DOCSLIB.ORG

Chapter I V Transition : the Hollow Men, Ariel Poems

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Chapter I V Transition : the Hollow Men, Ariel Poems CHAPTER I V TRANSITION : THE HOLLOW MEN, ARIEL POEMS AND ASH-WEDNESDAY The course of Eliot's poetic development after The Maste Land can best be described by reversing the title of Jessie Weston's book. As suggested at the end of the last chapter, the figure of the knight is being replaced by that of the saint. The term 'saint' of course encompasses the Christian context but goes beyond it to suggest an attempt at chastening the sensibility through the ascetic discipline of religion. As Lyndall Gordon has argued, the figure of the saint coexisted with that of a secular quester from the beginning, but under Pound's influence, the religious strain was held in abeyance. ^ •'•' But with the closing of frontiers, as indicated by The fVaste Land, the quester had no other option but to effect a self-transformation through a change of roles, through a turning back to the poetry of religious candidature. That the magnum opus of 1922 marked a terminal point is clear from what Eliot wrote to Richard Aldington barely a month after its publication. 162 As for The l^aste Land that is thing of the past so far as I am concerned and I am now feeling toward a new form and style.^ ^' As Ronald Bush has pointed out, some idea of Eliot's search for new form and style can be had from an introduc­ tion Eliot wrote to a slim volume of Paul Valery's verse and from the Clark Lectures of 1926 ^ "^ ^ In 1924 Eliot wrote an introduction to Mark Wardle's translation of Valery's "Le Serpent". Earlier in The Sacred h/ood, Eliot had compared Valery to Dante in an unfavourable light and had castigated Valery for "exorcising" philosophy from modern poetry. But in the 1924 Introduction, Eliot displayed a change of attitude. Valery is now seen as a poet, who "extended" and "completed" his personal feelings in impersonal verse; who reintegrated "the symbolist movement into the great tradi­ tion" of French classicism. Thus Valery represents the "completion" and "explanation" of the "experimental work of the last generation". Eliot further wrote that Valery raised "the music, the fluidity" of Jules Laforgue to new heights through a poetic organization of a much higher intellectual order than Laforgue's" 163 One can imagine what it must have meant for an ardent admirer and imitator of Laforgue like Eliot to suggest that Valery was the "completion" and "explanation" of Laforgue. The earlier Laforguian strategy of representing the inner life through dramatization is now being discarded in favour of Valery's technique of discovering a pattern of one's emotions. Howsoever hard and painful the process of change, the attempt at imposing a pattern on his emotions is clearly seen not only in the poems that follow but also in his statement in the 1924 Introduction that Valery understood "the truth that not our feelings, but the pattern which we make of our feelings is the centre of value". If Valery is being privileged over an earlier favou­ rite Laforgue, in the Clark Lectures of 1926 a similar exercise of reassessment is undertaken with respect to another earlier model, Donne. These eight "Lectures on the Metaphysical Poetry of the Seventeenth Century" dealt with Eliot's old preoccupations with poetic excellence and tradi­ tion by applying new criteria. Whereas in the earlier essay "The Metaphysical Poets" - a review article on Grierson's anthology of Metaphysical poetry in 1922 - Donne was held up as a poet par excellence of unifield sensibility, now in the 164 Clark Lectures, Eliot argued that Donne's sensibility represented a dissolution of the fusion of thought and feeling, which is to be found in the mediaeval poets like Dante and Cavaleanti. Whereas the sensibility of the Ital­ ians is "classical" and "ontological", rooted in man's orientation toward absolute value, the seventeenth century roetaphysicals were "romantic" and "psychological". Donne, instead of contemplating metaphysical ideas for their in­ trinsic value merely plays with them. As opposed to Donne's "romantic" subordination of thought to feeling, Eliot recommended the wisdom of writers like Aquinas, Dante and Cavaleanti, who were interested only in the impersonal value of thought and feeling. These writers Eliot asserted, extended the frontiers of the everyday world by "the devel­ opment and subsumption of emotion and feeling through intel­ lect into the vision of God". The ontological enquiry into the nature of existence was evident even in their amatory work, where a statement of the effect of the beloved upon the lover served"solely ... to suggest the beauty and digni­ ty of the object contemplated". The suggestiveness of these comments in relation to The Hollow Men and after becomes clearer by Eliot's acknowl­ edgement in the introduction to his lectures that the pivot 165 on which "the whole of my case turns" was his reading and interpretation of the Vita Nuova. Some of the most reveal­ ing observations are made when Eliot uses examples from Dante's handling of erotic material to criticise the degen­ erate "modern" sensibility represented by Donne. For exam­ ple, he charges Donne of conflating the human and divine aspects of love and goes on to say, - "Donne, the modern man, is imprisoned in the embrace of his own feelings. There is little suggestion of [Dante's] adoration, of worship. And an attitude like that of Donne leads naturally to one of two things: to the Tennysonian happy marriage - not very different from Donne's own - which is one sort of bankruptcy; or to the collapse of the hero of Huysman's En Route : Men dieu, que c'es done bete. It leads in fact to most of modern literature; for whether you seek the Absolute in