ts eliot example essay

NOW OPEN: 2024 Term Two Enrolments 🎉

T.S. Eliot Exemplar Essay - Module B HSC English Advanced

The following essay was written by Fenna Kroon, Project's English Resourcer!

Fenna Kroon

94 in English Advanced

English Advanced Module B Exemplar Essay - T.S. Eliot

Module b essay question.

“When you engage with works of quality you often feel, and continue to feel, that your internal planes have shifted, and that things will never quite be the same again.”

To what extent does this statement resonate with your considered perspective of TS Eliot’s poetry？

Need help analysing texts and writing essays for other modules? Try out classes with our tutors at Project Academy !

HSC English Exemplar Essay Response

Good literature has the power to take us as readers on a journey with the author. This is evident in TS Eliot’s modernist suit of poetry TS Eliot: Selected Poetry, particularly ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ (Love Song) (1915) as well as ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925). These texts and their use of literary devices provide readers with a glimpse into another perspective from a time long gone. As a result, our own views and internal planes are challenged and altered. This change is permanent, exposing readers to ideas beyond their own. Thus, these poems have shaped the views of countless individuals and will continue to do so to a large extent.

When confronted with literature that is challenging and engaging, the individual has no option but to ponder its central messages. In ‘Love Song’, Eliot establishes this through prolific use of the Flanuer, connoisseur of the streets and a lonely, observing wanderer. Created within a context of mass urbanisation and mechanisation, this figure walks through new streets and society that is continually changing. Personally, this poem was finished shortly after the death of Eliot’s close friend, Jean Verdenel in the Gallipoli campaign in 1915 and hence this poem encapsulates the futility of conflict as well as modern society. This is evident in the opening lines as the flaneur says “Let us go then you and I / as the evening is spread out against the sky / like a patient etherised on a table.” This stark and confronting juxtaposition mirrors that of the title where ‘love song’, with musical and romantic connotations, is juxtaposed with ‘J Alfred Prufrock’ as a proper noun. This consequently results in readers immediately feeling uncomfortable as their expectations for what to expect within traditional poetry are crushed. Exacerbated through repetition as he writes “There will be time, there will be time.”, Eliot comments on how his society has made him passive, procrastinating the search for meaning with temporary satisfactions. He further comments on British high society, questioning whether “Should I, after tea and cake and ices, have the strength to force this moment to its crisis?”. Here, Eliot and the flaneur are begging themselves to find the strength to create their own meaning in society. Thus, they reach out to the audience to change their ways，acting as a cautionary tale for the ambivalence the two experience. Finally, this is exemplified as Eliot writes “I have seen moments of my greatness flicker” and the visual connotation of achievements as flickering like a candle indicate how Eliot believes that a modernist society inhibits individuals from being their own person and finding meaning. As John Xiros Cooper so effectively summarised, “[modernist society] make us passively abject.” This highlights how Eliot’s context minimised his ability to find peace and understanding. Within a world of upheaval, the individual becomes lost. Reading this as a contemporary audience, it is impossible to ignore our own suffocating society of change. Consequently, this poem allows for readers to understand the futility of their attempts of finding the meaning of life and existence. This ultimately shifts their internal understanding irrevocably and unchangingly.

Further, the futility of life and religion leave readers with no guidance or advice in finding continuity. This is evident in Eliot’s The Hollow Men, which uses an extended metaphor of the river Styx (the purgatorial border between life and death) and intertextual references to establish the meaningless nature of a life without faith. After suffering a nervous breakdown and institutionalisation in 1921, this poem is a manifestation of this desolation and pain. Evident as he writes “This is the dead land. This is the cactus land.” the allusion to Dante’s Divine Comedies, a text discussing hell and purgatory, it becomes evident that the setting of the poem is one of indecision and judgement. This is further established through the epigraph alluding to Guy Fawkes, “A penny for the old guy”and to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as he writes “Mistah Kurtz - he dead”. Both these allusions discuss legacy and how you’re remembered once you die. Fawke’s death is celebrated by children to this day, with Mr Kurtz repenting on his deathbed, begging “What have I done?”. Consequently, Eliot’s inclusion of these two epigraphs at the beginning of his poem create lingering questions of what death means and what an unsatisfying life means. Hence, as he writes “We are the Hollow men. We are the stuffed men.”, the inclusive language of ‘we’ draws all readers into the discussion of whether they’ve lived a worthy life. Eliot links this to religious pursuits as he writes “Lips that should kiss / form prayers to broken stone”. This alludes to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, comparing their romance to the paradoxical nature of religion. Providing both a mechanism for damnation in Hell as well as eternal salvation，Eliot questions whether a religious life would in any form change his circumstance. Xiros Cooper effectively expands on this, arguing that “We are not surprised when it ends with a defeated stammer”. Essentially, Eliot’s consistent allusions to other texts and metaphors to being ‘hollow’ create a questioning persona surrounding life and religion and its influence on judgement. Consequently, readers are forced to go on this journey with Eliot as they engage with this poem, considering their own answers relating to life, death and purgatory. And, once these questions are in your head, they are impossible to get out.

Having considered Eliot’s suite as a whole，it is evident that his poetry impacts readers on a fundamental level because it discusses issues pertinent to everyone. This is particularly true for The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Hollow Men, discussing the dangers of a changing society and purgatory itself respectively. As a result, the reader’s understanding of themselves and their broader society is fundamentally and permanently altered.

Was this helpful? Come read our other essays and English study guides !

Maximise Your Chances Of Coming First At School

Trial any Project Academy course for 3 weeks.

NSW's Top 1% Tutors

Unlimited Tutorials

NSW's Most Effective Courses

Access to Project's iPad

Access to Exclusive Resources

Access to Project's Study Space

How to Study for HSC Chemistry

Hi, I’m Catriona Shen, a HSC Chemistry tutor at Project Academy. Here is my guide on how to study for HSC Chemistry.

