T.S. Eliot and Amy Lowell
The poetic styles of T.S. Eliot and Amy Lowell are so dissimilar, that it comes as something of a shock to realize how much the two poets had in common. Each came from a prominent Boston family, and was related to a President of Harvard University -- Eliot was a distant relation to Harvard's President Eliot, and attended Harvard as an undergraduate: Amy Lowell's brother would become President of Harvard in the year that T.S. Eliot graduated. Meanwhile the poetic careers of both Eliot and Lowell were influenced by Ezra Pound: Pound famously edited Eliot's "aste Land," which is dedicated to him. But Pound had earlier been an artistic ally of Amy Lowell, and they had together been part of a loose poetic movement around the time of the First orld ar called "Imagism" -- their quarrel over the direction this movement would take is, according…...

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Works Cited

Beach, Christopher. The Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Print.

Eliot, T.S. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." In The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume 2: 1865 to the Present. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: Norton, 2007. Print.

Korg, Jacob. "Imagism." In A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry. Ed. Neil Roberts. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Print.

Lowell, Amy. "Madonna of the Evening Flowers." In The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume 2: 1865 to the Present. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: Norton, 2007. Print.

TS Eliot REVISED
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot is indefeasibly a Modernist masterpiece. Yet how do we know it is modernist? Let me count the ways. Modernist poetry is often marked by complicated or difficult disjunctions in tone -- "J. Alfred Prufrock" which is capable of moodily swinging from the depressive lows of "I should have been a pair of ragged claws / scuttling across the floors of silent seas" to the manic highs of "I shall wear white flannel trousers and talk upon the beach / I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each." Modernist poetry is often international in character and although in May of 1917, T.S. Eliot published Prufrock and Other Observations, his first collection of verse, in London, Eliot was not an Englishman but an American, and his poem uses Italian in the quotation from Dante that serves as epigraph and…...

T.S. Eliot and Paul Verlaine
The late nineteenth century Symbolist movement in literature was first identified as the primary origin of twentieth century Modernism by Edmund ilson, in his 1931 work Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930. ilson's study ranges widely enough to cover the Modernist prose of Proust and Joyce in addition to the experimental prose-poetry of Gertrude Stein, but he makes a particularly strong case for the origins of Modernist poetry in the Symbolists. ilson, in defining Symbolist tendencies in poetry, is not uncritical in his assessment:

The Symbolists themselves, full of the idea of producing with poetry effects like those of music, tended to think of these images as possessing an abstract value like musical notes and chords. But the words of our speech are not musical notation, and what the symbols of Sym-bolism really were, were metaphors detached from their subjects for one cannot,…...

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WORKS CITED

Eliot, T.S. "The Waste Land." Accessed online 1 April 2011 at:  http://eliotswasteland.tripod.com/twl.html 

Verlaine, Paul. "Claire de Lune." Translated A.S. Kline. Accessed online 1 April 2011 at: http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/Verlaine.htm#_Toc263756502

Wilson, Edmund. Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930. New York: Scribner's, 1931.

Sketch of T.S Eliot
The Life of T.S Eliot

Eliot was born in Missouri in 1888. He studied philosophy and logic at various universities including Harvard. After graduating he spent a year at Sorbonne in Paris reading French literature. He then returned to Harvard where he studied epistemological theory, Indian languages and metaphysics. He later transferred to Oxford where he studied Greek philosophy (Kamm 143).

During these years of study he also wrote many of his poems and several books of his poetry were published. These included the poems 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,' 'Preludes,' 'Portrait of a Lady' and 'Rhapsody at Midnight.' His books of poetry included Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917, Poems in 1919 and Ara Vos Prec in 1920 (Kamm 143).

Eliot also offered a criticism of literature in his book The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism published in 1920 (Kamm 143).

He was married in…...

This is the case with Gabriel in "The Dead" as well. Throughout much of the action of the story, Gabriel appears at a loss as to who he is, which is directly related to how he is perceived. The first time in the story this is noticed is to the beginning, when he gives a coin to Lily out of an unspecified yet apparently selfless motive. Gabriel wants to share himself with others, but is unable to do s in a manner he feels befits him because he is unsure of himself, and unsure of how others react to him. This becomes painfully clear at the end of the story, when Gabriel realizes that the nature of love is related to the desire for death in love's absence: "His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend,…...

