Thomas Stearns Eliot: tesina

THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT: TESINA

Thomas Stearns Eliot.

Life and Works: He was born in St. Louis (Missuri), in 1888 and educated at Harvard. He was an American by birth, but his cultural background was at first English and then European. Infact in 1910 he went to Paris and at the Sorbonne, after attend in the Oxford University. He settled in England during World War I and worked in London, first as a bank clerk, then as a publisher. His first important poem, The love songs of j. Alfred Prufrock, appeared in 1915. His first book of criticism was published in 1920 and The Waste Land two years later, after the American poet Ezra Pound had contributed to reduce it to its final form, and Eliot later dedicated it to Pound himself, “il miglior fabbro- the better craftsman”. In 1925 was published The Hollow Men and two years later Journey of the Magi. In 1927 he renounced his American citizenship and became a British subject. In the 30s attempted to revive verse drama, the most successful of his plays, Murder in the Cathedral about the assassination of Becket in 1770, was published in 1935. In 1948 he received the Nobel Prize for literature. He died in London in 1965.

The modern age and Thomas Stearns Eliot: tesina

ELIOT: THE WASTE LAND

The Waste Land: The Waste Land is a long poem in 443 lines, and five section:
•    The Burial of the Dead;
•    A Game of Chess;
•    The Fire Sermon;
•    Death by Water;
•    What the Thunder said.
It is considered the greatest poem of the twenty century. When it appeared produced a sense of shock, a feeling that the poetic tradition was being upturned. There was the matter of its difficulty; there were those who found it totally obscure, and others who found it arid and desiccated, as some people found mr. Eliot himself.
Eliot was one of the modernist English poets of the first half of 20th century. He explained his modernism:” Our civilisation comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must became more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning”.
For the ordinary reader this meant considerable obscurity; and it had the effect of turning poetry from something everyone could enjoy into a pursuit for an academic elite”.  
The Waste Land defies any order or unity. It is an amazing anthology of indeterminate states of the mind, of impressions, situations and personalities. All the fragmentary passages seem to belong to one voice relating to a multiple personality beyond the limits of space and time.