marriage, adultery or debauchery, it is all one - you are seeking in the wrong place". Perhaps, that is the lesson the quester has learnt by the end of The Waste Land. But that is not all, for the 166 poet Eliot goes on to say in the fourth lecture, as he speaks of Donne's 'The Blossome', "There is a great deal of the modern "recherche de I'absolu", the disappointed romanticism the vexation of resignation at finding the world other than one wanted it to be. The literature of disillusionment is the disillusion­ ment of immaturity. It is in this way that I have ventured to affirm that Dante is more a man of the world than is Donne" . The phrase "disillusionment of immaturity" shows that Eliot had clearly someone else besides Donne in mind, as he criticizes his earlier favourite for writing the kind of poetry he himself had written till recently, if The Waste Land is anything to go by. Any lurking doubt in this respect is completely eradicated when he targets Laforgue next in his assault. Like Donne's Laforgue's writings, too, had metaphysical origins : Laforgue "had an innate craving for order : that is, that every feeling should have its intellectual equivalent, its philosophical justification and that every idea should have its emotional equivalent, its 16? sentimental justification"/ Again like Donne, he too needed a Vita Nuova to justify and integrate his sentiments into a system of the universe. But instead, what Laforgue wrote was "a poetry of adolescence" unintegrated with an adult view of the world : he thus remains, for us, imprisoned within his adolescence, with a philosophy which should have been mature ... For Laforgue to have passed into a larger life would have necessitated a violent struggle, too violent for so delicate a constitution". For Eliot, who too like Laforgue, had "so delicate a constitution", Donne and Laforgue, who had acted as his Virgils through the Inferno of his early life and poetry, now needed sturdier and more blessed persons like Dante to take him through the rest of his journey. It was Dante who had "passed into a larger life", who by an "adult view of life" had transcended his adolescent sensibility. Vita Nuova uses the same material as Laforgue's verse : "the material of adolescence; but it is handled by a mature man with a philosophy which assigned a place to such experinece". For Eliot, Vita Nuova came to symbolize a "record of the method of utilizing, transforming instead of 168 discarding, the emotions of adolescence; the record of a discovery analogues to those concerning the use of waste products of coal-tar in industry. The result of this dis­ covery was a real extension of the area of emotion and an attitude both more "spiritual" and more "worldly" than that of Donne, or that of Tennyson or that of Laforgue." In the third Clark Lecture, Eliot said, " The Vita Nuova is to my thinking a record of actual experience reshaped into a particular form." If the phrases, "actual experience" and "reshaped into a particular form" are given equal emphasis, one begins to see the relevance of these comments to Eliot's introduction to Valery. Both Dante and Valery demonstrate the importance of weaving an emotional pattern. For Eliot, the poems in Vita Nuova present stages in the growth of a young man's feelings "from Beatrice living to Beatrice dead." In other words, the work shows a development from the earlier poems expressing the selfish love-struck emo­ tions of an adolescent to the final sonnet which shows a "pilgrim spirit" directed heavenward and blessed with "a new perception born of grieving Love". The importance of Vita Nuova for Eliot at this stage becomes clear if we set it in the context of his own line of development. Right 169 from the start, as we have seen, Eliot's poetry, displays an emotional inclination towards romantic quests and, because of the disappointing nature of the world, an equally strong inclination towards chastisement through religious disci­ pline.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • 'Doctrine' and 'Poetry' in TS Eliot Tony Sharpe
    Contribution to Religion and Myth in the Poetry of T.S. Eliot, eds. Michael Bell and Scott Freer (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2016) 1 Feb 2016. [Published July 2016, pp. 27-47] ‘Somehow Integrated’: ‘Doctrine’ and ‘Poetry’ in T.S. Eliot Tony Sharpe I write this as the semi-centenary occurs of Eliot’s death in January 1965; his wife Valerie’s name has now joined his on the oval tablet at St Michael’s, East Coker, which invokes our ‘charity’ to pray for the repose of their souls. In suddenly-accelerated publication, five volumes of his letters and two of his collected prose have appeared in recent years; a new biography is imminent and a scholarly edition of the complete poetry in prospect. All this offers opportunity to take stock: the time, as might be said, is now propitious. Yet as early as 1938, Wallace Stevens was describing Eliot’s ‘prodigious reputation’ as ‘a great difficulty’ for any reader wishing to approach him ‘out of the pew’.1 Whether this surge of scholarship will increase or abate charitable impulses toward the poet and his oeuvre remains to be seen: Eliot’s visible presence in St Michael’s (not the only church in which he is commemorated), together with the accumulating volumes of his writing, could be viewed as part of an official installation already problematical, as hinted in Stevens’s mischievous formulation. For it almost became a truth universally acknowledged, that Eliot’s poetry was damaged by his Christianity; his faith was travestied as part of an intellectual evasion through which he accepted answers rather than posed questions, and in so doing lost contact with the powerful uncertainties and radical sources of unknowingness that had generated his earlier verse.
