TS Eliot

Prufrock TS

With a firm focus on the individual, in the midst of a society that is permeated by anxiety and isolation, Eliot’s Prufrock subverts Romanticism exposing the decaying urban landscape and allows the reader to enter his Modernist world through a dramatic monologue to explore the passage of time, and growing disconnection, awakening existential dread (in the reader).

Prufrock Quotes (16)

Quote	Technique
“There will be time”	Exploration of Bergson ‘lived time’ and wasting it  Future tense  The poem's persona, Prufrock, is trapped in a cycle of hesitation, constantly asking "Do I dare?" but never acting, leading to a deep sense of futility and fear of a life unlived, a common manifestation of existential anxiety.
“I have measured out my life in coffee spoons”	Lived time  Wasted  Repetitive  Loss of individuality
“For I have known... For I have known”	Tried to find meaning but failed  Repetition; cyclic
“Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels”
“Streets that follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent”’
“I grow old... I grow old...”	Aging + Death
“I do not think they will sing to me”
“Time yet for a hundred indescisions/and for a hundred visions and revisions”
“Women come and go, talking of michelangelo”	Class divide  Don't feel they belong
“It is impossible to say just what I mean!”
“Yellow smoke rubs its back… yellow smoke rubs its muzzle… licked… lingered”
“There will be time... there will be time... to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet”
“Streets that follow as a tedious argument of insidious intent”
“Half deserted streets”	City seperates ppl
“Do I dare disturb the universe?”

Preludes TS

Through his use of flaneur, Eliot provides an observation of different individuals and modernist society to criticise the lack of hope and spiritual faith, exposing the inverse relationship between the rapidly urbanising world of 1910s America, and its increasingly faithless population and encouraging the reader to desire change.

NOTE: Flaneur: Observing ppl in society

Vignettes: Episodic sections

Preludes Quotes (11)

Quote	Techniques
“You lay upon your back and waited… A thousand sordid images”	Memory paralyses us
“A thousand furnished rooms”	Loss of individuality
“Muddy feet that press to early coffee stands”
“Masquerades”
“Withered leaves about your feet”
“As the street hardly understands”
“Newspapers from vacant lots”
“Yellow soles of her feet”	Imagery of death Allusion to The Leper
“His soul stretched across the skies that fade behind city blocks… or trampled by instant feet”	Death of spirituality Allusion to Jesus Spirituality fades in city
“6 O’clock”	Objective Time Emjament, sudden + in ur face”
“That time resumes”	Lived time

Rhapsody TS

Eliot fractures time and memory in his poem ‘Rhapsody on a windy night’ to showcase the fragmentation of memory caused by spiritual decline in a rapidly urbanised American society in the 1910s confronting how social and moral decay caused  life to become cyclic and monotonous, using episodic vignettes and images of death and urban decay to urge society to seek meaning for themselves.

Title is ironic: there is no reference to wind in the poem. Instead the poem seems still, frozen under the moon’s gaze

Rhapsody Quotes (15)

• “Her hand twists a paper rose…/dust and old cologne…/she is alone” 

• Symbol of rose 

• To emphasise isolation she is alone is separated from cologne part by enjambment with next line 

• Love is dead/futile (paper) 

• Dust and old cologne; lingering and sensory imagery 

• Focused on MEMORY of love 

• Personification of moon 

• “Put on your shoes, sleep, prepare for life. / The last twist of the knife.”  

• The normal repetitive Life = death 

• TECHNIQUE: rhyming couplet  

• Etherize yourself, numb yourself to the realities of the world, cyclical monotony of the world 

• Twist = cyclical (image repeating) 

• No indiviuality in dwellings; simmilar in Preludes “A thousand furnished rooms” 

• LAST: this will end; encouraging reader 

• “Twelve o’clock… half past one… half past two… half past three… four oclock” 

• Anxiety 

• Objective time 

• “A broken spring… Rust that clings to the form… ready to snap” 

• TECHNIQUE: image of death, decay into uselessness  

• Connotations of modern industrial world CONTEXT 

• Sees past life and gets reminder of mortality 

• Sees images of death everywhere 

• Can’t bounce back no more 

• “The moon has lost its memory 

• Death 

• Eyes: 

• “I could see nothing behind that child’s eye” 

• “I have seen eyes in the street/trying to peer” 

• “Corner of her eye/twists like a crooked pin” 

• “She winks a feeble eye” 

• Flowers represent decay and mortality as opposed to ‘spring’ (new life)  

• Time and memory build a sense of atrophy (wasting away) throughout the poem. Instead of comforting the speaker, memories only highlight the passage of time and the inevitability of death. 

• “The memory throws up high and dry… a twisted branch” 

• non-discriminatory/everything/ONSLAUGHT 

• Difficult to distinguish memory/reality 

• Memory personified - given sense of agency/will 

• Rejection/sickness 

• overstimulated 

• Instability ← speaker cannot control the memories emerging and cannot control their own life  

• Nature of memory 

• Tangential thoughts related to the memory of a “twisted branch” that the memory conjures follow 

• Stream of consciousness 

• “Dissolve the floors of memory… its divisions and precisions” 

• Destroy structure memory stands upon 

• Loss of control 

• Dissolve: Slow 

• Fits dreamlike and unnerving imagery 

• Divisions: fragmented 

• Echoes Prufrock “indecisions… 

• TECHNIQUE: imagery and sibilance (dissolving sound) 

• “Midnight shakes the memory/as a madman shakes a dead geranium” 

• TECHNIQUE: imagery, simile + symbolism  

• Memory compared to dead flower - similar to moon reminisce 

• Midnight compared to madman (related to moon personification l8r?) 

