1914- The Modern applies to British literature written since the beginning of

1945: Period World War I in 1914. The authors of the Modern Period
have experimented with subject matter, form, and style
and have produced achievements in all literary genres.
Poets of the period include Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Dylan
Thomas, and Seamus Heaney. Novelists include James
Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. Dramatists
include Noel Coward and Samuel Beckett.
1914- American
1939: Modernist Period Like their British counterparts, the American Modernists
experimented with subject matter, form, and style and
1920s, The "Lost produced achievements in all literary genres. Gertrude
1930s: Generation" Stein, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Ernest Hemingway
writers of The Lost Generation

Thomas Stearns Eliot, or T.S. Eliot as he is better known, was born in 1888 in St. Louis. He was the son of
a prominent industrialist who came from a well- connected Boston family. Eliot always felt the loss of his
family’s New England roots and seemed to be somewhat ashamed of his father’s business success;
throughout his life he continually sought to return to the epicenter of Anglo- Saxon culture, first by
attending Harvard and then by emigrating to England, where he lived from 1914 until his death. Eliot
began graduate study in philosophy at Harvard and completed his dissertation, although the outbreak of
World War I prevented him from taking his examinations and receiving the degree. By that time, though,
Eliot had already written “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and the War, which kept him in
England, led him to decide to pursue poetry full-time.

Eliot met Ezra Pound in 1914, as well, and it was Pound who was his main mentor and editor and who got
his poems published and noticed. During a 1921 break from his job as a bank clerk (to recover from a
mental breakdown), Eliot finished the work that was to secure him fame, The Waste Land. This poem,
heavily edited by Pound and perhaps also by Eliot’s wife, Vivien, addressed the fragmentation and
alienation characteristic of modern culture, making use of these fragments to create a new kind of
poetry. It was also around this time that Eliot began to write criticism, partly in an effort to explain his
own methods. In 1925, he went to work for the publishing house Faber & Faber. Despite the distraction of
his wife’s increasingly serious bouts of mental illness, Eliot was from this time until his death the
preeminent literary figure in the English-speaking world; indeed, he was so monumental that younger
poets often went out of their way to avoid his looming shadow, painstakingly avoiding all similarities of
style.

Eliot became interested in religion in the later 1920s and eventually converted to Anglicanism. His poetry
from this point onward shows a greater religious bent, although it never becomes dogmatic the way his
sometimes controversial cultural criticism does. Four Quartets, his last major poetic work, combines a
Christian sensibility with a profound uncertainty resulting from the war’s devastation of Europe. Eliot died
in 1965 in London.

Themes

The Damaged Psyche of Humanity

Like many modernist writers, Eliot wanted his poetry to express the fragile psychological state of
humanity in the twentieth century. The passing of Victorian ideals and the trauma of World War I
challenged cultural notions of masculine identity, causing artists to question the romantic literary
ideal of a visionary-poet capable of changing the world through verse. Modernist writers wanted to
capture their transformed world, which they perceived as fractured, alienated, and denigrated.
Europe lost an entire generation of young men to the horrors of the so-called Great War, causing a general
crisis of masculinity as survivors struggled to find their place in a radically altered society. As for
England, the aftershocks of World War I directly contributed to the dissolution of the British Empire. Eliot
saw society as paralyzed and wounded, and he imagined that culture was crumbling and dissolving. “The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917) demonstrates this sense of indecisive paralysis as the titular
speaker wonders whether he should eat a piece of fruit, make a radical change, or if he has the fortitude to
keep living. Humanity’s collectively damaged psyche prevented people from communicating with
one another, an idea that Eliot explored in many works, including “A Game of Chess” (the second
part of The Waste Land) and “The Hollow Men.”

The Power of Literary History

Eliot maintained great reverence for myth and the Western literary canon, and he packed his work full of
allusions, quotations, footnotes, and scholarly exegeses. The Waste Land juxtaposes fragments of
various elements of literary and mythic traditions with scenes and sounds from modern life. The effect of
this poetic collage is both a reinterpretation of canonical texts and a historical context for his
examination of society and humanity.

The Changing Nature of Gender Roles

Over the course of Eliot’s life, gender roles and sexuality became increasingly flexible, and Eliot
reflected those changes in his work. In the repressive Victorian era of the nineteenth century, women
were confined to the domestic sphere, sexuality was not discussed or publicly explored, and a puritanical
atmosphere dictated most social interactions. Queen Victoria’s death in 1901 helped usher in a new era
of excess and forthrightness, now called the Edwardian Age, which lasted until 1910. World War I,
from 1914 to 1918, further transformed society, as people felt both increasingly alienated from one
another and empowered to break social mores. English women began agitating in earnest for the
right to vote in 1918, and the flappers of the Jazz Age began smoking and drinking alcohol in
public. Women were allowed to attend school, and women who could afford it continued their
education at those universities that began accepting women in the early twentieth century.
Modernist writers created gay and lesbian characters and re-imagined masculinity and femininity
as characteristics people could assume or shrug off rather than as absolute identities dictated by
society.

