T.S Eliot Views and Values

2261 Words10 Pages
T.S Eliot was a primary figure throughout the period of modernism; a time of experimentation in the arts from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, particularly in the years following World War I. The modernist writers challenged the linear nature of writing, demonstrated throughout Eliot’s poems where he replaces the logical exposition of thoughts with collages of fragmentary images and complex allusions. The fragmentary nature of the writing results from T.S Eliot’s view (and the modernist view) of the world as fragmented, because in an era characterized by industrialization, rapid social change, advances in science and the social sciences and the loss of traditional beliefs, T.S Eliot and other modernist writers felt a growing isolation and sense of destruction within society. Eliot’s poetry therefore becomes a critique of this new, fractured society in which the loss of traditional values and spiritual purity result in emotion detachment and a sterile, meaningless existence. The first of these societal critiques, The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock is written as a dramatic monologue and explores through the voice of its middle-class male speaker a bleak and superficial world bereft of cultural depth and the fulfillment of personal relationships. The poem begins with an epigraph from Dante’s Inferno in which Guido tells Dante of his life after death. This imagery of hell parallels Prufrock’s own inner hell of isolation and emotional distance. Just as Guido is imprisoned in a flame, Prufrock’s inner self is imprisoned in a superficial world where he cannot tell of his feelings and desires. This notion of hell on earth is indicative of Eliot’s view of the world as damaged and fractured. This view is further emphasized in the lines ‘When the evening is spread out against the sky/like a patient etherized upon a table’ Eliot juxtaposes the usual beauty and
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