英美文学选读学习笔记 T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was born at St. Louis, Missouri, USA. Eliot was first educated at Smith Academy in his hometown and then at Harvard where he concentrated his energies on studying philosophy and logic. Later Eliot studied literature and philosophy in France, Germany and at Oxford, England. He took interest in Elizabethan literature, the Italian Renaissance and Indian mystical philosophy of Buddhism. He was also attracted by the French symbolist poetry.

Eliot got married and settled down in London in 1915. After a year or two of teaching, he began to write. His first important poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," appeared in 1915.  From 1917 to 1919, he served as the assistant editor of The Egoist, a magazine advocating Imagism. In 1922 he became the editor of The Criterion, which was one of the two most influential literary reviews of this century.  Eliot's most famous poem, The Waste Land (1922), appeared in the first number of The Criterion. In 1927, Eliot took English citizenship and became a devout member of the Anglican Church. In his later career, Eliot busied himself with different kinds of literary work such as writing, editing, publishing and lecturing. He won various awards, including the Nobel Prize and the Order of Merit in 1948.

Eliot had a long poetic career, which was generally spanided into two periods: the early one from 1915 to 1925, and the later one from 1927 onward. In his early period, Eliot produced a fairly large number of poems, which were mainly collected in Poems 1909-25 (1925). He also published Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), The Waste Land and two other small volumes of poetry. As a young man with bitter disillusionment and with boldness in the handling of language, Eliot had explored in his early poetry various aspects of decay of culture in the modern Western world, exssing a sense of the disintegration of life. Most of his early poems are about a state of mind. There is little "action" in a physical sense; the action is totally psychological. The poems are dominated by the dark horror of an earthly hell. The more important poems of this period are: "Prufroek,“ "Gerontion," The Waste Land, and The Hollow Men. "Gerontion" is a poem of dramatic monologue in which an old man reminisces about his lost power to live and his lost hope of spiritual rebirth. The poem is heavily indebted to James Joyee in terms of the stream-of-consciousness technique, which has been largely employed in Eliot's later writings. The poem is also an advance over "Prufroek" and a lude to The Waste Land, helping to point up the continuity of Eliot's thinking.  The Hollow Men, which bears a strong thematic resemblance to The Waste Land, is generally regarded as the darkest of Eliot's poems. In this earthly  hell, the hollow men must wait for death to liberate them into a kind of purgatory. But even in the purgatory, there is no hope of salvation.

The Waste Land, Eliot's most important single poem, has been hailed as a landmark and a model of the 20th-century English poetry, comparable to Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. With bold technical innovations in versification and style, the poem not only sents a panorama of physical disorder and spiritual desolation in the modern Western world, but also reflects the valent mood of disillusionment and despair of a whole post-war generation. The poem is 433 lines long and is spanided into five sections, which are not logically constructed or connected. Section I, "The Burial of the Dead," deals chiefly with the theme of death in life. The inhabitants in the modern Waste Land, who have lost the knowledge of good and evil, live a sterile, meaningless life. In the last passage of the section, Eliot connects the "unreal city" with the city of the dead, and modern London with Dante's Hell, claiming that those who have no faith of religion are actually living dead. To bury the dead is to bury a memory, which brings no hope of growth or renewal. Section II, "A Game of Chess," gives a rather concrete illustration of the sterile situation. A picture of spiritual emptiness is sented with the reproduction of a contemporary pub conversation between two cockney women. The discussion is constantly interrupted by the pub keeper's "HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME."  Section III, "The Fire Sermon," exsses a painfully elegiac feeling by juxtaposing the vulgarity and shallowness of the modern with the beauty and simplicity of the past. What was once ritualistic and meaningful is now despairing and empty. In section IV, "Death by Water," the drowned Phoenician Sailor is an emblem of futile worries over profit and loss, youth and age. With the curative and baptismal power of the water images, the drowned Phoenician Sailor also recalls the rebirth of the drowned god of the fertility cults, thus giving an instance of the conquest of death. The  of Section V, "What the Thunder Said," appears to be derived from an Indian myth, in which the sume Lord of the Creation speaks through the thunder. As the drought breaks and the thunder speaks, various elusive suggestions of hopes are given; but despite the thunder's advice "to give, to sympathize, and to control," which projects the possibility of regeneration, the issue is left uncertain at the end. The Waste Land  is a poem concerned with the spiritual breakup of a modern civilization in which human life has lost its meaning, significance and purpose. The poem has developed a whole set of historical, cultural and religious themes; but it is often regarded as being primarily a reflection of the 20th-century people's disillusionment and frustration in a sterile and futile society.

