Poe Group

Question:

spartanchick26
spartanchick26
Student
High School - 10th Grade

Compare/contrast the personal lives and historic time periods of Edgar Allan Poe and T.S. Eliot and illustrate how these influenced their work.

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Posted by spartanchick26 on Monday April 7, 2008 at 8:50 PM and tagged with poe, poe and eliot.

Answers:


  1. hosni Student
    College - Senior

    This question requires an essay long answer, but if we try to sum the whole matter up. The major difference between both may be the fact that while Eliot is a sober classicist, Poe's style is much influenced by the Romantic 'ardency' To compare the historical contexts alone would not be doing them justice because the works of a writer have much to do with his personal convictions.

    In Poe's time, Good and Evil were the issues of the day in America. The layer between life and death is deconstucted. Life and death being respectively the Value and the Anti-value. This is a direct result of the disillusionment of some American intellectuals with respect to the 'Great and Divine' concept and hope that America was to stand for, due to wars and ethical issues. This threw him in utter despond and he tried to impregnate his art with these sombre feelings.

    With T.S. Eliot, it is the 20th C and the collapse of humanity with all its values and the exhaustion of the last divine breath it had with the World Wars. The best work of Eliot examplifying this remains The Wasteland, a representation of a desolate world.

    This is how each was influenced by his time. Poe with dissipation of the illusion of America and Eliot with the extinction of the seemly humanity.

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    Posted by hosni on Thursday August 28, 2008 at 9:25 AM