Scribd
Upload
219 views1 page

Preludes Paragraph Scaffolds: Alienation and Isolation

Eliot depicts the modern urban landscape in Preludes as spiritually decayed and isolating. Individuals are detached from human connection and dignity, reduced to parts that fuel the industrial machine. The grimy streets have become people's souls, and the only interaction is sordid. Eliot expands this critique to focus on the cultural and spiritual isolation, with meaningless newspapers and masquerades. While hoping for reunification with God, Eliot sees this as folly, finding the world and landscape void of values and revolving in endless disillusionment. Thus Eliot merges the internal experience of isolation and misery with the emptiness of the external world.

Uploaded by

Cameron Atkinson
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
219 views1 page

Preludes Paragraph Scaffolds: Alienation and Isolation

Eliot depicts the modern urban landscape in Preludes as spiritually decayed and isolating. Individuals are detached from human connection and dignity, reduced to parts that fuel the industrial machine. The grimy streets have become people's souls, and the only interaction is sordid. Eliot expands this critique to focus on the cultural and spiritual isolation, with meaningless newspapers and masquerades. While hoping for reunification with God, Eliot sees this as folly, finding the world and landscape void of values and revolving in endless disillusionment. Thus Eliot merges the internal experience of isolation and misery with the emptiness of the external world.

Uploaded by

Cameron Atkinson
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 1

PRELUDES PARAGRAPH SCAFFOLDS

Alienation and Isolation

- In Preludes, Eliot condemns the modern urban landscape as blighted by spiritual decay
and a place in which individuals are isolated from human companionship and one's
personal humanity.
- Urban landscape is, again, represented as a decaying and alienating setting - not
somewhere people find warmth or connections. (quotes and analysis from imagery in
Prelude 1: steak...burnt out ends...broken blinds and chimney pots...).
- Unlike his more free-flowing and random poems, Eliot’s Preludes is structured on a
twenty four hour day and captures the cyclic monotony and drudgery by beginning at
“Six o’clock”(Prelude 1, line 3); disassociated from actual control over their own lives,
only passive slaves to the modern commercial city and ‘time.
- Indeed, this urban landscape is so dehumanising that individual people are seen as
being nothing more than ‘the parts of their bodies (hands...feet,+ synecdoche Prelude 2)
which are useful for being parts of the urban industrial machine; the inhabitants of this
world are further detached from the dignity of humanity, effectively being ‘owned by
the street’: sawdust-trampled street/with all its muddy feet that press/to early coffee-
stands (Prelude 2)
- According to Eliot, the ‘grimy streets’ (select another quote) of the external world have
become the soul of its inhabitants; the only form of connection between individuals is
‘sordid’ (Prelude 3)...Or clasped the yellow soles of feet/In the palms of both soiled
hands + analysis
- Eliot expands his critique of the urban landscape to focus on the subsequent cultural
and spiritual isolation: ‘grimy scraps’ (P1), motif of newspapers meaningless culture Commented [1]: The consequences of alienation from
(P1,3&4); the ‘performance/masquerade’ sequence of images (in Prelude 3+analysis). a source of meaning are further examined in Prelude 3,
where Eliot switches the point-of-view of the poem to
- While Eliot held out hope that people would again become familiar again and united speak directly to a prostitute as she struggles to wake
with God (IV: fancies that are curled...and cling...infinitely gentle...thing’) he ultimately to yet another day of physical ravishment and
humiliation,...recollecting the “thousand sordid images/
presents this desire for reunification between the human and spiritual realms as folly;
Of which her soul is constituted,”...the unsavoury
Eliot is clear that ‘the worlds’ - the cosmos and his modern urban landscape - is void of images of the previous life that has reduced her soul
values and ultimately ‘revolve like ancient women’ in a never-ending cycle of into a commodity for lust... her soul now isolated from
her humanity and condemned to an eternity in hell from
disillusionment, with this spiritually disconnected existence - as pointless as the act [where] there is no relief.
of ‘gathering fuel in vacant lots’.
- Thus, Eliot ironically merges the internal experience with that of the external world;
similar to the emptiness and desolation of the external life, the mind of the individual also
suffers a sense of isolation and misery.

You might also like