    [Show full text]
  • Simply Eliot
    Simply Eliot Simply Eliot JOSEPH MADDREY SIMPLY CHARLY NEW YORK Copyright © 2018 by Joseph Maddrey Cover Illustration by José Ramos Cover Design by Scarlett Rugers All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher at the address below. [email protected] ISBN: 978-1-943657-25-4 Brought to you by http://simplycharly.com Extracts taken from The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume 1, The Complete Poems and Plays, The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture, On Poetry and Poets, and To Criticize the Critic, Copyright T. S. Eliot / Set Copyrights Limited and Reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd. Extracts taken from Ash Wednesday, East Coker and Little Gidding, Copyright T. S. Eliot / Set Copyrights Ltd., first appeared in The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume 1. Reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd. Excerpts from Ash Wednesday, East Coker and Little Gidding, from Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T. S. Eliot. Copyright 1936 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Copyright renewed 1964 by Thomas Stearns Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Extracts taken from Murder in the Cathedral, The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk, and The Elder Statesman, Copyright T.
    [Show full text]
  • Ts Eliot's Ash Wednesday
    / SI T. S. ELIOT'S ASH WEDNESDAY: A PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACH TO EMPOWERING THE FEMININE THESIS Presented to the Graduate Council of the University of North Texas in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the degree of MASTER OF ARTS By Stephen D. Adams Denton, Texas August, 1992 Adams, Stephen D., T. S. Eliot's Ash Wednesday: A Philosophical Approach to Empowering the Feminine. Master of Arts (English), August, 1992, 62 pp., bibliography 39 titles. In his 1916 dissertation, Eliot asserted that individuals were locked into finite centers and that all knowledge was epistemologically relative, but he also believed that finite centers could be transcended through language. In the essay "Lancelot Andrewes,'" Eliot identified Andrewes's "relevant intensity," a method very close to nonsensical verse. Eliot used Andrewes's Word and the impersonality of nonsense verse in Ash Wednesday. The Word, God's logos, embodied the Virgin Mary as its source, and allowed Eliot to transcend the finite center through language. Ultimately, Eliot philosophically empowered the feminine as the source of the Word. Though failing to fully empower the earthly Lady in part II of Ash Wednesday, Eliot did present a philosophical plan for transcending the finite center through language. TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE 1. INTRODUCTION . 1 2. ELIOT'S SYSTEM: F. H. BRADLEY AND THE FINITE CENTER TRANSCENDED ..... .. ............. 6 3. ELIOT'S NONSENSE: FROM LANCELOT ANDREWES TO THE POWER OF THE FEMININE .. ... .. .. .. 17 4. THE FEMININE IN ELIOT...................... 29 5. THE POWER OF THE FEMININE: THE LADY AND THE VIRGIN OF ASH WEDNESDAYSa. .9. ... .. .*... 43 6. CONCLUSION............................. 56 WORKS CITED..........*............
