Eliot's First Long Philosophical Poem example essay topic

Thomas Stearns Eliot otherwise known as T.S. Eliot was born in Missouri on the 26th of September in 1888 to Henry Ware a businessman and Charlotte Stearns Eliot a gifted poetess. Eliot attended Miss Locke's Primary School and Smith Academy in St. Louis. His first poems and prose pieces appeared in the Smith Academy Record in 1905, the year of his graduation. He attended Harvard University, When he left the United States in 1910 he had earned both undergraduate and masters degrees and contributed several poems to the Harvard Advocate.

He returned to Harvard after a year in Paris to study philosophy, But returned to Europe in 1914, settling in England and marrying Vivienne Haigh-Wood on June 26, 1915, . While in Europe he settled in London working as a teacher then later working in a bank, There, on September 22, 1914, through a Harvard classmate and fellow poet, he met Ezra Pound, who would exert a great influence over the development of his work and his literary career. Eliza Pound assisted in the publication of his work. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" published in Poetry in 1915", The love song of J Alfred Prufrock" devise on a wide range of symbols and images to represent a chaotic modern world. The first poem in basically in the form of a dramatic monologue where the speaker is talking to his alter ego, Prufrock, a man like his peers feels isolated and incapable of decisive action to vocalize his thoughts.

To reflect Prufrock's stream of consciousness, Eliot uses a method he calls "the objective correlative" by which he dramatizes sensations, emotions and feelings through a set of objects, a situation and a chain of events". The love song of J Alfred Prufrock" was included in his first book Prufrock and Other Observations which was published in 1917 and established him as a leading poet. Eliot also did a good deal of book reviewing and public lecturing, largely for financial reasons. He taught school briefly in 1915 and 1916, then worked in Lloyds Bank for several years beginning in 1917. He would not achieve permanent, congenial, financially secure employment until he joined the publishing firm of Faber & Gayer (later Faber & Faber) in 1925.

The stress and exhaustion of his overwork -- as well as the tensions of his marriage, which had been a difficult one for both partners from the beginning -- brought him to a nervous collapse in 1921. During his recuperation at a hospital in Lausanne, Switzerland, he finished writing The Waste Land, a poem of more than four hundred lines. Within The Waste Land published in 1922 Eliot describes the harsh reality of post world war one England, He also makes references to the working classes struggle, "The broken finger nails of dirty hands" The Waste Land, was Eliot's first long philosophical poem, can now be read simply as it was written, as a poem of radical doubt and negation, urging that every human desire be stilled except the desire for self-surrender, for restraint, and for peace. Compared with the longing expressed in later poems for the "eyes" and the "birth", the "coming" and "the Lady" (in "The Hollow Men", the Ariel poems, and "Ash-Wednesday"), the hope held out in The Waste Land is a negative one.

Through The Criterion, a journal that he founded in 1922 and edited until its suspension in 1939, and through his essays and volumes of literary and social criticism, Eliot came to exert vast influence as a molder of opinion. Despite his having written some of the most ultra-modern poetry of his time, his basic conservatism became increasingly overt, as shown in his famous declaration in 1928, a year after he had become a British subject and had been confirmed in the Church of England, that he was a "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion". . By the 1930's Eliot was a dominant figure in poetry and literary criticism, as a poet he transmuted his affinity with the 17th century metaphysical poets and the 19th French symbolist poets, Eliot connected most of his earlier works to the French Symbolists whom he came into contact with through reading "The symbolist movement in Literature" By Arthur Symons. It can be assumed that Eliot sought to express his symbolic imagery in the same way the French symbolists have done it. The Hollow Men is an episodic free verse poem.

Eliot constructs a desolate world, "death's dream kingdom", to explore mankind's avoidance from spiritual intention. The focus of the poem is on the hollow men's inability to interact with each other. The techniques employed by the poet show this predicament. The title of the poem draws our attention to the importance of the collective personae. The hollow men represent all mankind, and their tragic existence, the poem suggests, concerns us all.

The epigraphs bring to mind a range of associations - the first, "Mi stah Kurtz-he dead" is a reference to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a novella inhabited by men whose actions are equally devoid of ideological or spiritual guidance; and the second, "A Penny for the Old Guy" is an allusion which highlights the impotency of humanity and the way in which our most critical actions may end in nothing more than a whimper. T.S. Eliot's poetry explores the predicament of human existence in the twentieth-century setting characterised by an overwhelming disillusionment of the younger post world war one generation and acceptance at his imperfect ability. Accepting his Nobel Prize, Eliot commented, "poetry may make us a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves". He made use of a variety of aural and visual imagery and a remarkable breadth of content to evoke these feelings in the reader, and in doing so facilitates an exploration into the depths of our existence. In January 1957, Eliot, married Valerie Fletcher, his secretary at Faber and Faber; he was sixty-eight years old, she was thirty.

After a painful first marriage, followed by many years of guilt and loneliness, Eliot in the last years of life enjoyed an emotional and physical closeness that he had never known before. Unfortunately, his happiness would be short-lived. After several years of declining health, he died of emphysema at his home in London on January 4, 1965, six days before his eighth wedding anniversary.