In his later period, Eliot produced only two major volumes of poetic works: Ash Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1944). Both clearly reflect his allegiance to the Church of England. The Four Quartets, based on the Christian dogmas of incarnation and resurrection, is concerned with the quest for the immortal element, the stillness within time or history. Man, disillusioned and hopeless in his early poetry, now finds reconciliation in God. Thus, the Four Quartets is characterized by a philosophical and emotional calm quite in contrast to the despair and suffering of the early works.

T. S. Eliot was one of the important verse dramatists in the first half of the 20th century. Besides some fragmentary pieces, Eliot had written in his lifetime five full-length plays: Murder in the Cathedral (1935), The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1950), The Confidential Clerk (1954), and The Elder Statesman (1959). All the plays have something to do with Christian themes. Murder in the Cathedral, which was written for the Canterbury Festival of June 1935, is concerned with the death and martyrdom of Thomas Becket. The focus of interest of the play lies not in the violent killing of St. Thomas but in his inner conflict with various temptations, -of which the most serious is the temptation to accept his martyrdom for the wrong reason. For all its lack of action and convincing protagonist, the play is intensely moving. The dialogues are marked by the sharp, irregularly assorted stresses, four to a line, which closely mimic the versification of Everyman. Generally speaking, Murder in the Cathedral is the best of his plays in the sense that it contains the best poetry and the most coherent drama. The Family Reunion has a modern setting; the story is about a young nobleman who painfully comes to realize the truth about himself, his background and environment, and who, spanested of all deception and distraction, sets out on a lonely journey towards union with the spanine. Instead of the rich, highly colored language of the choruses in Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot is aiming at catching the tones, idioms, and rhythms of the contemporary speech in this play. His three later plays are also concerned with the subject of spiritual self-discovery but in the form of a sophisticated modern social comedy. Eliot's major achievement in play writing has been the creation of a verse drama in the 20th century to exss the ideas and actions of modern society with new accents of the contemporary speech.

T. S. Eliot was also an important prose writer. During his literary career, he wrote a large number of essays, articles and book reviews. His essays are mainly concerned with cultural, social, religious, as well as literary issues. In his famous essay, "Tradition and Inspanidual Talent," Eliot put great emphasis on the importance of tradition both in creative writing and in criticism. And in senting his doctrine of impersonality, Eliot argued that a poet's mind should remain "inert" and "neutral" towards his subject matter, keeping a gulf between the man who suffers and the mind which creates. It is not inappropriate to say that Eliot, as a critic, may have occupied today a position of distinction and influence equal in importance to his position as a poet.

Like Wordsworth, Eliot experienced a drastic change in his political attitude towards the world. When he was young, he was radical, pessimistic, satiric and explorative. His wasteland derogation of the civilized world was the cise exssion of the young people after the First World War. The horror and' menace, the anguish and dereliction, and the futility and sterility exssed in his poetry had been afflicting all sensitive members of the postwar generation.

When Eliot had himself well-established, his New England's religious background, his authoritative habit of mind, and his fears of the socialist revolution gradually turned him to the choice of conservatism and a hierarchic society. His conversion to Anglicanism in 1927 made him in favor of the spanine order against the anarchic chaos. Eliot came to believe that the illness of the modern world was of the sum of inspanidual souls, and that the cure could only be obtained by the change of the inspanidual souls through the religious salvation. Thus, the quest for stability, for order, and for the maintaining of the bourgeois status quo became his primary concern in his later works.