The Image of Modern Man in T. S. Eliot's Poetry

THE IMAGE OF MODERN MAN IN T. S. ELIOT’S POETRY

Mariwan Nasradeen Hasan Barzinji

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Published by AuthorHouse 11/16/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4772-4704-4 (sc)

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DEDICATED TO:

The teacher of humanity (Prophet Muhammad)

peace and blessings of Allah be upon him.

All my teachers in the past, present and future.

ABSTRACT

T his book The Image of the Modern Man in Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot attempts to portray the image of the modern man in a selection of Eliot’s famous poems. Critics have hinted at this image in his poems but few have attempted to highlight it chronologically in detail. This study also examines all the aspects of the modern man’s life. Reader response analysis approach is used while analysing the poems.

The first chapter, the Introduction attempts to define the image of the modern man as it came into use by the modern poets then, certain non-literary and literary factors and influences, which shaped the modern poetry and modern society, are discussed and Eliot’s role as a modern poet and representative of modernity is highlighted. Finally, the technique that Eliot used to depict the image of the modern man is pinpointed.

The second chapter "Prufrock as a Representative of Modern Man in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1917) tackles the modern man as inactive, shy and impotent being incapable of solving his problems. Prufrock, who may be Eliot himself, represents the modern man. The poet ascribes these problems to the modern man himself who has lost faith in God, which resulted from the destructive effects of the First World War.

The third chapter "Tiresias as a Modern Man in The Waste Land" (1922) presents the same image of the modern man as sterile like the Fisher King. Eliot presents some characters in the poem to indicate that the modern man lives in a chaotic and disorderly life, because he has neglected God and has immersed himself in the materialistic world.

Chapter Four consists of three parts; the first part is "the image of the modern man in The Hollow Men (1925), where Eliot depicts the modern man as hollow. In this poem, the modern man realises his hollowness; therefore, he wants to repent for the sins that he has committed. The poet highlights that the modern man is soon subject of despair since he is spiritually empty. This poem also shows Eliot’s life; when he was writing the poem, he was prepared to be baptised and purified from his sins. The modern man, who has realised his sins, repents and finally returns to God. The second part includes: The Image of the Modern Man in Ash-Wednesday" (1927), which deals with the modern man and his turning to religion. The poet has confirmed that by the modern man’s returning to God, the modern man will have a meaningful life, then the poet alludes to the Virgin as an intercessor for the modern man, which means the poet as the representative of modern man is hopeful because he has finally reached the end of his journey, which starts in his The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and ends in his Four Quartets. The last part of the study is the conclusion section which sums up the findings of the study and infers that Eliot was a pioneer among the poets in vividly delineating the image of the modern man through studying the psychic, mental, emotional and social states, which was prevailed during a specific period in the life of people in his own community.

Contents

Abstract

Chapter One Introduction

Chapter Two Prufrock As A Representative Of The Modern Man In The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917)

Chapter Three Tiresias As A Modern Man In The Waste Land (1922)

Chapter Four The Image Of The Modern Man In The Hollow Men And Ash-Wednesday

4.1. Modern Man As Hollow In The Hollow Men (1925)

4.2. The Image Of Modern Man In Ash-Wednesday (1930)

Conclusion

Bibliography

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

T homas Parkinson states that the modern man is a term, which is invented by modern poetry to dignify modern people’s skepticism (Parkinson, 1951: 5). Eliot has depicted the image of modern man in his poems to reflect their problems in the entire world.

Before considering modern poetry, something should be said about the modern temper; i.e., about certain non-literary influences shaping the modern poetry and the audience who received it and gave it its fame. Shakti Batra in his book T.S. Eliot: A Critical Study of his Poetry, points out two important factors that left great influence on modern poetry: first, the audience in the twentieth century has been, to an unprecedented degree, interested in mental phenomena by introspection. The growing prestige of psychology as a subject of investigation has been paralleled in prose literature by the works of such writers as Joyce and Proust. Each of them creates enormous verbal fabrics out of the development and history of a single sensibility. The second factor is the modern temper which by contrast with the Victorian temper, has been characterized by more anxiety and insecurity than by confidence and assurance (Batra, 2001: 2).

In a spiritual sense, the period induced insecurity by its revolt against traditions of all kinds. This revolt led to political uncertainty. It has been said that a large number of conversions and apostasies were experienced by modern intellectual leaders in the twentieth century. The spread of doubts is also seen in the twentieth century about human freedom and human dignity. Determinism and Marxism were two of the new ideologies brought by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), and Carl Marx (1818-1883). Freud had suggested that human individuals are predetermined by formation or malformation of the unconscious parts of their minds during infancy or early childhood but Marxism had suggested that human societies, in their organization and historical development, are predetermined by economic or technological considerations (Kaplan, 2006: 5).