    [Show full text]
  • Valerie Eliot: in Memoriam
    Time Present The Newsletter of the T. S. Eliot Society number 78 WINTER 2013 CONTENTS Valerie Eliot: In Memoriam Essays 1 he T. S. Eliot Society lost its foremost Honorary Member with the passing on 9 Conference Notes 4 TNovember of Valerie Esmé Eliot (1926–2012). A requiem mass was held for her in the Parish Church of St. Stephen, London, on 21 November, with a reading of “Journey Book Reviews 8 of the Magi” by Seamus Heaney, a eulogy by Craig Raine, and a choral singing of Igor Stravinsky’s setting of “The dove descending breaks the air” and George Herbert’s “King Pubic Sightings 10 of Glory, King of Peace, I will love thee,” both of which were sung at Eliot’s service there. As a Yorkshire teenager spellbound by John Gielgud’s reading of “Journey of the Abstracts 11 Magi,” Valerie determined upon graduation to make her way to T. S. Eliot: she eventually became his personal secretary at Faber in 1949, brought him much happiness after their Conferences and marriage in 1957, and became the steward of his papers upon his death in 1965. She Call for Papers 17 opened or attended the openings of numerous cultural events over the years, and her generous presence at the reception and dinner during the Eliot Society’s visit to London in Call for 2004 is remembered as a thrilling highlight by many our members. Nominations 18 The obituaries have invariably described her life mainly in terms of Eliot’s, but in the forty-seven years after his death she created an extraordinary life of her own as editor Board Report 18 of the facsimile edition of The Waste Land and three volumes of letters; as a director and sustaining supporter of the Faber firm; and as the executrix of his estate, which was Membership List 18 enriched by the worldwide success of Cats, thereby enabling her to become a major philanthropist for the nation, the arts, education, and numerous charities.
    [Show full text]
  • The Development of the Religious Thought Op T
    THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE RELIGIOUS THOUGHT OP T. S. ELIOT APPROVED: Directoector of thel/departmenthel/Depa t of English De^n W the Graduate School THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE RELIGIOUS THOUGHT OF T. S. ELIOT THESIS Presented to the Graduate Council of the North Texas State University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS By Howard W. Laing, B. A., Th. M. Denton, Texas August, 1967 TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Pag® X« INTRODUCTION 1 II. THE NONRSLIGIOUS THOUGHT (1888-1920) 6 III. THE TRANSITION TO THE THOUGHT Of AKQLO- CATHOLIC CHRISTIANITY (1921-192?) 35 IV. THE EARLY EXPRESSION OF ANOLO-C/THOLIC CHRISTIANITY (1927-1953) . 67 V, THE LATER EXPRESSION OF ANGLO-CATHOLIC CHRISTIANITY (1935-1965) 107 VI. CONCLUSION 141 BIBLIOGRAPHY 150 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION T. 3. Eliot has been acknowledged a® "a poet of spiritual experience.1,1 In his early poetry, however> he does not evi- dence a belief "in an absolute spiritual reality."2 One of the vital studies in til® Eliot corpus, therefore, is to ob- serve, and hence be aware of, hie change from scepticism to Christian belief. This thesis will concern itself with the development of the religious thought of Eliot as it is ex- pressed in his poetry and plays. Although the term "religious" could refer to many reli- gions, religion for Eliot cane to mean Christianity.^ This thesis will limit itself primarily to the development of his religious thought as It relates to Christianity. Other reli- gious Influences will be introduced if they have a modifying or possible modifying effect upon his grasp of Christianity as it is commonly understood.
    [Show full text]
  • Ash Wednesday 2006 2 Corinthians 5-6 / Mt 6
    Ash Wednesday 2016 2 Corinthians 5-6 / Mt 6 What always strikes me most as I confront these familiar readings each year at this season is how radically counter- cultural they are. What we are advised to do, to love God and our neighbor (which is the agenda for every season of the church year) goes about as firmly against what our society advises us to do as can well be imagined. The summary of Jesus’s advice in this chapter of what we call the Sermon on the Mount is at the end: don’t set any stock in the kind of rewards this world can dish out. Make your investments elsewhere – put your trust, your cash, your time, your energy, where it will make a difference to God, and settle your heart to wait for his kind of reward. Can you just hear what the investment-counselling ‘industry’ (because it is now an industry…) would tell you about that? ‘Well, it’s all very well to make charitable contributions – they're fine (in moderation, of course), and you can write them off on your tax return – but we need to make sure your stocks are up to date, and your IRA is fully funded….’ Jesus’s view is completely opposite: the guy in the 3-piece suit is right that you should put your money where the return is highest – but guess what? That’s where I'm telling you it is, not where he is telling you it is. All the pious acts, all the good deeds you do, are investments, and, in a world of finite resources, making those investments will mean that you don’t have all that time, money, etc.
