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PARADOSSI Storie di illusioni e verità rovesciate Alessio Vezzoni - 5^BLT |
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PARADOSSI Storie di illusioni e verità rovesciate Alessio Vezzoni - 5^BLT |
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis Missouri, USA, in 1888, on both sides his ancestors had been among the earliest settlers to move to Massachusetts from their native England.
He began studying at the Smith Academy and then entered Harvard University. In this time he showed his English taste, with his careless way of dressing and his smoking a pipe; typical English behaviour. He was a reserved student due to his inborn shyness and tried to over come this problem by taking dancing and boxing lessons.
After taking his M.A. degree, he come to Europe and, attending the lectures of Henri Bergson, was deeply influenced by the works of the French Symbolists.
When the First World War broke out he went to England where he studied Greek philosophy and knew Ezra Pound who praised his poems. He tried to enlist in the U.S. Navy, but was refused because of his poor health.
He went to Switzerland where he finished writing The Waste Land, his masterpiece. After its publication in 1922 he was hailed as the most important English-speaking poet of the time. He also joined the Church of England and took British citizenship; for this new position he defended himself proclaiming himself as "an Angle-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics".
Finally he received the British Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948.
He died in London (1965).
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He
soon rejected the romantic conventions that had characterised poetry
from Wordsworth to the Decadents; endowed and with a cosmopolitan
culture, he broke away from all the canons and created a new poetic
technique. The Themes he dealt with are: Modern
man's alienation from society; Time
versus eternity;
The
question of personal identity; The
problem of faith in modern civilisation; The sense
that the present is inferior to the past; The fear
of living; The
normal, spiritual and sentimental emptiness of our time. The
masterpiece of Eliot is The Waste Land. It was the decisive
intervention of Ezra pound that "turned The Waste Land from a
jumble of good and bad passages into a poem". the
meaningful link with the past: it is introduced in the poem both as
a mythic past and historical past. The past often merges with the
present and by juxtaposition, makes it look even more squalid and
lifeless;
the
emptiness and sterility of modern life. Eliot presents sterility at
various levels:
natural:
the land is dry, rocky, polluted and unfruitful;
social:
people find it difficult to communicate with each other and are
unable to love;
spiritual:
people no longer believe in religious values and in Christ as the
spiritual Saviour. There
is no plot in the poem, but only a sequence of images, sometimes
ambiguous, apparently unconnected and open to various interpretations
but linked to each other by the technique of association of
ideas.
ELIOT'S THE WASTE LAND
The waste
land escapes any order or unity. It is an amazing anthology of
indeterminate states of mind, of impression, hallucination,
situations and personalities.
The main themes of The Waste
Land are:
The poem is divided into five self-contained sections
of various length that make up a whole work as they all revolve
around the same vision of a nightmarish world inhabited by people
that are spiritually dead, since their lack of faith has turned their
lives into a sterile, arid waste land.