Catriona Shen

Senior HSC Chemistry Tutor, 99.75 ATAR

Ultimate Guide to Literary Techniques

This article will guide you through the use and analysis of literary techniques for the HSC English course. Written by the HSC English team at Project Academy.

Elliese Tjeuw

English Team

Guide: How to Bounce Back From a Bad Assessment Mark

My goal throughout this article is to destigmatise the “f-word” (failure, to be clear), share tips to help you bounce back from bad marks, and motivate you to kick a** for the rest of your HSC!

Michelle Zhang

3U Maths Tutor, All-rounder at NSG

How to Write the Most Effective Set of HSC Study Notes

Writing study notes is easy. Writing great study notes is hard. Learn the art of writing notes to maximise your performance in the HSC.

99.40 ATAR & State Ranker

A Summary and Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Metaphysical Poets’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

In his 1921 essay ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, T. S. Eliot made several of his most famous and important statements about poetry – including, by implication, his own poetry. It is in this essay that Eliot puts forward his well-known idea of the ‘dissociation of sensibility’, among other theories. You can read ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ here before proceeding to our summary and analysis below.

By 1921, T. S. Eliot has established himself as one of the leading new poets writing in English: his two collections of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) and Poems (1920), had heralded the arrival in London literary society of someone who had, in his friend and fellow modernist poet Ezra Pound’s words, ‘modernised himself on his own ’.

Eliot had read widely, in medieval Italian religious poetry (Dante’s Divine Comedy ), Renaissance verse drama (Shakespeare, Thomas Kyd, John Webster, and their contemporaries), and nineteenth-century French Symbolist poets (such as Baudelaire and Laforgue).

But Eliot had also studied the canon of great English poetry, and his essay on the metaphysical poets shows that he identified his own approach to poetry with these poets from the seventeenth century. This is somewhat strange, when we analyse it more closely (as we will do in a moment), but first, here’s a brief rundown of what Eliot argues in ‘The Metaphysical Poets’.

Eliot’s article on the metaphysical poets is actually a review of a new anthology, Herbert J. C. Grierson’s Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century . Eliot uses his review of Grierson’s anthology, however, as an opportunity to consider the value and significance of the metaphysical poets in the development of English poetry.

Although the metaphysical poets were a distinctly English ‘movement’ or ‘school’ (Eliot uses both words, while acknowledging that they are modern descriptions grouping together a quite disparate number of poets), Eliot also draws some interesting parallels between the seventeenth-century English metaphysical poets and nineteenth-century French Symbolist poets like Jules Laforgue, whose work Eliot much admired.

Eliot begins by reminding us that it’s difficult to define metaphysical poetry, since there is a considerable difference in style and technique between those poets who are often labelled ‘metaphysical’. We have explored the issue of defining metaphysical poetry in a separate post, but the key frame of reference, for us as for Eliot, was Samuel Johnson’s influential denunciation of the metaphysical poets in the eighteenth century.

Eliot quotes Johnson’s line about metaphysical poetry that ‘the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together’. Eliot’s response to Johnson’s censure, however, is to point out that all kinds of poets – not just the metaphysicals – unite heterogeneous or different materials together in their poetry. Indeed, Eliot quotes from Johnson’s own poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes :

His fate was destined to a barren strand, A petty fortress and a dubious hand; He left a name at which the world grew pale, To point a moral or adorn a tale.

Eliot argues that, whilst such lines as these are different in degree from what the metaphysical poets did in their own work, the principle is in fact the same. Johnson is ‘guilty’ of that which he chastised Abraham Cowley, John Cleveland, and other metaphysical poets for doing in their work.

Eliot then goes on to consider the style of numerous metaphysical poets. He points out that, whilst someone like George Herbert wrote in simple and elegant language, his syntax, or sentence structure, was often more complex and demanding. Key to Herbert’s method is ‘a fidelity to thought and feeling’, and it is the union of thought and feeling in metaphysical poetry which will form the predominant theme of the remainder of Eliot’s essay.

Eliot next considers what led to the development of metaphysical poetry: reminding us that John Donne, the first metaphysical poet, was an Elizabethan (Donne wrote many of his greatest love poems in the 1590s, when he was in his early twenties), Eliot compares Donne’s ‘analytic’ mode with many of his contemporaries, such as William Shakespeare and George Chapman, who wrote verse drama for the Elizabethan stage.

These playwrights were all influenced by the French writer Montaigne, who had effectively invented the modern essay form in his prose writings. (We can arguably see the influence of Montaigne, with his essays arguing and considering the various aspects of a topic, on the development of the Shakespearean soliloquy, where we often find a character arguing with themselves about a course of action: Hamlet’s ‘To be, or not to be’ is perhaps the most famous example.)

The key thing, for Eliot, is that in such dramatic speeches – the one he cites is from George Chapman’s drama – there is a ‘direct sensuous apprehension of thought’, i.e. reason and feeling are intrinsically linked, and thought is a sensory, rather than a merely rational, experience.

This is where we come to his thesis concerning the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ which occurred in the seventeenth century.

‘Dissociation of sensibility’

The idea of the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ is one of T. S. Eliot’s most famous critical theories. The key statement made by Eliot in relation to the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ is arguably the following: ‘A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.’ Or, as he had just said, prior to this, of the nineteenth-century poets Tennyson and Browning: ‘they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose.’

In other words, whereas poets like Donne, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, felt their thoughts with the immediacy we usually associate with smelling a sweet flower, later poets were unable to feel their thought in the same way. The change – the ‘dissociation of sensibility’, i.e. the moment at which thought and feeling became separated – occurred, for Eliot, in the mid-seventeenth century, after the heyday of metaphysical poetry when Donne, Herbert, and (to an extent) Marvell were writing.

