T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

"The Waste Land"

• theme - decay of Western civilisation, with his subjects the passive people of London ("unreal city")
• contains mixture of different languages and techniques
• divided into five sections: The Burial of the Dead, A Game of Chess, The Fire Sermon, Death by Water, What the Thunder Said

It begins:

April is the cruellest month, breedingLilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

Four Quartets

• name given to four related poems: "Burnt Norton", "East Coker", "The Dry Salvages" and "Little Gidding"

It begins:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.

"Journey of the Magi"

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For the journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins,
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death,
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Literary Criticism

• objective correlative - term introduced in his essay "Hamlet and His Problems"; defined as the set of objects, a situation or a chain of events which will set off a specific emotion in the reader
• "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
• presents his conception of tradition and the definition of the poet and poetry in relation to it
• though the English tradition generally upholds the belief that art progresses through change, literary advancements are recognized only when they conform to tradition
• a poet must embody "the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer" while simultaneously expressing his contemporary environment
• "the most individual parts of his (the poet's) work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously."
• novelty is possible through tapping to tradition 
• "Impersonal Theory" of poetry - since the poet engages in a "continual surrender of himself" to the vast order of tradition, artistic creation is a process of depersonalization
• the poet is compared to a catalyst in a chemical reaction, in which the reactants are feelings and emotions that are synthesized to create an artistic image that captures and relays those same feelings and emotions
• the poet is thus a depersonalized vessel, a mere medium - it is the intensity of the fusion that renders the art great. Successful poetry is impersonal.