The most controversial aspect of the modern movement was its rejection of tradition. Modernism’s stress on freedom of expression, experimentation, radicalism, and primitivism disregards conventional expectations. In many forms of art, that controversy over the rejection of tradition often meant startling and alienating audiences with bizarre and unpredictable effects, the strange and disturbing combinations of motifs in Surrealism, and the use of extreme dissonance and atonality in modernist music. The technique of modern literature is often involved in the rejection of intelligible plots or characterization in novels, or the invention in poetry that rejected clear interpretation. The Soviet Communist government rejected modernism after the rise of Stalin on the grounds of alleged elitism, although it had previously gave approval to Futurism and Constructivism, and the Nazi government in Germany considered it narcissistic and ridiculous (Berghaus, 2000: 212). The Nazis exhibited modernist paintings alongside with works which were considered the mentally ill in an exhibition entitled Degenerate Art. In fact, modernism flourished mainly in consumer/capitalist societies, despite the fact that its proponents often rejected consumerism itself. However, high modernism began to merge with consumer culture after World War II, especially during the 1960s. The likes of Bob Dylan, Serge Gainsbourg and The Rolling Stones combined popular musical traditions with modernist verse, adopting literary devices derived from James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, James Thurber, T. S. Eliot, Guillaume Apollinaire, Allen Ginsberg, and others. Modernist design also began to enter the mainstream of popular culture, as simplified and stylized forms, which were often associated with dreams of a space age high-tech future that became popular. This merging of consumer and high versions of modernist culture resulted in a radical transformation of the meaning of modernism (Grant, 1999: 100). Firstly, it implied that a movement based on the rejection of tradition had become a tradition of its own, and secondly, it demonstrated that the distinction between elite modernist and mass consumerist culture had lost its quality of being precise. Some writers declared that modernism had become institutionalized, and in some other fields, the effects of modernism have remained the strongest.

Modern poetry is known as being very unusual, and obscure. The heart of this vagueness mirrors the complexity of the modern life and its problems because poetry has been a medium for reflecting the entire problems of modern man. The problems are artistically reflected in the poetry of T.S. Eliot. Eliot’s poetry is similar to the metaphysical poetry because he, like the metaphysical poets, uses conventional images in a startling way and creates new images by using unexpected literary devices like, metaphor, and juxtaposition and linked very far-fetched ideas in his poetry. For instance, in The Love of Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the opening simile of the patient etherized upon a table sets the tone for the images, which follow in the poem (Thorne, 2006:289).

Modern poetry dramatizes the problems of the modern age, which permeates experience in terms of values, ethics, social and psychological problems. Modern poets are different from the romantic poets, who tried to find solutions for individual’s problems. However, modern poets seek to understand this split of modern man in a modern way. The sense of incompleteness, alienation and that of irrecoverable loss of existence without spiritual centre has nowhere been cleverly dramatized than in The Hollow Men (Shakti, Batra, 2001: 3-5).

English and American modern poetry had several independent voices that question contemporary important events and catastrophes of the age. The most important aspect of modern poetry is the special way of perceiving life and dealing with the world, because of the radical changes brought about by the first and second world wars. The destructive results of these two wars led to the creation of a new type of poetry, which was quite different from the poetry before the war in content and style, i.e., the poetry of the Victorian age at the late nineteenth century and the early beginning of the twentieth century. The devastating results of World War I caused a change in many European countries and brought about radical changes in the social life and disillusionment among people. The great losses faced by a large number of people in different countries changed the way people perceived religion, tradition and ethics, which created a shake in their beliefs and even in their political ideologies. Theologians, public intellectuals, and academicians argued that the forces of modernization were so powerful that they inevitably secularized western society and rendered religious belief old-fashioned. Churches and religious movements were doomed to extinction. But Balmar, in his book, Religion in Twentieth Century America, states, nothing could be far from the truth. Instead of dying, religion has thrived as never before. Whether measured by church attendance rates, national opinion polls, or charitable activities, this nation, arguably the most modern in the world, is also the most religious. (Balmar, 2001: 7)

The poetry of the age mirrors the new social, religious and political changes in the life of the people and their disillusionment. World War I was a very sad and catastrophic experience for the entire European countries and of the world in general, but its impact was much greater on the intellectual people. (Batra, 2001: 3-5). It was after that destructive war that some modern poets like Eliot brought a new way of writing poetry In defining themselves as innovative, Eliot and Pound rejected much Victorian literature for its out-moded Romanticism (Cronin etal, 2002: 513).

Tiwari states that Cleanth Brook points out that Eliot, like John Donne, belonged to the tradition of wit and paradox in English poetry. In his poetry, Eliot has portrayed the atmosphere of crime and the horror faced by humanity in the modern societies. Eliot has used the Greek myth in his poetry because he, like the symbolists, found a very deep spirituality in Greek mythology, which was quite different from the vulgarity of the modern world surrounding them. Eliot and the symbolist poets tried to present a picture of the ideal life in contrast to the debasement of values of the world in which modern man lives (Tiwari, 2001:1-3).

It is clear that Eliot knew when and why he decided to become a poet. He became a poet at the age of fourteen in 1902, after he read a copy of Fitz Gerard’s free translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, which had left an impact on his imagination (Jr. Miller, 2005:2). In the winter of 1910-1911, when Eliot was studying in Paris, he read three of Dostoevsky’s novels Crime and Punishment, The idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, on which he comments that These three novels made a very profound impression on me and I had read them all before Prufrock was completed (Southam, 1968: 18).

The poetry of Eliot, on the one hand, shows the catastrophes faced by modern man, like alienation, and on the other hand, suggests the solution for each single problem. Lewis Feuer argues that the problem of modern man is not specifically modern, it is omnipresent. What stands out from a historical and comparative standpoint is the omnipresence of alienation; it takes different guises in all societies (Feuer, 1969, 90).

It is said that the lack of basic wisdom is one of the salient characteristics of Eliot’s poetry. Eliot’s poetic revolution was complex in its effects. In fact, he introduced the urban element into his work as an essential and vital change in poetry; but Eliot’s imitators gave the readers the notion that his poetry is obscure without the essential vision and wisdom that underlie the originality and made a virtue out of incomprehensibility (Stephen Martin, 1984: 97).

Marlowe. A. Miller in his book, Masterpieces of British Modernism states that Virginia Woolf has declared that human nature, and human relations changed at about 1910. This change included master-slave relationship and that of