This watershed moment, this shift in poetry, is represented, for Eliot, by two major poets of the later seventeenth century: John Milton and John Dryden. Both poets did something consummately, but what they did was different. Dryden’s style was far more rational and neoclassical; Milton’s was more focused on sensation and feeling.

It is worth noting, although Eliot doesn’t make this point, that the Romantics – whose work rejected the cold, orderly rationalism of neoclassical poets like Alexander Pope and, before him, John Dryden – embraced Milton, and especially his Paradise Lost . Wordsworth references Milton in several of his sonnets, while Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is steeped in Milton.

Eliot concludes ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ by drawing some comparisons between the metaphysical mode and nineteenth-century French Symbolists, to demonstrate further that the ‘metaphysical’ was not some entirely distinct variety of poetry but that it shares some core affinities with other schools of poetry.

He then returns to Johnson’s criticism of the metaphysical poets’ techniques and metre, and argues that, whilst we should take Johnson’s critique seriously, we should nevertheless value the metaphysical poets and look beyond poets like Cowley and Cleveland (who are Johnson’s chief focus).

In conclusion, Eliot’s essay was important in raising the profile of the metaphysical poets among his own readers: people who looked to Eliot for discerning critical judgement and viewed him as a touchstone of literary taste were inclined to go and reread the metaphysicals.

This led to a tendency among critics of Eliot’s work to identify him as a latter-day metaphysical poet, a view which, as the poet-critic William Empson pointed out, isn’t borne out by reading Eliot’s work. Prufrock, the speakers of The Waste Land , and the Hollow Men don’t really speak to us in the same way as Donne or Marvell do: there aren’t really any elaborate and extended poetic conceits (central to the metaphysical method) in Eliot’s work.

So, this connection between Eliot’s own work and the work of Donne, Herbert, and others has been overplayed. (Empson was well-placed to point this out: his own poetry clearly bears the influence of Donne in particular, and Empson is rightly called a modern metaphysical poet for this reason.)

However, Eliot himself encourages such a parallel at one point in ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, when he writes that poets writing in modern European civilisation must be difficult because the civilisation is itself complex and various, and so the poet, to do justice to this complexity and variety, must become ‘more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning’. Certainly this statement is equally applicable to Andrew Marvell and T. S. Eliot.

About T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) is regarded as one of the most important and influential poets of the twentieth century, with poems like ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1915), The Waste Land (1922), and ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925) assuring him a place in the ‘canon’ of modernist poetry.

Modernist poets often embraced free verse, but Eliot had a more guarded view, believing that all good poetry had the ‘ghost’ of a metre behind the lines. Even in his most famous poems we can often detect the rhythms of iambic pentameter – that quintessentially English verse line – and in other respects, such as his respect for the literary tradition, Eliot is a more ‘conservative’ poet than a radical.

Discover more from Interesting Literature

Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.

Type your email…

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading

Module B Essay – T.S Eliot

DOWNLOAD THE RESOURCE

Resource Description

(939 words)

The quest for understanding and enlightenment is futile within the constraints of empty societal constructs. T.S Eliot’s oeuvre of poems depicts the tension between the vacuity of modern European society and the universal journey for self-discovery, fabricating a canonical piece that is inherently laced with textual integrity. Eliot exposes the detriments of modernism on the psyche in ‘ The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock ’ (1910), ‘ The Hollow Men ’ (1925) and ‘ The Journey of the Magi ’ (1927), as his synthesis of form, content and rhetoric subtly reflects his own search for identity. Written during an era of disintegrating forces that fragment the conventions of romanticism, Eliot captures the despair of early modernist society in his critical portrayal of societal constructs. Sustained throughout Eliot’s corpus is the struggle to escape the pervasiveness of monotony with the culmination of Eliot’s quest in ‘Magi’ exposing the ultimate truth that religion cannot sufficiently fulfill the vacuum of meaning society has torn. Hence, Eliot forges a timeless body of literature in his representation of society as an everlasting obstacle in the pursuit of personal meaning.

Societal constructs impose a blanket of triviality that suffocates the potential for enlightenment. The dramatic monologue ‘The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ upholds textual integrity through its lasting depiction of the impact of shifting social contexts on the psyche. Modernism saw a rejection of religious guidance, with the collapse of spiritual affirmation increasing individuals’ desire for social validation. The conflict between tradition and change, as romanticism moved to modernism, is epitomized in the intertextual epigraph, as Eliot draws on the classic Dante’s Inferno (1476) to employ an objective correlative between the narcissism of Guido and the titular Prufrock. The extended allusion to the epigraph echoed in Prufrock’s obsession with his image confirms that the motif of an ‘overwhelming question’ is centered upon embracing introspection. The parenthetical insertion ‘(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)’, structurally interrupts the stanza, symbolising the disruptive nature of self-consciousness in achieving self-discovery. The stultifying effect of a spiritual vacuum is captured in the conduplicatio; “Prepare a face to meet the faces” with the repetition expressing the monotonous cycle of urban life. Prufrock ultimately avoids the ‘overwhelming question,’ instead escaping his journey to self-discovery by preoccupying himself with trivial facades noted in the rhetorical question; “Shall I part my hair behind?’ The poem’s canonical status is invoked through Eliot’s exploration of the universal tension between the imperative yet confronting nature of introspection, exposing the complex quest for meaning in the modern world.

