Through the exploration of T.S Eliot’s ‘Prelude’s’ (1911), ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925) and ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (‘Prufrock’ 1915), the audience is exposed to the isolation, depersonalisation and corruption of society that Eliot endures by his ‘single voice’ of apprehension, engaging with our own uncertainties. Eliot’s poems endure the hardship of people being hungry for any form of spiritual experience in which through the exploration of the five poems, becomes increasingly obvious. His poetry is set in the brutal onset of The Great War, encircling the soulless mechanisation and industrialisation of a modern world. The critic, Potter Woodbery, echoes that it is precisely because of Eliot’s fragmented, “modern metaphors and similes”, that allows responders to gain a “fuller and closer examination” of his poems (WUTOSAMA, 2016). Although his early poems do not give a clear idea about his beliefs, they show the shaping and incorporation of multiple themes (MAHFOUD, 2009). Eliot uses the method of observing places and people, as well as experimenting with poetic forms in order to convey his spiritual views (MAHFOUD, 2009) which become increasingly evident in these five poems; ‘The Journey of Magi’, ‘The Hollow Men’, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, ‘Prelude’s’ and ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’. All five poems delve into the eternal aspects of a corrupted society as well as isolation and the depersonalisation of individuals. The audience is presented the textual integrity conveyed in these five distinct poems as Eliot consistently critiques modernity, the corruption caused by liberalism and the individuals struggle against diffidence and loneliness (Condliffe, 2018). Very evident to the audience, through Eliot’s use of intertextuality and form, that we see just how these convey and reinforce meaning throughout his texts. These are evidently present in his interpolation of folk songs; such as in ‘Prufrock’ and ‘The Hollow Men’ (Condliffe, 2018). Eliot’s use of abundant universal themes, regarding human concerns such as, the human condition, allows the audience to get an insight into the canonical status of his poems (Condliffe, 2018)..
A growing sense of corruption within society pervades in the works of modernist writer, T.S. Eliot, and his five poems. Society becomes increasingly hungry for spiritual experience in Eliot’s poems, and it is sufficient to say that the analogy of corruption of society is extremely evident. It explores the ongoing predicament of a world increasingly complicit in its determination to head towards self-destruction (Google Classroom, lecture four). In ‘Prufrock’, Eliot’s protagonist lacks stability. Perhaps he was not trying to create a character but a mood (a representation of many characters within his collection of poems) or of society that was constructing and reconstructing individuals in such a way as to negate any sense of reality and remove any form of spiritual experience. The epigraph at the beginning of ‘Prufrock’, alludes to Dante’s Inferno, which symbolises Prufrock’s entrapment in a hellish corrupt environment, reinforced with the structural downward movement of the poem from the “sky” to the “silent seas”, symbolic of society’s descent into hell. The final stanza in ‘The Hollow Men’ implies these men are dead, and if we (the audience) read the poem as inclusive of us, then essentially, we are already encountering the spiritual death that comes with subscribing to the corruption of a world where love, compassion, kindness, respect and connection has been lost. This stanza is also linked to Dante’s epigraph in ‘The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock’ as the voices of this poem, like that of Guido, resonate with guilt and fear, lacking in the moral fibre, the humanity that has ultimately left them void of substance. Like ‘Prufrock’, ‘Prelude’s’ deals with modernity, and represents the angst and tensions of society that shifts and turns in its acceptance and awareness of the multiplicity and complexity of competing notions of existence. The poem echoes Prufrock’s inarticulate life and inability to convey his truths. The “muddy feet” are both literal and figurative, reflecting echoes of life, fragmented as they are, not bodies or people, just faint echoes of humanity ‘that press’, or rush, ‘To early coffee-stands’. In this stanza (stanza 2), this persona is presenting the workers’ daily struggle. All lines except the final line are enjambed. The use of enjambment breaks to continuity of the lines but are fragmented when spoken. The rhyme is unnatural too, together the audience is shown profound insights into the textual integrity of the poem (Condliffe, 2018). Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’, connotes to the spiritual loss in which his society endures, suggesting a world of devoid, a world pure confinement and anticipation for some form of spiritual experience. Individual metaphors can be gleaned from lines eight, nine and ten – “grass”, “rats”, “cellar”. The sentience here creates archetypal imagery of aridity, of the spirit and of the soul. The couplet referencing the formlessness of the entities reinforces their powerlessness, yet this too is ironic for “they”, as the subjects of the poem, have become voices of a generation, a memory embedded with the loss of integrity, power and betrayal we are all subject to as we conform to the status quo (Google Classroom, Lecture four).
