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ELIOT
He was a poet, essayist, dramatist of American origin
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Cosmopolitan attitude to culture: he absorbed part of the
American cultural heritage and he transported it into the European panorama and he enriched his
production with a bit of everything
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The poem we analyse are related to the first phase>

- the love song of J
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- Journey of the Magi, a shorter dramatic monologue
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In Yates production, Sailing to Byzantium (last poem read) also represents a new belief in life and a
new dimension in life (eternity of art)
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Need of both poets to have new foundation to their own existence and to give certainty to other
human beings
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Objective correlative
An object reminds the person of an emotion and it provokes in that specific situation the reexperience of emotion or any emotional reaction connected to the object (epiphany, moment of
being)
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Objective because it relates to something that can be physically perceived
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These poets were
not understood nor appreciated in their own time
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They shocked and amazed the reader by combining discordant images or expression from different
fields of knowledge
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So he had this dissociated sensibility between the two level of
perception of reality
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Conversion
between thought and feelings
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In reality the author and his personality, needs, aspirations are often part of what they
produce
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What Eliot tries to obtain is to enhance the
imagination through the sound of poetry, combining what is new and innovating with what belongs
to past traditions (also in Joyce)
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They need values to rely on and to build something new from
themselves, they can’t find these values in the present, so they look for them in the past
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No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone
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You cannot value him alone; you must
set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead
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The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not
onesided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens
simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it
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The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist
after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and
so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this
is conformity between the old and the new
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And the poet who is aware of this will be
aware of great difficulties and responsibilities
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I say judged, not amputated, by them; not judged to be as good as, or worse or better than, the
dead; and certainly not judged by the canons of dead critics
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To conform merely would be for the new work not
really to conform at all; it would not be new, and would therefore not be a work of art
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We say: it appears to conform, and is perhaps individual, or it appears
individual, and many conform; but we are hardly likely to find that it is one and not the other
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The reader gives a subjective interpretation to
the piece of art
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Alfred Prufrock) and The Hollow Men, which convey the sense of sterility and desolation in
the mind of the poet
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His masterpiece is The Wasteland, a very long poem divided
into 5 parts and really complicated
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ALFRED PRUFROCK
Prufrock  Eliot chooses this name by chance
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Prutrock could be any man and the alter ego of the poem
himself
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It is a feeling that the poet wishes he could live in
first person
Cultural intensity characterizes in all of his poems
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The focus is on communicating one’s
thoughts and not worrying about the reactions of other people
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Let us go then  then implies that the talk has been going on for some time
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Even with Joyce the focus was always on the public and private side of each
individual and the way each person relates themselves to the other members of society
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These may be pubs in England  all of these are
not exclusive places