The powerful omnipresence of societal constructs limit self-actuated enlightenment. Eliot’s revolutionary piece ‘The Hollow Men’, employs a free-verse form to reflectively encapsulate his profound realisation that modern society is a formation of purposeless facades. Written months after a psychotic breakdown, the paradoxical anaphora; “We are the hollow men. We are the stuffed men,” symbolically portrays Eliot’s acknowledgement of the modern man’s inability to connect with new constructs that ‘stuff’ us with false meaning. While Eliot embodies pessimistic naturalism, theorist David Buckley argues that the subtly threaded biblical allusions, noted in “fading star”, displays Eliot and the hollowmen’s quest for unified meaning. The dichotomies that plague Eliot’s context, with the challenge of Romanticism and Modernism, Religion and Naturalism, solipsism and omniscience, coalesce a paradoxical narrative in ‘The Hollowmen’ as Eliot ridicules societal constructs only to entertain the notion of religion. The ellipsis in; ‘For Thine is; Life is; For Thine is the…” insinuates a tone of contemplation, as the direct repetition connecting ‘Life’ to the religious ‘Thine’ combines literary elements to imply the promising prospect of faith in achieving a cathartic awakening. The dialectic layers evoke a sense of confusion that mirrors Eliot’s personal identity crisis, maintaining textual integrity while expressing the premise that humans are inescapably surrounded by cycles of tedium. Thus, ‘The Hollow Men’ canonically portrays the premise that the modern man will no longer search within but search throughout societal constructs for meaning.

While religion is classically displayed as the key to self-discovery, societal constructs prevail as an obstacle in the path of spiritual fulfillment. ‘Journey of the Magi’ captures Eliot’s spiritual awakening as he grapples with his religious conversion. The restrictive facades of society exemplified in ‘Prufrock’ and ‘The Hollowmen’ are reflected in the declarative; ‘We regretted the summer palaces on slopes.’ The Romantic tone created by the sibilance is contrasted by the connotations of ‘regret’, where Eliot concludes to separate himself from societal constructs such as these ‘palaces’ to reach true meaning. However, Eliot’s portrayal of Jesus’s epiphanic birth is satirized through the use of low modality and flippant tone; ‘it was (you might say) satisfactory,’ revealing the judgement that religion offers little consolation. In fact, at the culmination of the poem, the Magi must return to society, ‘but [are] no longer at ease ,’ representative of Eliot’s despondency with the modern world’s obsession with logicality and technology at the expense of higher cultural and spiritual meaning. The truncated final line; ‘I should be glad of another death,’ exerts a sense of hopelessness espousing Eliot’s ultimate loss of confidence in the quest for self-discovery

Within the modern world self-discovery is futile. Eliot’s collection of poems expose the tediums and detriments of the new world that has shifted from the comforts of romanticism. The desire for identity and spiritual awakening is hindered by the masks individuals and society create to evoke a sense of false meaning. ‘The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and ‘The Hollow-men’ display the impacts of society on individual enlightenment whilst ‘The Journey of the Magi’ cynically rejects religion as a final answer. Eliot’s dark analysis of self-discovery amplified by his personal ennui, insinuates the emptiness of humanity’s societal and religious constructs, maintaining a canonical status and textual integrity.

Report a problem

Popular HSC Resources

• Speech on George Orwell ‘1984’ – Human Experiences
• How To Survive the HSC
• One Night the Moon – Analysis (Video)
• 2020 – Physics – PHS (Trial Paper)
• Business Studies Influences on HR (Quiz)
• Sci Ext – Portfolio Pack
• 2020 – Science Ext – Exam Choice (Trial Paper)
• Domino’s Marketing Case Study

Become a Hero

Easily become a resource hero by simply helping out HSC students. Just by donating your resources to our library!

What are you waiting for, lets Ace the HSC together!

Join our Email List

No account needed.

Get the latest HSC updates.

All you need is an email address.

Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Poetry — Universal Issues in T. S. Eliot’s Works

Universal Issues in T. S. Eliot's Works

• Categories: Poetry T.S. Eliot

About this sample

Words: 918 |

Published: Jul 17, 2018

Words: 918 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Verified writer

• Expert in: Literature

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

3 pages / 1357 words

4 pages / 1801 words

2 pages / 1071 words

4 pages / 1748 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Rudyard Kipling's poem "The White Man's Burden" was penned in 1899 at the height of European colonialism and imperialism. The poem reflects the prevalent attitudes towards colonial rule and the perceived responsibilities of the [...]

Allen Ginsberg is a prominent figure in American literature, known for his influential poetry that captures the essence of the Beat Generation and critiques the social and political landscape of America during the Cold War era. [...]

Amanda Gorman's poem "The Hill We Climb" made headlines all around the world following her performance at President Joe Biden's inauguration. The poem serves as a rallying cry for unity and hope, and its literary elements [...]

Poetry has a universal appeal that transcends time and space, evoking emotions and inspiring reflection. Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is a prime example of the power of poetry to captivate and provoke [...]

Carol Ann Duffy wrote 'The World's Wife' in order to scrutinize the representation of both men and women, inspired by her strong feminist views -- reconstructing, for example, many of the 'voiceless women' from throughout [...]

Across Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and ‘For My Lover, Returning to His Wife’ by Anne Sexton, jealousy is presented as both resulting in self-deprecation and anger. Whereas in ‘After the Lunch’ by Wendy Cope a form of love [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

T.S. Eliot Sample Essay: A Personal Response

“ The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock ” is literally overflowing with allusions to various literary works. The allusion to the “Book of Ecclesiastes” fits brilliantly, as it emphasises the procrastination of the main character. The original text reads “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die.” The message is that there is a natural flow of time and events and there is no need to interfere with that. However, Prufrock perverts this idea and attempts to justify his cowardice and indecisiveness, saying that “there will be time” to do whatever he wants – to ask his “overwhelming question,” which ultimately he fails to do.

