychological/internal uncertainty

·      Possibility of redemption

Want to know more about these ideas? JP English provides text specific booklets written by state rankers which outlines the key ideas of each poems to guide students into developing their own nuanced arguments. Furthermore, we provide exemplars from ex-students who have achieved state ranks or 95+ English HSC marks so that students know exactly what is needed to ace Module B.

Special Structural/Stylistic features of each poem

Here are some features of Eliot’s poetry that I found particularly unique and intriguing. Of course, there are so many others, but here are some of the main ones.

The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock

·      The title itself is extremely ironic. ‘Love Song’ suggests intimacy and connection and yet this is completely subverted by Prufrock’s pedantic, ambiguous narrative of isolation and disconnection.

·      The various intertextual allusions towards the end of the poem.

o   “I know the voices dying with a dying fall” is from Shakespeare’s  Twelfth Night

o   “ I am Lazarus, come from the dead” is a biblical allusion to Lazarus whom Christ raised from the dead.

o   Prufrock rejects the idea that he is Prince Hamlet, a character whose tragedy could arguably be said to have borne out of his indecision.

·      The idea of Prufrock as a flaneur, a wanderer amidst the modern landscape.

·      Again, the title is very ironic. T he cohesive lyricism of the Romantic preludes is completely subverted by Eliot’s very disturbing portrait of sordid Modernist imageries.

·      The pronouns shift from section to section, examining the society from different perspectives.

Rhapsody on a Windy Night

·      Again, Eliot appropriates the episodic, free-flowing structure of Romantic Rhapsodies while inspiring the portrait of a fractured and denigrated world.

·      There’s also quite an evident struggle between nature (the feeble, voiceless moon) and humanity (the narrating streetlamp).

·      The recurring time motifs, “Twelve o’clock”, “Half past one”, “Half past two”, etc places emphasis on the regularity and indifference of time.

The Hollow Man

·      The various intertextual allusions in this poem:

o   It begins with an allusion to Joseph Conrad’s ‘Mistah Kurtz’, a sinister imperialist.

o   The epigram, ‘a penny for the Guy’, refers to the Gunpowder Plot and Guy Fawkes

o   “The twilight kingdom” is an allusion to Dante’s hell

o   “Here we go around the prickly pear” is an allusion to the nursery rhyme/children’s song “Here we go ‘round the mulberry bush”.

·      This is somewhat debatable, but it could be said that this poem depicts a world where religious entities and cosmic powers are apathetic to human suffering.

Journey of the Magi

·      Eliot’s recent conversion to Anglicanism inspired his intertextual reflection on traditional ideals of Christianity through appropriating the “Three Wise Men” in seeking Jesus.

·      The hedonistic materialism of “summer palaces on slopes” is quite evident in the early stanzas

·      In this poem, the search for meaning is both a spiritual and literal journey.

·      Read scholar articles – for Eliot, there are so many excellent articles out there. They help you articulate your ideas and inspire you to view the text from a different perspective. Just go on Google Scholar and type ‘Eliot poetry’. There are so many resources there!

·      Practice! – the only way to get better is through practice. Not only does JP English provide you with ample exercises, but they also provide weekly feedback so you can improve.

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