"On receiving news of the war" by Isaac Rosenberg

Rosenberg's poem conjures up a physical, metaphorical image of the specter of war. A spirit of a person torn by the red fangs of either death, war, or some diabolical, physically imagined agent hangs over the poem. This dead spirit, representing all of the fallen soldiers, is in neither heaven nor hell (suggesting a crisis of faith in this modernist poem) but is lonely in the never-never land where he mourns the loss of life of his colleagues.

"The Dead" by James Joyce

Gabriel, for the first time, understood how the dead Michael Furey still lived within the soul of his wife, Gretta. The snow outside was falling, and he also understood that the snow -- and death -- just like all other natural forces in the world affected everyone equally. He was no exception: neither his intellect nor being loved by a woman…...

Ernest Hemingway & T.S. Eliot
Modernism in Literature: Comparative Analysis of the works of Ernest Hemingway and T.S. Eliot

As the world entered the 20th century, world literature have become influenced with the emerging ideology of modernism, a new thinking that promotes the potential of humanity to achieve more than they imagined possible. That is, modernism has promoted the idea that humanity has the potential achieve more than the present state they are living; the future offers numerous opportunities for human society to become more developed and further enlightened.

The optimism that modernist ideology in human society pervaded even the domain of literature, specifically in Western literature, the primary civilization that induced modernization to the world through the industrial revolution. American literature is an example of a Western literature wherein modernism became the main ideology of the 20th century. The promise of modernism is apparent in the works of T.S. Eliot and Ernest…...

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Bibliography

Eliot, T.S. (1917). E-text of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Available at:  http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html .

____. (1922). E-text of "The Waste Land." Available at:  http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html .

Hemingway, E. (1998). "Soldier's Home." In Literature: an introduction to reading and writing. E. Roberts and H. Jacobs (Eds.). NJ: Prentice Hall.

Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Specifically, it will choose one instance of abstraction in the work, and describe what the author is trying to "get at," through that abstraction. What is he trying to suggest? What methods is he using to do so? Does it "work" for you? Why or why not?
Abstraction in Poetry

In "The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock," T.S. Eliot writes in many abstractions, but there is one at the end, which is especially poignant and full of meaning. "I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me. / I have seen them riding seaward on the waves / Combing the white hair of the waves blown back / When the wind blows the water white and black. / We have lingered in the chambers of the sea / By sea-girls wreathed with…...

T.S. Eliot: Still Modern Today
When he died in 1968, an article in Life Magazine proclaimed, "Our age beyond any doubt has been, and will continue to be, the Age of Eliot" (qtd. Brooker xiii). Although T.S. Eliot has been dead for over fifty years, this statement is still true in 2011, because in many ways, the basic issues and problems that formed the background for Eliot's works are still present in today's world, although the specific reasons and forms of those problems have evolved over the years. The period of Eliot's earliest artistic production, in particular, has many parallels to today. As with Eliot himself, young people coming of age today have strong familial and cultural traditions to which they are expected to conform, but which seem foreign to them. As during the writing and publication of Eliot's first major works (The Waste Land, 1922, and The Love Song of…...

" For Pound, the Image should be central to the poem; this is the "thing" that needs to be dealt with solely and directly, without any extraneous words, in musical meter.
Pounds definition of an image is "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." That is, an image as Pound uses the term is a snapshot; it is a motionless artifact, spontaneously and completely captured by the poet and transmitted via the poem to the reader without any additional trappings. The effect of such an image is one of "liberation;" it is the "sense of freedom from time limits and space limits." Images exist outside of time and space; they are not representations of shift but eternal constructs -- Pound uses the word complex -- that exist somehow outside the mind, somewhat like Plato's concept of the ideal. Imagism is the school of poetry that…...

However, in line with the Paz prompt at the outset of this discussion, Keats merely uses this tradition as a bridge on which to extend toward motivation on behalf of the evolving form. The subject matter is where this work takes a step toward modernity. The manner in which Keats describes the reality of dying is startling for its time primarily because it lacks religiosity. In describing death, the poet tells, "where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; / here but to think is to be full of sorrow / and leaden-eyed despairs; / here beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, / or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow."
The notion of discussing death from a decidedly humanistic rather than spiritual perspective is more daring and innovative than perhaps we are won't to give credit for. It is remarkable that the poet would invert a steadfastly traditional form…...