Eliot seems to be fascinated by the Bard of Avon and includes several allusions to his work. In the named poem, the line “No, I am not Hamlet, nor was meant to be” is an obvious reference to Shakespeare’s most celebrated tragedy “Hamlet.” But behind such a blunt reference is a subtle method – it is an allusion to Hamlet’s famous soliloquy (Act 3, Scene 1) which opens with the phrase “To be, or not to be.” This instinctively stimulates the reader to compare Hamlet and Prufrock. Obviously, at first this diminishes Prufrock. Hamlet is a centre-stage, dazzlingly gifted mysterious prince… and who exactly is Prufrock? An obscure “attending lord.” But on closer examination, I found that they have more in common than is immediately obvious. They both procrastinate, they are both indecisive and they like to reflect. Although it is hard to make out behind Prufrock’s comic image, his monologue made me believe that he is a deeply intelligent being, overanalysing and unsure. The way this allusion opened up an avenue to understand the character fascinates me. Remembering the historical context makes me realise that Eliot was probably trying to show that the role of men changed, perhaps even diminished, after World War I and, on the background of all the devastation brought by the war, there is a rich inner world in some of the lost and disadvantaged members of society.

TS Eliot Essay

This is an example of a high range response of a TS Eliot essay. As a critical study, the respondent must assess his work as a whole and be aware of the broader contextual impact of the work. This response is for the 2013 English HSC.

Explore how time and place are used in Eliot’s poetry to shape the reader’s understanding of modernity.

In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO of the poems set for study.

T.S. Eliot’s poetry examines how individuals in modernity are trapped by materialistic values, limiting their experiential perspectives to particular times and places. In a world riddled with uncertainty in the wake of vast ideological and political changes spurred on by the scientific enlightenment and subsequent industrial hegemony of Western imperial nations, the poet’s work often contrasts traditional metaphysical ideals with the vacuum of modern nihilism.  Whereas Eliot’s first professionally published poem The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock TLSJAP (June 1915) philosophically wrestles in uncertainty with the relentless power of this new world, his later work The Hollow Men THM (November 1925) succinctly critiques the limitations of a solely modernistic value system.

Even in Eliot’s earliest work, his reverence for past wisdom and curiosity for non-physical places are evident.  The infinitely internal and publicly shy poet begins TLSJAP by intertextually invoking Dante in its original latin format, inviting the audience into a version of hell through the eyes of a poet in the Late Middle Ages. Dante’s protagonist believes that if someone were able to escape hell, “this flame would keep still without moving any further.” However, as the protagonist and all who hear him are trapped in the allegory of “those undergrounds” or for a figurative interpretation, the hell of one’s own mind; he is able to “answer you” (himself), “without fear of infamy” as the poet would be unable to suffer rejection or ridicule from within the confines of his own psyche. It is in this way that Eliot is able to express both his interpersonal sense of isolation where he does not “dare” to disturb other people in a social setting as well as the dread and confusion that develops from symbolically daring to “disturb the universe” through existential inquiry. By reading his poetry, the audience is invited into a realm that both emphasises the physical constraints of modern materialistic reality where literally and figuratively, “in a minute there is time”, whilst simultaneously using the wisdom of the ancients to query the “hundred indecisions … hundred visions and revisions” that transcend individual experience and instead serves as a reminder of the many facets of existence where the universe paradoxically has “time to murder and create” across time and space .

At the turn of the nineteenth century the “madman who lit a lantern” screeching “Whither is God?” had left a deep existential void for Western thinkers in modernity. Eliot wrestles with Nietzsche’s assessment of the encroaching societal nihilism in TLSJAP by positing: “But as if a magic lantern threw nerves in patterns on a screen”. The simplicity of the simile and Eliot’s recurring motif of lamp light symbolises humanity’s limited capacity for creation in “the chambers of the [sublime] sea”, where the folly of modern man’s hubris is alluded to with “Prince Hamlet” and the rise of Western materialism serving as the precursor “to swell progress” symbolically in the modern world. Ultimately this merely serves as a temporary respite for what the “worshippers of the machine” choose to forget,  as “human voices” are the only one’s viewed as rational enough to “wake us” in a time where man is the master and creator of all until “we drown”, the finality of death being inevitable to a 20th Century intellectual mind. Modernity serves as a stage for examining the absurdity of existence with a self conscious protagonist who is ironically concerned with whether he will “part” his hair or wear his “trousers rolled” whilst simultaneously grappling with metaphysical questions like having “squeezed a universe into a ball” of consciousness. J. Hillis Miller interprets as an “opaque sphere” of subjectivity where each “Lazarus” (human) who has been brought into existence in their own “impenetrable” bubble of experience and understanding, is stuck in the timeless angst of their own mind as their impending death looms.

As a critic, Eliot’s THM draws inspiration from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, to the poet, the value placed on materialism in the modern world is viewed as hollow, much like an ivory tusk that has been removed by Kurtz as he parades around as a god before his untimely demise. Eliot parodies the shortsightedness of modern man by referring to him as someone with a “Headpiece filled with straw”, an allusion to “pagan rituals” according to Grover Smith. Once more through literary fragmentation the poet slips into and out of his own context to explore the subjectivity of meaning from a relativistic perspective; to the poet, the “quiet and meaningless” voices of men are paralleled with “wind in dry grass” and “rats’ feet” which to a 20th Century modernist would have no inherent purpose. The symbolic “cactus land” that modern man inhabits and “At five o’clock in the morning” in futility goes “round the prickly pear”, a parody on the “divine” tree which places the nihilistic thinker in a position that resembles Sisyphus with his rock. The solitude of city life is apparent as the poet wonders whether it is “like this” in “death’s other kingdom” where the machine men are “walking alone”, babies “trembling with tenderness” in a “hollow valley” that only values  “stone images” which glorify the materialistic might of the Western world.