    [Show full text]
  • T.S. Eliot: a Never-Ending Exploration
    Honors Thesis Honors Program 12-18-2015 T.S. Eliot: A Never-Ending Exploration Kristina Krupilnitskaya Loyola Marymount University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/honors-thesis Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, Creative Writing Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons, Literature in English, North America Commons, and the Liturgy and Worship Commons Recommended Citation Krupilnitskaya, Kristina, "T.S. Eliot: A Never-Ending Exploration" (2015). Honors Thesis. 4. https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/honors-thesis/4 This Honors Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Honors Program at Digital Commons @ Loyola Marymount University and Loyola Law School. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Thesis by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons@Loyola Marymount University and Loyola Law School. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Krupilnitskaya 1 Kristina Krupilnitskaya Dr. John Menaghan Honors Senior Thesis 18 December 2015 T.S. Eliot: A Never-Ending Exploration Considered one of the most important modernist poets of his age, T. S. Eliot was a literary genius, known for poetry that was often filled with nihilism and personal melancholy. Is it any wonder then, that Eliot compared his own life to “The horror! The horror!” experienced by Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (Seymour-Jones 301). Battling the demons of his own mind, Eliot was able to produce poems like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The Waste Land” as a result of these brooding thoughts; in fact, many literary critics believed that this internal pain is what helped to make so much of his poetry so complex, experimental, and experiential.
    [Show full text]
  • 15 Crawford 1736 10/3/11 08:35 Page 479
    15 Crawford 1736 10/3/11 08:35 Page 479 WARTON LECTURE ON ENGLISH POETRY T. S. Eliot’s Daughter1 ROBERT CRAWFORD University of St Andrews ‘IDEALLY HE SHOULD LIKE to have had about ten children,’ Valerie Eliot once said of her late husband. ‘He was,’ she added, ‘suited in every way.’2 I first heard these words roughly a quarter of a century ago, and they have stayed with me. They struck me as moving, and lie behind this lecture. Mrs Eliot’s remarks presented someone very different from that image of an ‘unpleasant to meet Mr Eliot’ which the poet himself was well aware of, and which has too often calcified into gaunt caricature.3 Eliot is one of the twentieth century’s great poets, perhaps its greatest. He is so especially because of the music of his words. In his verse there is an insistent, insidious and magnificent sense of poetry as language which, as C. K. Williams says poetry must, ‘achieves a forcefulness far beyond that of direct prose’. Eliot’s work demonstrates Williams’s assertion that ‘By incorporating some of the elements of music, artificial rhythms, tonal organization, repetition, harmony and dissonance, poetry touches more deeply into the ground of our mental life than other kinds of language.’4 Eliot is also the greatest immigrant poet in the English language; to Read at the Royal Society as part of British Academy Literature Week, 19–22 October 2009, and at the University of St Andrews on 28 October 2009. 1 This British Academy Warton Lecture on English Poetry has gained from points made by its auditors, especially suggestions from Danny Karlin, Phillip Mallett, and Josh Richards.
    [Show full text]
  • EJ1207236.Pdf
    Available online at ijci.wcci-international.org IJCI International Journal of International Journal of Curriculum and Instruction 10(1) Curriculum and Instruction (2018) 48–60 An Analysis of Gerontion by T.S. Eliot Gültekin Borana * a Gazi University, Ankara, Turkey Abstract Thomas Stearns Eliot, who is believed to be one of the most important poets of his time in the English and American Poetry, as well as today, left many poems in most of which he criticized and even rejected the Western Puritanist society and the principles of Romanticism. In this brief study, one of T.S. Eliot’s major poems, ‘Gerontion’ will be presented with other critics’ and this researcher’s interpretations. The speaker of the poem is an old man in an old house whose thoughts drift while being read to by a boy, and these thoughts form the poem. He misses fighting in the war and laments his presence in the mundane and common-place house (Basu, 2017). Since it will be useful to know T.S. Eliot’s philosophy of life and his background in order to understand and interpret his works better, his life story and background are also provided briefly in the first part of this study. In the final part, conclusions in connection with the society in which we live in were drawn from T.S. Eliot’s ‘Gerontion’. © 2018 IJCI & the Authors. Published by International Journal of Curriculum and Instruction (IJCI). This is an open- access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY-NC-ND) (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
    [Show full text]
  • A Buddhist Reading of Ash-Wednesday Chutian Xiao*