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Works Cited:

Dickinson, E. (1862). #303 (the Soul Selects Her Own Society). Poets.org.

Eliot, T.S. (1917). The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. University of Virginia. Online at  http://people.virginia.edu/~sfr/enam312/prufrock.html 

Keats, J. (1819). Ode to a Nightingale. Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed. 1919. The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250 -- 1900.

Miller and Eliot on Beauty
Comparing and Contrasting "Beauty" in Miller and Eliot

Arthur Miller and T.S. Eliot are two 20th century American playwrights. hile the latter is more commonly noted for expatriating to Britain and writing some of the most memorable poetry of the early 20th century, the former is noted for his famous depiction of the common man's struggle to find meaning and fulfillment in Death of a Salesman. As distinct as the two writers may seem, they both conceive of and treat the theme of beauty -- Miller analyzing its absence in Salesman, and Eliot analyzing its abandonment in several poems like "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "The asteland." This paper will compare and contrast both writers and show how they deal with the theme of beauty in their works.

The Absence of Beauty in Salesman and "Prufrock"

Beauty is missing from illy Loman's life in Death of…...

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Works Cited

Aristotle. "Poetics." Internet Classics Archive. Web. 12 Oct 2011.

Barstow, Marjorie. "Oedipus Rex as the Ideal Tragic Hero of Aristotle." The Classical

Weekly 6.1 (1912): 2-4. Print.

Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Forms. New Haven: Yale

T.S. Eliot, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, & Ezra Pound
"Preludes" by T.S. Eliot adopts a slant rhyme pattern to convey the state of his thoughts as he writes the poem. The poem basically illustrates the Voice/Poet's thoughts about the seemingly busy, yet tiresome and uninteresting lives of the people in the urban areas (cities). Eliot paints this tiresome and uninteresting picture of human life in the city by slant rhymes, reflecting the continuous stream of unorganized thoughts of the poet. For example, slant rhyming occurs in lines 2 and 4, where "passageways" and "smoky days" are used. However, towards the end of the poem, slant rhyming is instead replaced with end-rhymes (lines 12 and 13, with rhymes used "stamps" and "lamps"), proving once again the presence of 'unstable' and changing thoughts of the poet.

"The pennycandystore beyond the El" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti utilizes symbolism to effectively depict his thoughts about the fleeting nature of…...

We see the stone images raised again to indicate soulless worshipping. It is used to highlight the impurity and insincerity of worshippers:
At the hour when we are Trembling with tenderness

Lips that would kiss

Form prayers to broken stone.

The fourth section is actually that twilight zone that hollow men dreaded. The fear of meeting the eyes had already been overcome. It is their absence which is disturbing now:

As the perpetual star

Multifoliate rose

Of death's twilight kingdom

The absence of eyes in the 'twilight kingdom' suggests that this part if yet another version of the world. Here reappearance of eyes would mean rekindling of spirit and rebirth of soul and conscience. The return of eyes is now a hope- 'the hope only'. The syntax is deliberately ambiguous- 'This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms' evokes a powerful and mysterious image of things in the twilight kingdom. The last section deals with another kind of…...

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References

C.K. Stead, The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot (Penguin, 1967 edn), 167-70

In Rowson's version he mimics Eliot in the sense that his comic book is part satirical, it is pessimistic, and it is told in fragments, as well. But the two literary works could hardly be farther apart in substance, as Rowson parodies a crime novel's trashy tone -- parodying noted pulp crime writer Raymond Chandler more than Eliot or Eliot's poem -- and it shows in his edgy comic drawings that there is more than one "waste land" in the world.

Rowson had some problems in getting his lawyers to sign off on his parodies of Eliot's lines; for example, in Eliot's "The Fire Sermon," line 205, the poet writes "Jug jug jug jug…" and originally Rowson had his hero, Chris Marlowe ("Philip Marlowe" was a Chandler character ) walking past six jugs in the British Museum (which he uses in his comic illustrations). So instead of the six "jug[s]…" Rowson…...

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Works Cited

Eliot, T.S. (1922). The Waste Land. Bartleby.com. Retrieved January 2, 2012, from  http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html .

Rowson, Martin. (1990). The Waste Land. New York: Harper and Row.