It would be a disservice to assess THM without reflecting on Eliot’s most well known work The Waste Land; a poem that critiques the modern notion of progress without consideration, a time and place that lacks “roots” to “clutch” onto the “stony rubbish” that has been constructed by the “Son of man”. Again, the poet considers past wisdom that to the modern individual is “more distant” than a “fading star” as the “twilight kingdom” of death is treated with little regard in modernity, a time where materialists are “Sightless, unless / The eyes reappear”, a primitive “hope” for a species of “empty men” who have destroyed themselves with war. As if in a game of hide and seek, Eliot seeks the places where the symbolic “Shadow” of meaning resides. By placing the audience’s mind in “deliberate disguises” like “crowskin”, Eliot emphasises through pathetic fallacy man’s connection to the “voices” that are apparent to the poet “Between the conception / And the creation”, the metaphysical place being the “Kingdom” of the “multifoliate rose”, infinite time and potential.

Eliot grips his audience in a place that knows no time, the infinitely creative mind; he does this as he earnestly considers the events and thinking of his personal context and the wisdom that has illuminated the modern mind as the cult of progress developed and devalued the knowledge that came before. By seeking knowledge in the angst of his own mind as well as that of contemporary thinkers who had influenced global events, the poet is able to look beyond the veil of time and space in order to appreciate the sublime. He empathises with modernity, a time which whimpers into nothingness as the bombs fall and the business men circle in their suits but reminds the respondent to consider their own roots when seeking meaning.

Similar Posts

The Home Stretch- Final Preparation tips for the HSC English Exams

This time next week, the English exams will be over and you will never have to write another essay about belonging ever again! Important last minute preparation tips Do not try and pre-learn your essays. You will do a lot better if you write your essay from scratch, adapting your knowledge of the module and…

Studying for your HSC?

It all comes down to this. Most of you will now have graduated and will be doing your final preparations for the HSC English Exams. It is a very stressful time, but rest assured that in a few weeks time it will all be over and you will never have to even think about area…

Belonging Practice Questions-Essay Questions for Paper One

It is time to practice and improve your essay skills by having a go at this list of essay questions compiled by Save My HSC especially for you. All of these questions reflect the sort of questions you will have to answer in section three of Paper One. It is highly unlikely they will ask…

Essay Structure: Simple Quick-Reference Guide

The following is a handy quick-reference guide you can print and keep to assist you in writing essays. Introduction: -Thesis statement: Main idea you will argue in the essay -Briefly expand on the thesis -Name your texts and composers -Outline the arguments you will be making in the essay Body Paragraphs (May be more than…

Metropolis and 1984 Comparison

The key thing that advanced module a wants you to focus on is context. Metropolis and 1984 (Nineteen Eighty-Four) are two great texts with a great deal of similarities to focus on this particular concept. How does context shape how composers perceive the world? How does when and where they live impact how they construct…

Breaking it Down – Exam Questions and Thesis Statements

They say the beginning of something is always the hardest part, and this is especially true for essays. You’ve read the question; you know what to want to say, but actually writing it out takes careful planning and a fair idea of where you want to go with your essay. The first point will be…

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Analysis of T.S. Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent

Analysis of T.S. Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on April 30, 2020 • ( 1 )

T.S. Eliot’s essay Tradition and the Individual Talent  was first published as an anonymous piece in The Egoist , a London literary review, in September and December 1919 and subsequently included by Eliot in his first collection of essays, The Sacred Wood, published in 1920. That it continues to exert a genuine influence on thought regarding the interrelationship among literary classics, individual artists, and the nature of the creative imagination, is a comment on its value. In any case, Eliot was able to let loose in this comparatively short essay—it runs to little more than 3,000 words—packing virtually every sentence with pronouncements that, in any other context of presentation, might have required far more elaboration and persuasive defense.

Despite these genuine virtues and the essay’s deserved renown, Tradition and the Individual Talent is rather loosely, perhaps even haphazardly constructed and is worthy of consideration far more for the power of its suggestiveness than for the precision of its organization. In essence, the essay proposes a series of key concepts that would subsequently become germane, for one thing, to readings of Eliot’s own poetry and that would also eventually become the root if not the immediate source for major critical approaches with regard to modernism in general and the methodology of New Criticism in particular. In addition to exploring the question of the relationship between the tradition—that is, works already preexisting in a national or even multicultural body of literature—and any one poet in particular (that is, “the individual talent”), Eliot also delves into and, so, makes pronouncements on the relationship between the poet as a person and the poet as a creative intellect.

He comments as well, finally, on how much or how greatly a work of literature ought to be regarded as giving expression to the personality of the poet, giving birth to the impersonal theory of poetry. Coming relatively hard upon the poetry of the English romantics, the longest-lived of whom, William Wordsworth , had been dead nearly 70 years by 1919 and whose subjective, expressive approach toward the writing of poetry still wielded excessive sway over both the composition and the reading of poetry, Eliot’s efforts to found in principle in what would later become known as the impersonal school of poetry can hardly be scanted or overlooked. While his essay may not have initiated the powerful reaction to romanticism that is now thought of as literary modernism, the essay certainly gave that movement voice and a clear agenda.

In keeping with an analytical approach, Eliot structures his central argument around various issues of separation. Specifically, and as will be examined in more detail shortly, there is the matter of the quality and degree of the separation that may or may not exist between the body of past literature, or the created tradition, and the individual living poet creating within the tradition’s most current or ongoing moment. Eliot also considers the degree and quality of separation necessary between that living poet as a fully rounded person (what he calls—perhaps a bit too colorfully—the “man who suffers”) and those aspects of that individual’s intellectual choices and other selective processes that result in the making of an actual work of literature (what he calls the “mind which creates”). Finally, Eliot takes into consideration the degree and quality of separation that is necessary between, on the one hand, the artist as an individual whose utterances may be thought to express a personality and, on the other hand, the semblance of personality that is, or can be, expressed in the work without any need for reference to the author’s own personality.

