T.S. Eliot, Nobel Prize winner of 1948

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

T.S. Eliot, Nobel Prize winner of 1948

Tradition and the Individual Talent

• Impersonal theory of poetry

- relation of the poem to other poems by other authors: consciousness of the past

• - relation of the poem to its author

• Distinction between emotions & feelings

T.S. Eliot, Nobel Prize winner of 1948

Objective Correlative（客观对应物）

• Poetry is

- not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion

- not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality

T.S. Eliot, Nobel Prize winner of 1948

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

I. Introduction

II. The subject of “Love Song”

III. The form of “Love Song”

T.S. Eliot, Nobel Prize winner of 1948

I. Introduction

• T.S. Eliot & The Waste Land (1922)• Modernism: rejection of traditions;

experimental in form

- emphasis on inner world / consciousness

- dehumanization, helpless man, chaotic world

- symbolism, stream of consciousness

- sense of rejection, tone of desperation

- obscurity in language

T.S. Eliot, Nobel Prize winner of 1948

Summary of the Story

• A poem of self-irony

- “love song” vs. “absence of love”

- effort of action vs. effectual inaction

- ordinary surname vs. elegant initial “J.” and middle name

• Fear, boredom, despair, breakdown

T.S. Eliot, Nobel Prize winner of 1948

II. Subject

1. Focus on the “inner world”

2. Anti-hero & dehumanization

3. Alienation & estrangement

T.S. Eliot, Nobel Prize winner of 1948

1. Focus on “Inner World”

• dramatic monologue

- (cf. Robert Browning’s poem)

• Interior monologue – stream of consciousness: talking to self; ego & id; free association

T.S. Eliot, Nobel Prize winner of 1948

Fra Lippo Lippi

I am poor brother Lippo, by your leave!

You need not clap your torches to my face.

Zooks, what’s to blame? You think you see a monk!

What, ‘tis past midnight, and you go the rounds,

And here you catch me at an alley’s end

Where sportive ladies leave their doors ajar?

… …

T.S. Eliot, Nobel Prize winner of 1948

Fra Lippo Lippi

Fra Lippo Lippi (1406-1469), a Florentine painter and friar with the Renaissance fresh appreciation of earthly pleasures as a reaction against the medieval attitude.

T.S. Eliot, Nobel Prize winner of 1948

2. Anti-hero & dehumanization

• Hero – large, dignified, powerful, heroic like Hamlet and Michelangelo

• Anti-hero – petty, ignominious, ineffectual, passive, e.g. Prufrock a bald-haired middle-aged man of social failure

• Dehumanization – insect (butterfly), crab, e.g. Kafka’s Metamorphosis (Gregor changed into a gigantic insect, a cockroach.)

T.S. Eliot, Nobel Prize winner of 1948

3. Alienation / Estrangement

• From the society: ill at ease, bored, unwelcome

• Self-estrangement: self-debasing, coward / timid

T.S. Eliot, Nobel Prize winner of 1948

III. Form

1. Free verse: no fixed metrical foot, irregular line length, no regular rhyme, mixture of iamb, trochee or anapest; rhymed lines – images of irony, etc.

2. Symbols

3. Allusions

4. Lack of continuity

T.S. Eliot, Nobel Prize winner of 1948

2. Symbols

• Jules La Forgue

• Symbols for complex reality:

- evening (a patient etherized upon a table - inaction ) (John Berryman, Confessional poet)

- cat: sexy, alluring and fearsome; slothful state of spirit

T.S. Eliot, Nobel Prize winner of 1948

3. Allusions (1)

• Dante’s Inferno: the character’s pain• Hamlet, Bible stories, Andrew Marvel’s

poem – Prufrock’s cowardice• John the Baptist (a prophet): Prufrock’s

reputation is picked pieces – his head, a slightly bald head, is brought in on a platter, but he’s no prophet

T.S. Eliot, Nobel Prize winner of 1948

3. Allusions (2)

Lazarus raised to life:

• - Prufrock is like Lazarus raised from death to life, who has glimpsed sth. of another world and is not understood by the women. These women are a group of overcultured, bored people in the drawing rooms who sip tea and discuss art (Michelangelo) with shallowness.

T.S. Eliot, Nobel Prize winner of 1948

3. Allusions (3)

Mermaids:

• - opposite of what the women in the drawing rooms represent (their dried out, over-refined life)

• - stands for beauty, life, vitality

T.S. Eliot, Nobel Prize winner of 1948

Phrase Source

“I have wept and fasted, Matthew (The Bible)

wept and prayed…”

 

“Among the porcelain…” Emily Dickinson “I cannot live with you”

 

“I’ve heard the mermaids

singing each to each…” John Donne

 

“squeezed the universe

into a ball…” Andrew Marvel “To His Coy Mistress”

 

the last but five stanza Hamlet and Polonius in Hamlet

T.S. Eliot, Nobel Prize winner of 1948

4. Lack of Continuity

• Sudden shifting from one scene to another

• Jumping from one thought to another

• Collage of fragmented pieces

T.S. Eliot, Nobel Prize winner of 1948

Assignments for “Hills like White Elephants”

• Look for modernistic elements in

- relationship between the characters

- narration

- theme

- style

- symbols

…