• Geranium: flower symbolizes life (alive), passion, happiness 

• Midnight longing for memory; madman longing for companionship (SEE QUOTE “The moon has lost her memory” 

• Both futile 

• “The reminiscence comes/of sunless dry geraniums” 

• Oxymoron and motif (lotsa dead flowers) 

• No sun/no warmth = no life … pale imitation of the sun (a celestial life giver), sun allows growth but here the flowers are already dead  

• Moon has lost memory but still remembers that 

• Satirises Romanticism and romantic ideals

Hollow Men TS (4)

In Hollow Men, Eliot displays his disillusionment with post-war world, drawing on his experience in Britain, condemning individuals for having lost their desire for spiritual connection and meaning, due to a shared sense of hopelessness after horrors of war, as humanity has lost faith in itself and Eliot struggles to believe we have the courage to regain hope. 

Eliot's poetry continues to resonate today as he utilises linguistic devices and manipulates form to reflect the complexity of the human condition and encourages the reader to explore society’s dissonances in the wake of urbanisation, rapid spiritual decline following WW1 and the paradoxical journey to spirituality.

The concern of stasis and action within the decayed human condition culminates in HM, where Eliot’s disillusionment with the post-war world, condemns individuals for having lost their desire for spiritual connection and meaning and Eltiot struggles to believe we have the ability to take action to rectify this.

In HM, Eliot manipulates form to illustrate his disillusionment with a post-war world, condemning individuals for not questioning their lack of spiritual connection, caused by a shared sense of hopelessness after the horrors of war, as humanity has lost faith in itself and ultimately, Eliot questions if we have the courage to regain hope. Manipulates form: lack of punctuation, stagnant feeling compared to previous, time feels stagnant, italics for intrusions. Drawing on his experience in Britain, Eliot looks at loss of culture in Europe COLUMN LINE.

Hollow Men Quotes (14)

“Our dried voices…/Are quiet and meaningless/As wind”

Quote	Technique
“We are the hollow men/We are the stuffed men”	Full of superficiality, empty of deep things
“This is the dead land/This is the cactus land.”	Extended metaphor or allusions (idk) to hell and purgatory in Dante’s Divine Comedies  Symbolizes a spiritually/morally bankrupt society. Reflects society’s cultural decay and disillusionment  Decay Symbolism
“This is the way the world ends” x3 “Not with a bang but with a whisper”
“Between the idea/And the reality... Falls the Shadow”	The Shadow is what’s preventing them from doing  Makes reader think abt what is preventing them from doing things
“Shape without form...”	Paradox
“Behaving as the wind behaves/no nearer-/not that final meeting/in the twilight kingdom”
“Those who have crossed... Remember us- if at all- not as lost/Violent souls, but only/as the hollow men”	Violent: fought wars but didnt have a reason to
“Lips that would kiss/Form prayers to broken stone”	Rather than forming relationships we worship False Gods (could represent wealth etc), rich ppl on pedastal OR WWII leaders  Superficiality
“For Thine is/ Life is/ For Thine is the”	Enjament  Cant
“More distant and more solemn than a fading star”
“There, the eyes are/sunlight on a broken column”	We know what problem is but wont fix it  Decay of European culture from the war
“Let me also wear such deliberate disguises... Rat’s skin, crowskin, crossed”	Spreading disease Coming up with fake identity which is contagious  Decay/Death
“Gesture without motion”	Paradox
“For thine is the kingdom…Life is very long”	Italics represent a different entity that gives the poems structure, similar to the streetlamps, guides the poem, It can say the prayer, but they cant, feels like a godly entity
“This is the way the world ends x3/ not with a bang but with a whimper”

Journey of the Magi TS

In Journey of the Magi, a spiritually-reformed Eliot uses an allegory to share the difficulty in undertaking a spiritual journey yet urges his readers to share his discovery that the desire to undergo a pilgrimage for faith and belief can offer spiritual fulfilment in a world devoid of meaning.

Journey of the Magi Quotes (10)

Quotes	Technique
“With the voices singing in our ears, saying/this is all folly”	Magi story often conflated with story of shepards, Shepards spurred on by angels, Magi sent away”
“For a journey, and such a long journey”
“Silken girls bringing sherbet/ Then the camel men cursing and grumbling”	fgggggfgfg
“And... And... And”	Polysyndeton, anaphora, makes journey feel longer
“But there was no information, and so we continued”	All these religeous allusions, nothing said  Magi find no solace in christian symbols  Subverts expectations
“it was (as you may say) satisfactory”	Not dramatizing how amazing religion is  No details of meeting, infers faith is an ongoing journey, not just one sudden moment of becoming spiritual  Break in tension  Unreliability of poem  Casual, ironic tone  Subverts romantisism vibe
“Birth or Death?”	Playing on Jesus + Magi own spiritual rebirth  Antithesis
“No longer at ease here, in the old dispensation”	Sees smth nobody else sees  ‘New’ and better than others  References Eliots context
“Alien people clutching their gods”	Similar to hollow men  Feels seperated from them, doesnt relate anymore  False idols  Metaphor
“I should be glad of another death”	Would be reborn again for spirituality  OR   Would be down to go to heaven with people like him  Suicideal ideation  Allusion to Psalm 72:110  “All kings shall fall down before him”    Repetition of death