As may be apparent, there is some considerable overlap and confusion of terms here, as well as some overlap between matters that involve the act of writing—actions that involve the creation of a text—and the act of reading, which, because it is a process that involves the reception of a preexisting text, is a quite different approach. Nevertheless, the essay’s central premise, as well as its continuing critical value, is, in essence, Eliot’s argument that the creative process is an impersonal process, despite the tendencies of many readers to persist in identifying the speaker of a poem with the poet. Keeping this central premise in mind ought to demystify many of Eliot’s pronouncements on similar subjects.

The Living Talent and the Tradition

Eliot begins his presentation by directly addressing the essay’s ostensible topic, the relationship between tradition and the individual talent. What may seem to be the most obvious point in his opening argument is certainly the most salient, that the tradition is at any one time a completed whole that comprises all of the preceding creative endeavor out of which the individual author creates a new work. Tradition, then, is a continuum, and this point is one of the essay’s more daring stances. It may seem by now to stand to reason that the living practitioners of any one discipline add to and, so, shape and alter the accumulated store of their predecessors’ efforts—that, in other words, these past efforts live in a present that is continuously transforming itself into new efforts that then themselves become the efforts of the past, and so on.

Though such a position may sound reasonable and justified, Eliot’s taking that position, as his feeling the need to defend it to his readers should readily attest, flew in the face of the conventional wisdom to that time and that had been in place virtually from the beginnings of the European Renaissance. According to that wisdom, the ancients, meaning the classical writers of Greece and of Rome— Homer, Sophocles, Seneca, Virgil, Ovid , and others—were giants who towered over their puny modern descendants, who consequently characterized themselves as pygmies.

In that older way of casting the debate, the moderns, although by no means capable of being better or wiser than their ancient forbears, still had the advantage of being able to build on and improve such models as those ancients had left behind. Indeed, the term classic, in addition to connoting excellence in its field, implies a representative prototype within the particular genre or kind of work— epic, drama, lyric poem, and so forth. To complete the metaphor, if the ancients were giants and the moderns pygmies, those pygmies could nevertheless stand on the shoulders of the ancients and, in that way—but that way only—surpass them.

Eliot comes out firmly against any notion of couching the tradition in terms of a conflict and competition between the old and the new, the past and the present. In sharp contrast to this older idea of a combative relationship among long dead and living traditions and long dead and living artists, Eliot, who shortly before writing the essay now being considered had visited the underground caverns in southern France where cave drawings that were tens of thousands of years old had recently been discovered, could talk of a mind of Europe that had discarded nothing of its virtually timeless creative traditions along the way, as if there were in fact neither any seam nor any conflict separating the present from the past, the ancients from the moderns, or one work of art from another. Rather, there was only that constant stream of statement and restatement, adjusting and altering and coming back upon itself as each new voice is added to, and adds to, the mix. So, then, Eliot asserts that poets cannot write after the age of 25 unless they have developed what he calls the historical sense, that being a sense not of the pastness of the past, as he puts it, but of its presence.

It is at this point that Eliot’s argument takes a sudden, or at least unanticipated, turn by suggesting that the more perfect they are, the more artists express not their own personal lives and points of view so much as contribute to that living stream of creative endeavor. This abrupt turn makes much logical sense, however. Having just redefined the nature of tradition, one half of his title, Eliot is now obligated to define what he means by the individual talent, the other half.

International T. S. Eliot Society

History of the Society

Where we start from: tradition and the t. s. eliot society.

This essay was written in 2014 by David E. Chinitz and published in T. S. Eliot, France, and the Mind of Europe , ed. Jayme Stayer (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2015). It is reproduced here—with additional notes and minor edits—by permission of the editor. Sources in the Works Cited list are linked.

Founded in the 1980s as “a living and continuing memorial” to Eliot, the Society has about 180 members, two thirds of them from North America, the rest from twenty countries from the United Kingdom and continental Europe to Japan and South Korea, with intermediary stops in Eastern Europe, India, and the Middle East.

Though based in the United States, the Eliot Society had an international dimension from its beginning. The Society originated in the determination of a talented and enthusiastic immigrant, Leslie Konnyu, to have a monument to Eliot erected in the city of the poet’s birth. Born Könnyü László in Tomási, Hungary, Konnyu (1914–1992) had fled the Soviet occupation of his homeland and had been living in St. Louis since 1949, drawn to the city both for its immigrant community and because of his partiality for Eliot. Originally a teacher, he made his living in the United States as a cartographer; he was also a published poet and the author of books on Hungarian and Hungarian-American literature. Although he commissioned, at his own expense, a sculpture of Eliot by fellow immigrant Andrew Osze, hoping to persuade his adopted city to accept this tribute to Eliot as a gift, his efforts were repeatedly thwarted by bureaucratic indifference.

In 1983, however, Konnyu’s activities yielded unanticipated results when they came to the attention of Jewel Spears Brooker through a short article in the Tampa Tribune. Her interest piqued by the story of his frustrated exertions, Brooker, who taught in the English Department at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, reached out to Konnyu. She discovered that for several years he had been leading a discussion group of local— which, for Konnyu, meant international—friends who met annually in his living room to discuss Eliot’s work. After examining her scholarship, Konnyu invited Brooker to join this group (in which membership was then conferred by invitation) and to deliver the 1984 keynote. Following her address, which was given in the public library, a Hungarian pianist of Konnyu’s acquaintance entertained the audience with tunes from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats , then a brand-new musical, and Konnyu took up a collection to pay Brooker’s plane fare.

