T. S. Eliot as a Modernist Poet

      Modernist poets generally dealt with the Modern Anguish of the modern man; searching for meaning, and alienation from life and work. The poems of T. S. Eliot puzzle every reader of poetry and every critic. His poems get re-created by every reader that assigns new meanings and by every critic who decides to read his poems with a different approach. However, with a technic called close reading, the audience could read details in his poetry that makes him a well-known modernist poet.

     Modernist poets like Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats tried to use the metaphor of science for poetry thus making it an academic discipline. Eliot was one of the poets who produced new theories about poetry that helped to make poetry a disciplinary study. He argued that while innovating ‘New’ ways of poetry, contemporary poets should relate to the poetic tradition. He tried to advance poetry in the light of the past, thus New Criticism evolved. It argued that the structure and meaning of the text were connected and should be read simultaneously. He argued that modern tendencies of modern poetry were to modify poetry with poets that observe feelings like an astronomer observes stars; just to learn. To him, emotions were valuable regardless of being felt by him or not, they had to be studied.

     Modernist poets put boredom that evoked by modern life in the center and Eliot’s poetry was not an exception. The audience reads how he examines humans whose tragedy is to born with a godly potential and end up with a 9 to 5 job. In his poet titled Preludes, the audience could read the significant themes of modernist poetry. The poetic personage of Eliot’s poetry mirrors the modern audience. In section one, the poet gives a description of the city that makes the reader feel the depressing portrait of contemporary life. Markers of modern cities are smelly streets, newspapers that include mostly the grotesque or artificial sides of the cities, burn-out cigarette ends that cover the landscape of urban life, and broken blinds that unify the sordid image of the city.

I

The winter evening settles down

With the smell of steaks in passageways.

Six o’clock.

The burnt-out ends of smoky days.

And now a gusty shower wraps

The grimy scraps

Of withered leaves about your feet

And newspapers from vacant lots;

The showers beat

On broken blinds and chimney-pots,

And at the corner of the street

A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

 

And then the lighting of the lamps.

     Because in modernist poetry the time is relative and memories are not stored in the mind chronologically, Eliot’s second section opens up the day with the blurry memory of the night. The last lines of the first section tell the lighting of the lamps that implies the end of the day , however, the city continues its rush life in the night as well. As the day sleeps, the nightlife of the city woke. The poet chose olfactory imagery, the smell of the beer for the reminiscent of the night, and the smell of the coffee for the day. We know from Judith Butler that an identity is an act of performance, Eliot implies the performance people have to perform (for work, for school, or marriage) over and over again like Sisyphos with the words ‘shades’ and ‘masquerade’.

II

The morning comes to consciousness

Of faint stale smells of beer

From the sawdust-trampled street

With all its muddy feet that press

To early coffee-stands.

With the other masquerades

That time resumes,

One thinks of all the hands

That are raising dingy shades

In a thousand furnished rooms.

      Eliot believed that there were verbal formulas that one can use that will awoke a common feeling in humans, a feeling that was connected with an object, and he called it ‘objective correlative. In section three we could see how he uses this technic while he connects the bed with depressing thoughts. The alienation that is created by urban life could be read clearly because the modern man has no other time to ‘actually’ think, he only has time in his bed laying at night where he can go onto internal journeys. The poet says that it awoke sordid images however it is only a mirror of the soul. Sitting beside the bed in the morning reminds the feeling of tiredness and obligation, he has somewhere to go, and the bedside is where he thinks about how he will start his day while he has lost his sleep in thinking.

III

You tossed a blanket from the bed,

You lay upon your back, and waited;

You dozed and watched the night revealing

The thousand sordid images

Of which your soul was constituted;

They flickered against the ceiling.

And when all the world came back

And the light crept up between the shutters

And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,

You had such a vision of the street

As the street hardly understands;

Sitting along the bed’s edge, where

You curled the papers from your hair,

Or clasped the yellow soles of feet

In the palms of both soiled hands.

      Streets is a common image in the poets of Eliot because a street is a place where one is exposed and observed. Thus vulnerability and self-consciousness could be the emotions that are connected with the street as an object. The fourth section of the poem reminds cycles; evenings will come again, then there is the newspaper again, he will drag his feet from work to house, and the night he will be sleepless again, but he will wake up and live yesterday. He concludes that he is fascinated by moments of eternity that will clash with the time-bound existence of modern man where he always searches for meaning. Eliot ends his poem with hope. He concludes that one should laugh and move on because the world moves on anyway.

IV

His soul stretched tight across the skies

That fade behind a city block,

Or trampled by insistent feet

At four and five and six o’clock;

And short square fingers stuffing pipes,

And evening newspapers, and eyes

Assured of certain certainties,

The conscience of a blackened street

Impatient to assume the world.

 

I am moved by fancies that are curled

Around these images, and cling:

The notion of some infinitely gentle

Infinitely suffering thing.

 

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;

The worlds revolve like ancient women

Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

      In conclusion, T.S.Eliot is a well-known modernist poet because he both created boldly poetry about the despair of modern man with the themes of relativeness of time, depressing portraits of contemporary life, alienation, and objective perception and also studied modern poetry for the next generations. He gave them a paradox where they could analyze objects as emotions and emotions as objects.   

Works Cited:

     Brazil, Kevin. “T.S. Eliot: Modernist Literature, Disciplines and the Systematic Pursuit of Knowledge.” Being Modern: The Cultural Impact of Science in the Early Twentieth Century, edited by Robert Bud et al., UCL Press, London, 2018, pp. 77–92. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv550d3p.10. Accessed 31 Mar. 2021.

     McVey, Christopher. “T. S. Eliot, Modernism, and Boredom.” The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual: Volume 2, edited by John D. Morgenstern and Laura Coby, Liverpool University Press, 2018, pp. 67–86. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvhn0cz2.9. Accessed 31 Mar. 2021.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44214/preludes-56d22338dc954