    Exchanges : the Warwick Research Journal The Stillness in Movement: A Buddhist Reading of Ash-Wednesday Chutian Xiao* Department of English Studies, Durham University *Correspondence: [email protected] Abstract Commonly seen as a religious poem that reflects T. S. Eliot’s conversion to Catholicism, Ash-Wednesday demonstrates intensively the poet’s religious experience, especially the union of the spiritual stillness and the movements in time which verges on mysticism. However, such extraordinary experience can be comprehended from the perspective of Buddhism. It corresponds with the Buddhist concept of suchness, which is further connected to religious meditation and the attitude of non- attachment in face of worldly life. It does not violate the speaker’s pursuit for a kind of Christian salvation, for it concerns more the process and the way to achieve the destination than the destination itself. Keywords: T. S. Eliot; Ash-Wednesday; movement; Buddhism; timeless; divinity Peer review: This article has been subject to a double blind peer review process Compared with T. S. Eliot’s early poetry, there is a new phenomenon in Ash-Wednesday (1930): the introduction of the element of divinity as the imposing other. The intrusion of the omnipotent other is willingly called for and accepted by the speaker, which any earthly activity or feeling © Copyright: The must defer to for a new and everlasting meaning. However, the new Authors. This article is issued under the terms of element does not replace the personal sensibility of the speaker. Rather the Creative Commons than questioning all earthly values, the poem focuses on presenting the Attribution Non- speaker’s state of mind in meditation on the divine figure of the ‘Lady’, Commercial Share Alike License, which permits especially in relation to the reality of worldly life.
    [Show full text]
  • Defence Mechanism and T.S Eliot's Pessimism
    International Journal of Research and Review www.ijrrjournal.com E-ISSN: 2349-9788; P-ISSN: 2454-2237 Review Article A Million Dollar Hope for the Practical People: Defence Mechanismand T.S Eliot's Pessimism Malay Saha Research Scholar, Dept. of English, Tilka Manjhi Bhagalpur University, Raghunathganj, Murshidabad, India. Received: 19/06/2015 Revised: 10/07/2015 Accepted: 16/07/2015 ABSTRACT Most of Eliot's readers look upon his protagonists as somewhat lost in the mire of materialism and sexual passion, swinging in between decision and indecision and groping in utter hopelessness. The belief is so firm that they look upon Eliot as a pessimistic poet and his protagonists as 'hollowmen'- spectres, invalid people or people cut off from the spring of life. Apparently, those characters being lifeless and inactive invent various psychological methods of 'projections' and 'defence mechanisms' to face the tribulations of life. But what we fail to take into account is the fact that those 'projections' and 'defence mechanisms' are kinds of reality checks that are practical and pragmatic and does not merely reveal the pessimistic mind- set of the people. Key Words: Psychological, projections, defence mechanisms, pessimism, hope. 1. INTRODUCTION Prufrock wants to open his heart to the lady It must be clear in the mind that Eliot's but he fears that the girls might taunt him protagonists are not the inhabitants of an and in that case he would be no better than a absurd world. His Prufrock or Gerontion are worm wriggling and pinned onto the wall. not Vladimir, Estrgon or a Davies willing Thus the mere action of proposing becomes every moment to call it a day.
    [Show full text]
  • The Intellectual and Religious Development of TS Eliot
    1 The Intellectual and Religious Development of T. S. Eliot Reflected in Selected Readings of His Poetry with Emphasis on Ash Wednesday by David Naugle Introduction In the Preface to For Lancelot Andrews (1928), T. S. Eliot declared his faith to the world in his now famous pronunciamento in which he proclaimed himself to be "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion."1 The way by which Eliot arrived at this "three-toned annunciation"2 was indeed circuitous, especially religiously. Before arriving at his anglo-catholic destination, he had traveled by way of Indian thought and the philosophy of the English metaphysician F. H. Bradley. But it was his anglo-catholicism which saw him through to the end. The purpose of this paper is trace T. S. Eliot's intellectual and religious development through these three stages and to see how each stage is reflected in his poetry. This will be accomplished through selected readings of various poems culminating in and focusing upon Ash Wednesday which clearly embodies elements of his anglo-catholic position. The Intellectual and Religious Development of T. S. Eliot: Reflected in Selected Readings of His Poetry Though it is possible to ascertain numerous influences on Eliot and his writings,3 Indian, Bradleyean, and Christian thought predominate. "Eliot presented the credentials 1 Preface to For Lancelot Andrews (1928). Eliot later regretted at least the manner if not the substance of this pronouncement. Babbitt, he said, when the two of them met in London had chastised him for not making his positions plain to the public and this rapprochement led to this proclamatory expression.
    [Show full text]