T.S Eliot\'s selcted poems, critical reading quotes for The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock, Preludes, Rhapsody on a Windy Night, The Hollow Men, and Journey of the Magi. PDF

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This document has critical reading quotes for Selected poem of T.S Eliot, namely The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock, Preludes, Rhapsody on a Windy Night, The Hollow Men, and Journey of the Magi. Extremely useful for Advanced English students doing Eliot for Module B....

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T.S. ELIOT CRITIC SUMMARIES DOHA G

T.S. ELIOT CRITIC SUMMARIES DOHA G

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Puzzle in the poem: the question as to whether Prufrock ever leaves his room Spatial movement is a movement in the same place, like a man running in a dream There is no way to distinguish between actual movement and imaginary movement Prufrock, however far he goes, remains imprisoned in his own subjective space, and all his experience is imaginary Time, like space, has a subjective existence for Prufrock Past, present and future are equally immediate, and Prufrock is paralyzed o “I grow old… I grow old…/ I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled” o There is a systematic confusion of tenses and times in the poem In a world where only one mind exists the foreknown has in effect already happened and no action is possible o Prufrock’s infirmity of will is not so much a moral deficiency as a consequence of his subjectivism

THE LOVE SONG: DAVID SPURR •

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The infinitives in this passage--to have bitten, to have squeezed, to roll--conform to the poem's widespread use of transitive verbs of direct action in expressing the speaker's violent impulse to combat the forces of disorder: to murder and create, to disturb the universe, to spit out all the buttends, to force the moment. The poem's linguistic and thematic strategy consistently opposes active verbs to the passive voice which causes things to be spread out, etherized, smoothed, and stretched. o It sets these infinitives against present participles, which are constantly muttering, sprawling, rubbing, scuttling, and settling. Finally, it opposes these transitive verbs to intransitive verbs which lie, linger, malinger, lean, curl, trail, wrap, slip, and sleep. A relative lack of modifiers & the absence of plural forms further distinguish the passage cited above. By contrast the language of disordered experience, of imprecision and aimlessness, abounds in modifiers and plurals: restless nights, one-night cheap hotels, visions and revisions, the sunsets and the dooryards, and the sprinkled streets. The structure of the imagery at this point in the poem corresponds to the thematic role played by linguistic form. The speaker’s failure to mater the language, “It is impossible to say just what I mean!” reflects upon his impotence o To have failed with words is to have lost the war on he inarticulate: the speaker as heroic Lazarus or Prince Hamlet is suddenly reduced to the stature of an attendant lord Paradoxically, this diminution of the outer self brings about a corresponding expansion of the inner self Ultimately, the speaker partly abandons and partly resolves the struggle of form and matter; the integration of the psyche remains incomplete

T.S. ELIOT CRITIC SUMMARIES

THE LOVE SONG: J. HILLIS MILLER

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THE LOVE SONG: CAROL CHRIST • • •

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T.S. ELIOT CRITIC SUMMARIES

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Eliot avoids envisioning the female, indeed, avoids attaching gender to bodies The poem circles around not only an unarticulated question, but also an unenvisioned centre, the “one” whom Prufrock addresses The poem never visualizes the woman with whom Prufrcok imagines an encounter except in fragments and plurals- eyes, arms, skirts- synecdoches as fetishistic replacements o Even these synecdochic replacements are engendered The poem projects images of the body onto the landscape (the sky, the streets, the fog) o These images also avoid the designation of gender The most visually precise images in the poem are of Prufrock himself- “My morning coat, my collar… My necktie… asserted by a simple pin” o Only to be decomposed by the watching eyes of another into thin arms and legs, a balding head brough in upon a platter o The pin that centres his necktie goes on to pinion him to the wall o The poem decomposes the body, making ambiguous is sexual identification ▪ These scattered body parts at once imply and evade a central encounter, the speaker cannot bring himself to confront. In the pattern of their scattering, they constitute the voice that Prufrock feels cannot exist in the gaze of the other

THE LOVE SONG: MUTLU KONUK BLASING •

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“It is impossible to say just what I mean!” o Eliot’s ironic use of rhyme and meter in “Prufrock” acknowledges the complicity of the poet’s conventions with his persona’s “de-meaning” language o “comic” meter of lines like “In the room the women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo” equates poetic forms that channel force and the social forms of keeping conversation light In "Prufrock," the literary epigraph, bespeaking "not only . . . the pastness of the past, but . . . its presence" (SW, 49), casts such a shadow over the poem that nature itself disappears, for a "sky" that recalls "ether" is, in fact, "etherized" for the present speaker. Thus, social paralysis resulting from knowing all and being known or seen through parallels a literary anesthesia—knowing all predecessors and being preformulated and "epigraphed" by them. Both kinds of anesthesia subject the individual voice to anterior formulas, forms, and styles. His monologue is a “polylogue” superscribed with allusions and echoes that document the presence of the past. Eliot attempts to free the individual voice by breaking out of forms register, only as impulse to dismemberment and suicide

THE LOVE SONG: JOHN PAUL RIQUELME • • •

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The reader and viewer stand both inside and outside the frame of an illusion that cannot be sustained Two epigraphs from Dante suggest the oscillation and indeterminacy of Prufrock’s position and the reader’s The pronouns “you” and “I” used have been classified by linguists as “shifters: because they are mutually defining and depend for their meanings on the pragmatic context of the discourses in which they occur o These pronouns indicate positions that can be variously occupied

THE LOVE SONG: MICHAEL NORTH •

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The poem is a perfect example of what Terry Eagleton call the modern “transition from metaphor to metonymy: unable any longer to totalize his experience in some heroic figure, the bourgeois is forced to let it trickle away into objects related to him by sheer contiguity.” o “The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes”, the metaphor dissolves into metonymy In a figure that exactly parallels the bodily metonymies, time become a collection of individual parts, just as the poem’s human denizens had been little more than parts As Burke says, metonymy substitute quantity for quality, so that instead of living life Prufrock feels like he has “measured” his “life with coffee spoons”.

