T.s eliot

Literary Criticism II
ENG- 332
Lecture No: 10
“T. S Eliot ”
Course: Literary Criticism II- ENG- 332 – Instructor: Siraj Khan, Lecturer in English, Department of English KUST- Email: siraj.khan@kust.edu.pk
By: Siraj Khan
Lecturer in English
KUST

Outlines
Poet’s Biography
Important Works
Movement / Style
Themes
First Period (1911-1922)
Second Period (1922-1925)
Third Period (1930)
Awards and Recognitions
Topic: T. S Eliot
Course: Literary Criticism II ENG- 332 – Instructor: Siraj Khan, Lecturer in English, Department of English KUST- Email: siraj.khan@kust.edu.pk

T. S Eliot
(September 26, 1888 – January 04, 1965)
 American- born British Poet, Essayist, literary
Critic, Dramatist, Publisher and editor
 Thomas Stearns Eliot
 Nobel Prize for Literature (1948)
 Poems: The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,
Preludes, Ash Wednesday
 Plays: Murder in the Cathedral, The Cocktail Party, The Family Reunion, The
Confidential Clerk
Topic: T. S Eliot

Important Works
Topic: T. S Eliot
•The Waste Land (1922)
•Murder in the Cathedral (1935)
•The Dry Salvages (1941)
•Burnt Norton (1936)
•East Coker (1940)
•Four Quartets (1943)
•Little Gidding (1942)
•The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
•The Sacred Wood (1920)
•Sweeney Agonistes (1926)

Movement/ Style
 Modernism
 New Criticism
 Association of ideas
 Mythical Method
 Subjective Experiences Made Universal
 Use of Juxtaposition
 Fragmentation
 Technique of Implication
 Objective Correlative
Topic: T. S Eliot

T. S Eliot’s Style
Poetry
Metaphysical Poets
 Highly Expressive Meter
 Disconnected Images
 Repetition of words, Images and Phrases
 Flexible Tone
 Rhythm of Free Verses
 Metaphysical Whimsical Images
 Quotations From Different Languages
 Past and Present are simultanious
Topic: T. S Eliot

Themes
Eliot’s theories about modern poetry are enacted in his
work:
His writing exemplifies not only modernity, but also the
modernist mode
It seeks to put the reader off balance so as to capture the
incoherence and dislocations of a bewildering age.
 The modern individual is “ no longer at ease here”
 He has witnessed the birth of something new and unprecedented, and finds the change to
be a [h]ard and bitter agony.
 He also attempts to counteract its disorderliness:
 Bringing disparate elements into some sort of conceptual unity.
 The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings,
phrases images, which remain there untill all the particles which can unite to form a new
compound are present together.
Topic: T. S Eliot

 A poem should be an organic thing in itself, a made
object.
 Once it is finished, the poet will no longer have
control of it.
 It should be judged, analyzed by itself without the
interference of poet’s personal influence and
intentional elements and other elements.
Topic: T. S Eliot
Aesthetic Views

 Modern Life is chaotic, futile and fragmentary
• Eliot agues that modern poetry must be difficult” to match the
intricacy of modern experience.
 Poetry should reflect this fragmentary nature of life:
• The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more
allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary,
language into his meaning.
 This nature of life should be projected, not analyzed.
Topic: T. S Eliot
Reflection of Life

Topic: T. S Eliot
The Poet Should Draw Upon Tradition
Use the Past to serve the present and future
•Simultaneous order
•How the past, present, future interrelate
•Sometimes at the same time
Borrow from Authors that are:
•Remote in time
•Alien in language
•Diverse in interest
Use the past to underscore what is missing from
the present

First Period (1911-1922)
 1911 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock–
 The First masterpiece of Modernism in
English
 1917 Prufrock and Other Observations
 First Volume of Poetry
Topic: T. S Eliot

Topic: T. S Eliot
Second Period
1922 The Waste Land:
Eliot’s ephocal masterpiece, a representative
work of the High modernism of the 1920s.
1925 The Hollow Man:
 The Spiritual and emotional aridity of
modern men, exhibiting a pessimism

Topic: T. S Eliot
Third Period
1930 Ash Wednesday
1943 Four Quartets
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948
Literary Criticism:
Selected Essays 1932
The Uses of Poetry 1933
On Poetry and Poets 1957
1935-1958 Verse Plays:
Murder In the Cathedral

Awards and Recognitions
Eliot received:
 The Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948
 The Order of Merit in January 1948
 The Hanseatic Gothe Prize in 1954
 The Dante Gold Medal in 1959
 Eliot was recognized as an officier de la legion d’Honneur
Topic: T. S Eliot

Good Luck
Topic: T. S Eliot

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