Предыдущая страница реферата | 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10 | Следующая страница реферата

Extremely was influential figure in literary circles. Editor, poet, playwright, critic – he came from a prosperous American family, his father was a rich manufacturer & his mother wrote poetry. He was brought up in St.
Louis Missouri. He was educated in private school & attended Harvard to get his degree in philosophy in 1906. Then left for Paris. There he attended lectures of Henry Bergson – “Subjective Idealism Philosophy, Theory of
Intuitivism”. Being in Paris he read much on French symbolist poets. The symbolist movement was one of major influences upon his poetry. The goal of art is to express the unique personal emotional responses to a certain moment in human life through indefinite illogical, sometimes private in meaning symbols. Eliot returned to Harvard & there he read widely in
Sanskrit & oriental philosophy (had a powerful influence on him). In 1915 he decided to give up philosophy to remain in England & to begin writer’s career. In 1916 he completed his Ph.D. theses, but never received a degree.
He married & settled in England permanently.

The beginning of his literary career starts from 1910 when he wrote “The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. It was published in 1915 in magazine
“Poetry”. The poem is written in a very simple style. Then he made a collection “Prufrock & Other Observations”. This was compared with “Lyrical
Ballads” of Wordsworth & Coleridge. This work inaugurated the age of modernism in poetry. There is no plot in the story. It’s a dramatic monologue but of the new kind. It sounds like a stream of consciousness of a person who walks up the street of London. The protagonist is Alfred
Prufrock. He is an antiromantic hero, rather timid, self-centred. The tone is very ironic, images are startlingly fresh. The title suggests that some feeling should be shown to the other person. The poem starts as a dialogue:

Let us go out – you & I…

Critics argue that you & I are two sides of one & the same person. Eliot says that “YOU” is a companion of Prufrock. We should pay attention to the epigraph: “The truth will remain under”. This means that the speaker can persuade himself to talk only if this will never be heard. It is his own dramatic monologue. Prufrock is intensely preoccupied with himself.
Probably he signs his love song to himself… (though it doesn’t matter much)

We can understand “love-song” in ironic sense because the whole poem is an elaborate rationalization for not seeking love. Love cannot exist in this ugly senseless chaotic world. It is a miracle, hopeless yearning of person for the vitality. The whole scene makes us see that love is not possessive in this world. Repulsive attitude of the narrator towards what he sees – images of a pair of ragged claws, mermaids singing each to each.
Leitmotif:

В гостиных дамы тяжело

Беседуют о Микеланджело.

It means that they talk of what they pretend to know.

The poem is full of allusions. The epigraph is quite important, taken from Dante’s “The Divine Comedy”. The end of poem is pessimistic. It is one of the most understandable of his poems.

“The Waste Land” (the poem (1922) in ”Dial” & “Criteria”[GB]). The poem consists of 5 parts & their titles speak for themselves:

“The Burial of the Dead”

“A Game of Chess” – an allusion of a medieval play, where the action was as if in two playings.

“The Fire Sermon” – the postulates of oriental religion.

“The Death by the Water”

“What the Thunder Said”

In terms of forms the poem is a collage of fragments of memories, overheard conversations, quotations put together only by the implied present of a sensible person (= a refined sensibility = a modern poet), upon whom all these complexibilities & varieties of human world are hipped
& who staggers under the burden of them. We can say that the mind of the poet is heavily packed with cultural tradition. A poem abounds in highly sophisticated allusions:

. “The Tempest”

. Anthropological account of “Grail”(“Грааль”) legend– a legend connected with Christianity – a cup from which Christ drank;

. from “The Divine Comedy”;

. alluded & used words from operas of Wagner;

. refers to the story of crusification;

. uses French symbolists;

. as well as scraps of popular culture – music-hall songs, slang words, contemporary fashion;

He hips everything together. This bits & pieces are set into a matrix of flowing stream of consciousness of a man. The dramatic portrait of a single mind becomes the portrait of an age. Eliot provided 52 notes for “The Waste
Land” when it was first published. The poem was opposed violently but there were also admirers. They said that Eliot gave a definite description of their age. Now terms “lost generation”, “post-war disillusionment”, “jazz age”, “waste land” are used parallelly For many contemporary writers & critics “The Waste Land” was a definite description of the age.
Civilization was dying. Critics regarded it as the disillusionment of a generation. Eliot protested against that. The term “waste land” is used in literature alongside with the term “lost generation”.

He also employed the myth of dying & reviving king – what the poem expresses is the need of salvation & this is expressed in 3 Sanskrit words
(give, sympathize & control). There are many barbarisms in the poem.

Рекомендуем скачать другие рефераты по теме: конспект урока 9 класс, движение реферат, доклад по биологии.



Предыдущая страница реферата | 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10 | Следующая страница реферата

Поделитесь этой записью или добавьте в закладки