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One of the themes this poem develops is the tedium and dryness of modern life. It is a expression of the futility of life. The reader gets an intense personal view of the society, the city and the world in which Prufrock lives. The poem conveys a sense of frustration which leads us to the main issue: the problem of communication The failure of communication is related to the theme of the individual’s isolation, loneliness, and estrangement from other people

T.S. ELIOT: THEMATIC STATEMENTS (PRELUDES & RHAPSODY) • • •

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Chakraborty: Eliot critiques the superficiality and pretensions of the urban squalor, reducing individuals to nothing more than objects, depicting a life full of monotony and misery Henri Bergson: We cannot think of ourselves, we cannot even conceive of ourselves as having a single clear identity Southam: Preludes and Rhapsody deal with a problem of a structured external life which does not seem to be “real” and an inner life whose profoundest level is of fragmentary glimpses that resist formation Smith: Eliot’s observation in Preludes is best described by Smith, “in a modern world, no living entity proceeds by instinct toward and appointed goal but a worn out mechanism with parts stiffly toiling as without destination, it moves in epicyclic paths.” Maxwell: Rhapsody is a poem “which does not mean anything” o Chakraborty: Rhapsody manifests the memory of the protagonist to bring forth further images of despair and sterility that confirm the present moment Rhapsody depicts a flow of random emotions and thoughts without censoring them, known as “Free association”, a Freudian term. o Chakraborty: The poem represents the haphazard fragmentary thoughts and memories of the narrator Smidt: In Rhapsody, “impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways.” Sharpe: Eliot “pose[s] questions instead of providing answers” o Wittgenstein: thus giving as a more “perspicacious view” of our present world

T.S. ELIOT CRITIC SUMMARIES

THE LOVE SONG: ROGER MITCHELL

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BUCKLEY: T.S. ELIOT’S AESTHETICS OF SOLIPSISM •

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The early poems give us a phenomenology of solipsism from which we can infer two things 1. The origin of the solipsist predicament, one that is existential and spiritual; not merely psychological 2. What would be required to escape solipsism, namely a solution that must likewise be more than psychological Whereas mere loneliness and mere isolation can be alleviated by the presence of other people, solipsism cannot, since it is an existential condition in which people are radically other in consequence of ontological and epistemological commitments. Russell Kirk: Eliot “felt… an isolation from others, … a tendency toward solipsism.” Eliot was “already, in his poems, … groping his way toward other means than metaphysics for warding off solipsism: toward faith and moral imagination.”

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Prufrock’s intense self-consciousness manifests as narcissism Prufrock indifferently levels objects and people o He perceives the “external emblems for their social roles and status.” The skirts, teacups, and novels are all related for Prufrock in that they establish class and cultural capital within polite society Interiority is so radically inaccessible to him that he hardly can conceive of it Eliot: “if one centre took notice of the other, it could do so only as an object in its own world.” Prufrock engages in self-reflection that amounts to “tormenting narcissism, as opposed to meaningful or productive introspection.” His life cannot even be distinguished from the banal bourgeois milieu he participates in The social events in the poem “gather individuals together in mutual alienation.” Michelangelo quote: while the women fail to access any transcendent meaning, they still agree on a cultural tradition. o Still, these representations of hollow sociality also demonstrate that solipsism does not equate with isolation

HOLLOW MEN • • • •

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Elisabeth Daumer: The hollow men have a “longing for a passion so transcendent that it will lift them from the broken valley of death’s dream kingdom.” Crag Raine notes that there is an “absolute lack” of eye contact in the poem. Russell Kirk: “We grope together/ and avoid speech.” They have, as Kirk aptly puts it, “collectivity that is not community “Our dried voices, when / We whisper together,” they say, “Are quiet and meaningless.” Their voices are “meaningless” because they do not have anything above themselves that would bridge the gap between their minds and enable genuine communication. o The hollow men consist of discrete selves whose speech represents instances of selfexpression emanating from a solipsistic container. o They have “voices,” not even words, since “words” would imply participation in at least a community of language with shared meanings. o The term “voices” in this line emphasizes how localized their speech is to themselves. The archaic nature of the twilight land in which they are trapped emphasises their solipsism For Däumer, Eliot rejects dualism and symbolizes it in the shadow that resides between binary divisions. o The shadow falls “Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act,” and so on.

This obsession with betweenness—the gaps between subject and object, as well as the gap between subject and subject—reveals a desire for wholeness in its anxiety over division. The poem, like a human being, resonates for its ability to participate in a transcendent reality or the larger whole of universal experience that unites seemingly disparate subjects, even if that contact may be at first difficult. In Eliot’s early poetry the radically fragmented, solipsistic world portrayed does not argue for nihilism but condemns it.

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T.S. ELIOT CRITIC SUMMARIES

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