A tedious argument  boring and intricate at the same time
These thoughts and streets lead you to an overwhelming question  Prufrock’s existential question
that everybody has, but which he says not to ask
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He is probably paying a
visit to some place (a house in which there is a party)
Refrain
He describes a room in which there are some women with long and elegant skirts who walk through
the room and talk about Michelangelo
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2nd stanza
He describes the house from the outside: yellow fog and smoke which implies ambiguity, mystery
covering the house, they imprison people inside
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The smoke and the fog
penetrate the evening with their yellowish house, their movements around the house are described
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This description ends exactly as it started and the theme of time is
introduced
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Eliot expresses
his feeling for not being always accepted for what he is
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Time for you and time for me  reference to a possible love song
There is time to do something in life, since life is made up of a sequence of actions and thoughts,
but there will also be time for a 100 indecisions, visions and revisions  there seems to be no
certainty for Prufrock
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When do we have time for all this? Before the taling
of a toast and tea  reference to the trivial pleasant things of everybody’s everyday life
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It is a fall in the tone  Eliot first keeps the read focused on
serious things, but soon after he breaks these tensions
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3rd stanza
Then the poet states that there will be time to wonder, to question other people
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It is the first question he asks himself
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In
Hamlet (To be or not to be), there is the same act: should I act and kill Claudius or not? He is
becoming bold, others will notice it and make unpleasant comments about it
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Other critics say that through
this poem it is possible to understand the English fashion of the 20th century
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Do I dare disturb the universe, make my voice heard?  this may be the overwhelming question,
But his answer is that any minute can change our life and what we have decided can be reversed
very quickly, therefore that’s his answer
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He has known the evenings, mornings, afternoons  three phases of the day
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Importance of
life measured through trivial things
So how should I presume (osare)? Third question, third step
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There is a further movement towards acting, making something
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When he finds himself in such cathegory and he is standing on a pin (chiodo,
spillo  suffering) and he cannot move, because they are looking at him and have made him into
something which he is not
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There seems to be no
escape from this prison
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6th stanza
Then he focuses their arms: bare (with no hair on them) but actually there are some hairs that show
up in the lamplight
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He asks himself why he has such vane thought and if it a perfume that has stimulated
such thought
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He seems to be about to tell something to
us
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He says no and compares himself to a crab walking
backwards in the same way as he had decided to descend the stairs and move back
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8th stanza
By saying “I am afraid”, Prufrock reveals something about himself and he is not afraid to do so
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This may be the beginning of something new
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After tea and cakes and ices  usual things, but equally important
He asks himself is h should be strong something to reach a moment of chiris, cause it emplies doing
something out of an act of courage
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The
moment of his success has disappeared and even the eternal Footman (maggiordomo) has held his
coat soggignando a lui
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The eternal Footman may be the one he
met at the house entrance
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compares himself to some heroic figures, but he can’t reveal any truth
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He is about to say something, but he is not Lazarus, nor is he a prophet, so he is not ready to say
anything
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10th stanza
It is equally important to be brave enough and say that this is not what you meant
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11th stanza
Prufrock keeps wondering if he could have done that, been worth of it
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He cannot idenitify himself as Hamlet (tormented by being or not being) because
at the end he is pushed to action by the ghost of hisfather
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Because of his insane condition, he can know and reveal the truth
to others
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Prufrock is very confused, he asks himself if the should dear to eat a
peach, which may mean to dear to disturb the universe
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But not even the mermaids will sing for him
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12th stanza
Now there is a change from the I speaking and We have lingered in the chambers of the sea  all
this questioning, walking, philosophical speculation about that the others may think or say of him
and his feelings of inadequacy, all of it has taken place until he has felt human voices that awaken
you
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He is saying that he has looked for a way
out, but that all of us drown  Prufrockk (and Eliot) is not ready yet to find a solution to that sense
of desolation and ariditiy that characterizes the human condition
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THE HOLLOW MEN
It is an extension of the Wasteland, although it is shorter
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The second is part of the British culture
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Mistah Kurtz-he dead  Exclamation of the people living in Africa (Mistah); Kurtz is an
English trader who moved to Africa, got used to the African lifestyle and felt immersed in
this atmosphere, but he is anyways a colonizer, a white man invading another country
(Conrad’s novel is set in Congo
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The heart of Africa =
heart of darkness, but Marlow will never know Kurtz because he is dead
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refers to (the author doesn’t reveal it)
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has become aware of
the horror committed by white people on the lives of black people
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The
hollow men, the protagonists of his poem, are a bit like K
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K
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2
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Hollow means “vuoto”  men with spiritual void inside them

1st section

In line 14, the hollow men refer to the other Kingdom of death
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One idea is the physical death, the other idea is
that sometimes people live in a reality that to them is life, but this life is instead a sort of spiritual
death for them
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The hollow men at the beginning declare they are empty, but stuffed
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They whisper together and the stanza conveys a sad image
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They are not violent souls nor lost, but they are just hollow
and stuffed
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These images do not present any soul and the starts themselves are
fading
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In this reality, there can be no
love
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Third section neither is there a possibility to perceive reality as it is
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The only hope that they have is to see the perpetual star multifoliate
rose (reference to Dante)
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The overall theme can also be how communication fails in the reality described by the poets, which
is not too far from what the poet had expressed through the character of Prufrock
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The feeling of suspension,
emptiness, indecision which characterizes the stanzas from the Hollow Men is confirmed in the
conclusion (5th section)
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The nursery rhyme changed by Eliot says: here we go around the prickly pear (…) at 5 o’clock
in the morning
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We are immersed in a reality where there is no light (Falls the shadow), therefore
no hope of regeneration
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Conception-creation; emotion-response; desire-spasm; potency-existence;
essence-descent
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Then he introduces another nursery rhyme: this is the way the world ends (x3)
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It talks about a journey, but there is a similar idea to the poem
of Prufrock, who walks through the streets of London to a place that is not essential, but that to him
meets to walk somewhere, to meet people, to cope with various realities
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The
Magi are the three magi (magus: singular)
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In the first part, there is a description of the natural environment, of the conditions in which
this journey starts
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The language is not difficult, what makes it quite hard to follow is its philosophical speculation (it
is not only a mere description, like Prufrock)
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A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter
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There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet
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This sense of regret, however,
will later be overcome by the experience they are
about to live
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At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly
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o Instead of stopping in these unfriendly and
dirty places, they decide to keep travelling
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Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the
darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow
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But there was no information, and so we continued
And arriving at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you might say) satisfactory
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Water = life, vitality, purification

Three trees = remind of the three crosses on the low
sky
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They keep going
because they know they have to arrive on time for the
occasion
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“You might say”:
o involves the ideal silence audience of any
dramatic monologue
o the experience becomes universal

The magus is back to their present life
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All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt
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We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods
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o He would repeat this journey again
o Breaking of the language (like the Hollow
Men)  the magus doesn’t need to reveal
explicitly his feelings, he only needs a few
words to do so
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Strangely enough, the poet (and
the magus) closes the poem with the word
Death  Death of Christ meaning salvation for us all
is worth it
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Their beliefs have changed when they go back to life,
but this change was worth it

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