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A prominent theme in Eliot’s works is isolation. The five poems use extensive forms of fragmentation to show the isolation and helplessness felt by the speaker caught between two different worlds in which they belong to neither (GradeSaver, 2018). The poem ‘Prelude’s’ revolves around the narrator’s nocturnal walk, passing a succession of street lamps. He seems to be colonized by their commands to consider the sordid images in the streets and the distorted images thrown up by his memory. In other words, the morbid images of the Paris night reflect the modern world that has only despair and misery to offer to men. That the narrator is controlled by an external world signifies his lack of individuality and consequently his loss of identity as he suffers a life full of isolation and emptiness. Here, Eliot I believe was influenced by the Bergsonian philosophy that asserted that, “the individual consciousness is limited to those aspects of the universe that affect the individual,” resulting in the emanation of fragmentary thoughts and memories - thoughts that are dominated and controlled by the street lamps (BITE, 2013, Pg.4). Similarly, in ‘Prufrock’, the theme of isolation further represents itself when Prufrock asks, “Do I dare?” (Ln 38). This line alone represents the fear that the character has towards the society due to his status as a social outcast. Consequently, Prufrock seems to be afraid of the people and resorts to recollect similar voices he has perceived as the people he has seen crowd (ACW, 2011). Philosopher Henri Bergson observes that “We cannot think of ourselves, we can only live, we cannot even conceive of ourselves as having a single clear identity; our being can only be found amidst the shifting currents of our most immediate experience”, depicting the modern reality, its rootlessness and its dissatisfactions. Set in the squalor of the urban metropolis, the literature of modernism manifests the breakdown of social norms and cultural strictures, the rejection of history, substituting it with a mythic past, “borrowed without chronology,” and the growing sense of alienation and isolation in a world wherein daily existence is synonymous with “living death” (BITE, 2013, pg. 1).
Whilst Eliot illustrates the physical and spiritual depersonalisation of individuals within the societies depicted in his poems, the need for human interaction and some form of spiritual experience becomes progressively prominent. Critic G.S Fraser states, “Our world, and our place in it, is increasingly hard to understand and the sense of difficulty has been increasing for more than a hundred years”. Instead of starting off with a preconceived notion of life or a rehearsed response to it, Eliot explores the dull sluggish struggle of everyday existence, depersonalising individuals by talking about bodily members such as feet, hands, eyes and fingers, something that was practiced in his five poems; ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, ‘Prelude’s’, ‘Rhapsody on a Windy night’, ‘The Hollow Men’ and ‘Journey of the Magi’ (BITE, 2013, pg. 2). ‘Prelude’s’ reflects a sense of nothingness in the urban landscape. Eliot explores how modern society has depersonalised individuals as they are constantly struggling with everyday existence, and hungry for some form of spiritual experience. The men of Eliot’s poem, ‘Prelude’s’, are never accused of doing anything that should be resulting in this crime. They are faceless and hollow, eyes that watch but cannot see because they have done nothing, just existed and paradoxically, become non-existent in their demise. The synecdoche’s used throughout Eliot’s poetry are a representation of the personalisation of humans within his society and emphasises the attachment of the observer. The oppressing allusion to ‘eyes’ in ‘The Hollow Men’, infers the lack of insight and fragmentation. The metaphorical “kingdom” (Ln. 20) can be either a heaven or a hell as either requires a form of redemption, a movement through purgatory, implying that these esoteric figures are locked in a darkness of their own making (Google Classroom, Lecture four). In Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’, there is a reference to “one-night cheap hotels”, an allusion to prostitution or destitution. The allusion is further enhanced by the idea that one has “restless nights” in such establishments, metaphorically referencing the conscious as disturbed. If the audience sees this as a tangible geographical space, they could argue that those who inhabit such spaces do so for an escape that will bring them no moral peace (Google Classroom, Lecture one). Through the fragmentation and juxtaposing of individuals in this poem, we begin to see that Eliot set the scene of a sick world in which is ironic to his own life, a place where humans are not equipped to any form of spiritual experience within their society.
Thus, Eliot’s poems provide us with an effective platform for assessing the emptiness and despondency of a war devastated world, something that has ruined the human will to live. Motifs of isolation, depersonalisation and the evident corruption of society shown within Eliot’s poems, provides the audience with a deeper understanding of the poetry, in a complex era, Eliot had to reflect. Eliot remains the quintessential poet of the English language precisely because his poetry endures through his impersonal way, that of a fearful, disillusioned modernist, seeking truth in an alienated, and desolated world (WUTOSAMA, 2016). The audience is shown that the textual integrity of Eliot’s poems remains incredibly apparent, as his works all convey universal themes whether this be relationships, modernity, isolation, gender, personal struggle and more. Eliot’s profound but unsettling interrogation of ideas of tradition throughout his poetry inform the audience of the corrupt, and desolate society in which he occupied at the time.
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