Joining forces with Konnyu, Brooker energetically built up the St. Louis group into a large and vibrant society, using her own money and contacts to send out notices and personally recruiting Eliot scholars such as Grover Smith and Ronald Schuchard as well as younger academics. Over the next several years she courted major scholars for the annual keynote address (officially the “T. S. Eliot Memorial Lecture”) and worked with the St. Louis group to formalize the association. The T. S. Eliot Society was legally incorporated on December 2, 1986. Its beginnings in a collaboration between an aficionado and a scholar established a pattern for the Society that has persisted for three decades.

In 1988 the Society put on a major international program to mark Eliot’s centennial. Without grants, and with minimal institutional support, Brooker and Konnyu managed to bring together exhibits, musical and dramatic performances, poetry readings, and presentations by Cleanth Brooks, Michael Yeats, Russell Kirk, A. D. Moody, George Bornstein, and many others. When a star for Eliot was added to the St. Louis Walk of Fame the next year, Konnyu accepted the recognition on the poet’s behalf. He died three years later and did not live to see his original dream fulfilled in 2010 with the erection of a bust of Eliot (by another immigrant sculptor, Vlad Zhitomirsky) at the intersection of Euclid and McPherson. The Writers’ Corner established there by the Central West End Association commemorates two other denizens of the neighborhood, Tennessee Williams and Kate Chopin, together with Eliot. The T. S. Eliot Society contributed to the Eliot sculpture using monies that had been set aside at its founding and earmarked for just such a use. The Society has in fact maintained Konnyu’s tradition by supporting the establishment of public memorials several times, lobbying successfully in 1998 for a historical plaque at 4446 Westminster Place, Eliot’s adolescent home in St. Louis, and funding the restoration in 2007 of the northwest window in St. John’s Church, Little Gidding.

For its first decade and more, the Eliot Society met annually in St. Louis on the weekend closest to the poet’s September 26 birth date. The first break in that pattern came in 1999 with a meeting in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where the young Eliot had passed the summers with his family. This successful visit to the site of The Dry Salvages led naturally to an ambitious plan to bring the Society across the Atlantic to tour the scenes of the remaining three Quartets. In June 2004, the annual meeting convened for a week in London, with excursions by bus to Burnt Norton, East Coker, and Little Gidding. 

Proximity drew to this London meeting British and continental scholars who had never ventured to the American Midwest. One of these, the French modernist scholar William Marx, joined the Eliot Society again in St. Louis the following year and suggested the idea of a future meeting in Paris, which he generously volunteered to host. This invitation created an irresistible opportunity to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Eliot’s formative year in Paris, 1910–11. A July 2011 meeting in La Ville-Lumière eventuated.

As it has since the days of Jewel Brooker’s leadership, the Eliot Society takes seriously its mission to encourage scholarship on Eliot. An allied organization of the Modern Language Association, the Society has sponsored panels at the MLA’s annual convention on such topics as “Eliot and Transnationalism,” “Eliot and Violence,” and “Eliot, H.D., and New England.” The Society has likewise been active in organizing panels at the American Literature Association’s annual conference and at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900.  

The Society’s own annual meeting provides many opportunities for discussion of Eliot’s life, work, and thought through panels, peer seminars, lectures, banquets, and performances. Attendance is typically between 50 and 60, although the 2011 meeting in Paris drew over 80 participants. The highlight of the annual meeting is the T. S. Eliot Memorial Lecture, given each year by an eminent academic or poet. Past speakers have included, for example, the scholars Michael Levenson, Marjorie Perloff, Jahan Ramazani, and Helen Vendler; the poets Geoffrey Hill and Carl Phillips; and, in Eliot’s own mold, such poet-critics as Robert Crawford and James Longenbach. The Memorial Lecture remains, as Leslie Konyuu first conceived it, free and open to the public. 

Time Present , the Society’s newsletter (published thrice annually until the move to web-only publication in 2022), included news, book reviews, abstracts of conference papers, an annual bibliography, and other information of interest to Eliot scholars. The newsletter was mailed to the Society’s members; back issues are archived, for public and scholarly use, here and in the “resources and projects” section of our website. The website publishes relevant news and information on the Eliot Society and its activities and helps publicize Eliot-related activities taking place around the world—for example, the production of one of Eliot’s plays in New York, or the planning of a conference in Edinburgh or Florence.

Perhaps Leslie Konnyu’s most lasting bequest to the institution he founded—one that goes back to the early gatherings in his living room—is a pervasive atmosphere of congeniality that endures even now in the Eliot Society’s activities. It is probably because of that warmth that many scholars who intended to come once to the annual gathering in St. Louis have found themselves returning regularly for years. Although this quality suffuses the Society’s intellectual proceedings, it shows through especially clearly in such after-hours traditions as the Saturday-night sing-along—at which selections from Cats are now strictly forbidden—and late-night cocktail parties. As the original cadre of St. Louisans in Leslie Konnyu’s circle diminishes, the Eliot Society is undergoing a period of generational transition. Though its practices will inevitably evolve, one hopes that the hospitable and rather boisterous spirit of its early years will continue to pilot the Society through a future in which it finds itself, as Eliot himself counsels, “still and still moving.”

Works Cited

Brooker, Jewel Spears. “ Winking Back at the Stars .” T. S. Eliot Society News and Notes 16 (1992): 1.

“ Életmu” [Oeuvre] . Könnyü László hagyatéka Tamásiban [Legacy of Leslie Konnyu in Tamási]. Tamási Cultural Centre, 2003. Web.

Smith, Grover. “ The T. S. Eliot Society: Celebration and Scholarship, 1980-1999. ” Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook 1999. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. Detroit: Gale, 2000.