T. S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot was influential both as a poet and as a literary critic during the first half of the twentieth-century. Much of his work is a seminal force in the modernist movement, and he was highly...

Eliot's early poetry could certainly be described as modern in that he was actively responding to changes in Western society that took place after the First World War. Many of the old certainties...

As with all great artists, the appeal of T. S. Eliot is timeless. More than any other poet of his day and age, he pushed back the boundaries of what poetry was capable of, showing us a different...

I agree that T. S. Eliot's poetry presents a modern world that is full of darkness and despair. Many of his works describe everyday situations through the lens of misery. One example of this is in...

As a poet, T. S. Eliot is known for his monumental, if few, works of sprawling and satirical verse. However, lesser known in the mainstream world is Eliot as the literary critic. The theory in your...

For T.S. Eliot and certainly other poets, writing poetry can indeed be an escape from emotion and personality. For others, poetry is actually a way to process their emotions and demonstrate who...

It's difficult to respond to this question without seeming to express a critique of Eliot's verse that is not entirely positive. However, since Eliot has held an iconic status in the literary and...

T. S. Eliot was one of the leading voices of Modernism and was close to the center of its complex web of reciprocal influences. At the beginning of his career, Eliot often took advice from the poet...

T. S. Eliot's most sustained and comprehensive statement of his own theories of literary criticism can be found in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920). In this work, Eliot...

T.S. Eliot's quote strikes at a couple of points that he embodied in his work. The first is that there is not really an objective set of criteria that facilitates the communication of poetry....

Compare Eliot to JoyceEliot and Joyce compare favorably in that each was innovative and experimental, bringing new styles or forms to English literature. They contrast in that Eliot was prolific in...

The poem "Virginia," like the river it depicts, moves steadily onwards. It flows consistently from beginning to end. In seeking to capture the unique rhythms of the river's movement, Eliot resorts...

T. S. Eliot's "The Function of Criticism" puts forth the thesis that effective critics should shun interpretation as a tool of criticism, because interpretation is always from the critic's...

In T.S. Eliot's "Landscape" are the many images of nature, especially birds. There are about seventeen kinds of birds here. There is also the images are of children playing, a deer hunt, and...

T.S. Eliot is perhaps best known for his long poem The Waste Land, published in 1922, which focuses on the alienation and aimlessness of the post-World War I generation. "The Hollow Men," a much...

T. S. Eliot's poem "Marina" is based on a play by William Shakespeare, Pericles, Prince of Tyre. In this play, the protagonist Pericles survives a rather improbable series of shipwrecks. In the...

T.S. Eliot's "The Metaphysical Poets" was first published as a review of J.C. Grierson's Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the 17th Century. T.S. Eliot did far more than just review Grierson's book,...

The primary distinction between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet in "The Metaphysical Poets" by T. S. Eliot is the capacity to think versus the capacity to feel. He gives the example...

For love within a family, love that's lived inBut not looked at, love within the light of whichAll else is seen, the love within whichAll other love finds speech.This love is silent. T.S. Eliot...

A wood thrush is a bird common in the Northeastern part of the United States; it is known for its "loud clear song." In the poem, Eliot refers to hearing the wood thrush "singing through the fog"....

This statement is very true of Eliot's poetry. Let's take a closer look. Poems like "Preludes," "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" raise questions about modern...

I haven't read T.S. Eliot's essay "The Metaphysical Poets" (1921) in quite a long time and had to review it briefly to make sure I wasn't completely off base, but I recall Eliot's argument to be...

T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf have been sharply criticized by successive generations of scholars and critics for their unashamed elitism. These two representatives of the modernist movement came...

T.S. Eliot was innovative in his use of language and developed unique methods for evoking emotion in the reader. Three examples are negative words that belie a cheery tone; classical and other...

Although T. S. Eliot admired William Shakespeare and commented on his irreplaceable influence on English literature, he also took a strongly critical stance toward Shakespeare’s works. Especially...

T. S. Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" is a seminal piece of literary criticism. Its main point is that poets cannot, in fact, produce wholly original work, but rather contribute...

In "Little Gidding," the last of the Four Quartets, Eliot seeks to transcend the sense of time and place which were of such singular importance in the previous three poems. This is entirely in...

If you have been assigned to analyze a poem strictly on its literary devices, you will not be analyzing the poetic devices (such as sound elements, rhyme, rhythm, repetition). You should be aware...

As a modernist poet, T. S. Eliot uses imagery to convey themes and carry meaning. Both poems explore the idea that modern life is experienced as futility, through the disintegration of meaning...

In his review of James Joyce's Ulysses entitled “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” T. S. Eliot presents the mythical method of modern literature that he sees operative in the work under review. Eliot...

You can be a recluse from life by not really doing much. However, everyone is going to die eventually. To me, this means that you might as well live your life, because you are not going to be...

In his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," what T. S. Eliot says about the poet being the least poetical of beings links to his idea that it’s not the person that’s important but their...

According to T. S. Eliot, “objective correlative” refers to a “set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion” that a writer wants to share...

The poem employs several allusions: references to other people, places, texts, events, and so on. The speaker refers to John Webster and John Donne, both writers who pondered death in their works...

In poems like “Preludes,” “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “The Journey of the Magi,” “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” and “The Hollow Men,” T. S. Eliot presents his readers with more questions...

This just means that you have to decide whether or not you like the poem, then you have to support your feelings with solid literary reasons. Here are some things to consider: Do you identify with...

T.S. Eliot first coined the phrase in his essay, 'The Metaphysical Poets' which was a literary criticism. The argument that he put forth was that cultivation of emotion and thought separately as...

T. S. Eliot is often considered one of the most important – and also one of the most emblematic – literary figures of the twentieth century. As a leading proponent and practitioner of literary...

The vocative "my daughter" in "Marina" is, in my opinion, the speaker's ship or boat. It is rather difficult to tell, but the poem suggests that the speaker is a sailor in all aspects of the word....

The poem "To the Indians Who Died in Africa" is written in the voice of a British soldier speaking to soldiers from the Indian subcontinent. This suggests that the British soldier may have been the...

T. S. Eliot was a modernist poet who often employed the technique of "stream-of-consciousness" writing in his poetry. To explain, modernist writers tended to be disillusioned and upset with the...

T.S. Eliot developed his idea of the objective correlative, the way in which an author arouses emotion in the audience, in his 1919 essay, "Hamlet and His Problems." Eliot wrote: The only way of...

T. S. Eliot's "Whispers of Immortality" is a poem of eight quatrains, divided into two parts of fours quatrains each. The rhyme scheme is ABCB, with some use of slant rhyme. The meter is generally...

During the 17th century, according to Eliot's hypothesis, a gap opened up in Western culture between thought and feeling. This was largely a by-product of the dawning of the Age of Reason, the...

The theme of universal brotherhood is one which rejects all racial, social, religious, economic or other forms of classification or heirarchy, and instead makes the argument that all men are of one...

"Prufrock" shows isolation from society according to a specific time and place: London in the early 20th century. The narrator describes having much time for trivial matters, stating There will...