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T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), an American turned British citizen, was a renowned poet and literary critic who had a significant impact on modernist poetry. His works challenged traditional poetic forms and explored themes of disillusionment, fragmentation, and the search for meaning in the modern world.
- Marina
T.S. Eliot’s poem, ‘Marina’, belongs to the group of poems...
- Song
‘Song’ by T.S Eliot is a cunning poem about love. The poem...
- Burnt Norton
‘Burnt Norton’ is the first poem in Four Quartets.Although...
- Preludes
'Preludes' is one of the earliest poems of T.S Eliot,...
- Sweeney Among The Nightingales
The title of T. S. Eliot’s mock-heroic, modernist poem...
- Portrait of a Lady
Summary ‘Portrait of a Lady’ by T.S. Eliot depicts the...
- Whispers of Immortality
‘Whispers of Immortality’ by T.S. Eliot is an eight-stanza...
- Morning at The Window
‘Morning at the Window’ was written in 1914, some months...
- The Naming Of Cats
Although born in the United States of America, he became a...
- Rhapsody on a Windy Night
Half-past three, The lamp sputtered, The lamp muttered in...
- Marina
'Preludes' is one of the earliest poems of T.S Eliot, written during 1910-11 and published in Eliot's first collection 'Prufrock and Other Observations' (1917), which established his reputation in the literary world.
- Female
- October 9, 1995
- Poetry Analyst And Editor
- Summary
- Detailed Analysis
- Historical Background
It is difficult to tie one meaning to ‘The Waste Land‘. Ultimately, the poem itself is about culture: the celebration of culture, the death of culture, and the misery of being learned in a world that has largely forgotten its roots. Eliot wrote it as a eulogyto the culture that he considered to be dead; at a time when dancing, music, jazz, and othe...
Part One: Stanza One
Immediately, the poem starts with the recurring imagery of death: ‘April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.’ Note the cadence of every –ing ending to the sentence, giving it a breathless, uneven sort of reading: when one reads it, there is a quick-slow paceto it that invites the reader to linger over the words. The use of the word ‘winter’ provides an oxymoronic idea: the idea that cold and death c...
Stanza Two
Here is another of Eliot’s allusions, ‘son of man/ you cannot say or guess’, which is directly lifted from The Call of Ezekiel in the ‘Book of Ezekiel’. The religious allusion could be considered a response to the vast technological advancements of the time, where science was taking great leaps; however, the spiritual and cultural sectors of the world were desolate. ‘A heap of broken images’ shows the fragmented nature of the world and the snapshots of what the world has become to further pin...
Stanza Three
Cleanth Brooks writes: “The fortune-telling of “The Burial of the Dead” will illustrate the general method very satisfactorily. On the surface of the poem the poet reproduces the patter of the charlatan, Madame Sosostris, and there is the surface irony: the contrast between the original use of the Tarot cards and the use made by Madame Sosostris. But each of the details (justified realistically in the palaver of the fortune-teller) assumes a new meaning in the general context of the poem. The...
From the Modernism Lab at Yale University: “Eliot’s Waste Land is I think the justification of the ‘movement,’ of our modern experiment, since 1900,” wrote Ezra Pound shortly after the poem was published in 1922. T.S. Eliot’s poem describes a mood of deep disillusionment stemming both from the collective experience of the first world war and from E...
- Female
- Poetry Analyst
"Preludes" is made up of four poems written by the modernist poet T. S. Eliot between 1908 and 1912, when Eliot was in his early 20s. They were later collected in Eliot's debut Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917. Broadly speaking, "Preludes" is about the drudgery, waste, and isolation of modern urban life.
The Waste Land Summary & Analysis. T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" is considered one of the most important poems of the 20th century, as well as a modernist masterpiece. A dramatic monologue that changes speakers, locations, and times throughout, "The Waste Land" draws on a dizzying array of literary, musical, historical, and popular cultural ...
How should we approach Eliot’s poetry and the question of what The Waste Land means? How can we analyse The Waste Land and discover its true meaning? Is there a true meaning? Eliot was often notoriously unhelpful at providing clarification or elucidation to his poems.
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“The Hollow Men” is a poem by the American modernist poet T.S. Eliot, first published in 1925. Uncanny and dream-like, “The Hollow Men” describes a desolate world, populated by empty, defeated people.