Eliot simultaneously lauded the end of the Victorian era and expressed concern about the freedoms
inherent in the modern age. A disdain for unchecked sexuality appears in The Waste Land. The latter
portrays rape, prostitution, a conversation about abortion, and other incidences of nonreproductive
sexuality. Nevertheless, the poem’s central character, Tiresias, is a hermaphrodite—and his powers of
prophesy and transformation are, in some sense, due to his male and female genitalia. With Tiresias,
Eliot creates a character that embodies wholeness, represented by the two genders coming together
in one body.
Motifs

Fragmentation

Eliot used fragmentation in his poetry both to demonstrate the chaotic state of modern existence and to
juxtapose literary texts against one another. In Eliot’s view, humanity’s psyche had been shattered
by World War I and by the collapse of the British Empire. Collaging bits and pieces of dialogue,
images, scholarly ideas, foreign words, formal styles, and tones within one poetic work was a way
for Eliot to represent humanity’s damaged psyche and the modern world, with its barrage of
sensory perceptions. Critics read the following line from The Waste Land as a statement of Eliot’s
poetic project: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” ( 431). Practically every line in
The Waste Land echoes an academic work or canonical literary text, and many lines also have long
footnotes written by Eliot as an attempt to explain his references and to encourage his readers to
educate themselves by delving deeper into his sources. These echoes and references are fragments
themselves, since Eliot includes only parts, rather than whole texts from the canon. Using these
fragments, Eliot tries to highlight recurrent themes and images in the literary tradition, as well as to
place his ideas about the contemporary state of humanity along the spectrum of history.

Mythic and Religious Ritual

Eliot’s tremendous knowledge of myth, religious ritual, academic works, and key books in the
literary tradition informs every aspect of his poetry. He filled his poems with references to both the
obscure and the well known, thereby teaching his readers as he writes. In his notes to The Waste
Land, Eliot explains the crucial role played by religious symbols and myths. He drew heavily from
ancient fertility rituals, in which the fertility of the land was linked to the health of the Fisher King,
a wounded figure who could be healed through the sacrifice of an effigy. The Fisher King is, in turn,
linked to the Holy Grail legends, in which a knight quests to find the grail, the only object capable of
healing the land. Ultimately, ritual fails as the tool for healing the wasteland, even as Eliot presents
alternative religious possibilities, including Hindu chants, Buddhist speeches, and pagan
ceremonies.

Infertility

Eliot envisioned the modern world as a wasteland, in which neither the land nor the people could
conceive. In The Waste Land, various characters are sexually frustrated or dysfunctional, unable to
cope with either reproductive or nonreproductive sexuality: the Fisher King represents damaged
sexuality (according to myth, his impotence causes the land to wither and dry up), Tiresias
represents confused or ambiguous sexuality, and the women chattering in “A Game of Chess”
represent an out-of-control sexuality. World War I not only eradicated an entire generation of
young men in Europe but also ruined the land. Trench warfare and chemical weapons, the two
primary methods by which the war was fought, decimated plant life, leaving behind detritus and
carnage.

Symbols

Water
In Eliot’s poetry, water symbolizes both life and death. Eliot’s characters wait for water to quench their
thirst, watch rivers overflow their banks, cry for rain to quench the dry earth, and pass by fetid pools of
standing water. Although water has the regenerative possibility of restoring life and fertility, it can
also lead to drowning and death, as in the case of Phlebas the sailor from The Waste Land.
Traditionally, water can imply baptism, Christianity, and the figure of Jesus Christ, and Eliot
draws upon these traditional meanings: water cleanses, water provides solace, and water brings
relief elsewhere in The Waste Land.

The Fisher King

The Fisher King is the central character in The Waste Land. While writing his long poem, Eliot drew on
From Ritual to Romance, a 1920 book about the legend of the Holy Grail by Miss Jessie L. Weston,
for many of his symbols and images. Weston’s book examined the connections between ancient
fertility rites and Christianity, including following the evolution of the Fisher King into early
representations of Jesus Christ as a fish. Traditionally, the impotence or death of the Fisher King
brought unhappiness and famine. Eliot saw the Fisher King as symbolic of humanity, robbed of its
sexual potency in the modern world and connected to the meaninglessness of urban existence. But
the Fisher King also stands in for Christ and other religious figures associated with divine
resurrection and rebirth. The speaker of “What the Thunder Said” fishes from the banks of the
Thames toward the end of the poem as the thunder sounds Hindu chants into the air. Eliot’s scene
echoes the scene in the Bible in which Christ performs one of his miracles: Christ manages to feed
his multitude of followers by the Sea of Galilee with just a small amount of fish.

Music and Singing

Like most modernist writers, Eliot was interested in the divide between high and low culture, which he
symbolized using music. He believed that high culture, including art, opera, and drama, was in
decline while popular culture was on the rise. In The Waste Land, Eliot blended high culture with
low culture by juxtaposing lyrics from an opera by Richard Wagner with songs from pubs,
American ragtime, and Australian troops.

Eliot attributed a great deal of his early style to the French Symbolists—Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Mallarmé,
and Laforgue—whom he first encountered in college, in a book by Arthur Symons called The Symbolist
Movement in Literature. It is easy to understand why a young aspiring poet would want to imitate these
glamorous bohemian figures, but their ultimate effect on his poetry is perhaps less profound than he
claimed. While he took from them their ability to infuse poetry with high intellectualism while
maintaining a sensuousness of language, Eliot also developed a great deal that was new and original. His
early works, like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and The Waste Land, draw on a wide range of
cultural reference to depict a modern world that is in ruins yet somehow beautiful and deeply
meaningful. Eliot uses techniques like pastiche and juxtaposition to make his points without having
to argue them explicitly. As Ezra Pound once famously said, Eliot truly did “modernize himself.” As
Eliot grew older, and particularly after he converted to Christianity, his poetry changed. The later poems
emphasize depth of analysis over breadth of allusion; they simultaneously become more hopeful in tone:.
Rather than lamenting the ruin of modern culture and seeking redemption in the cultural past, as The
Waste Land does,
However, while Eliot’s poetry underwent significance transformations over the course of his career, his
poems also bear many unifying aspects: all of Eliot’s poetry is marked by a conscious desire to bring
together the intellectual, the aesthetic, and the emotional in a way that both honors the past and
acknowledges the present. Eliot is always conscious of his own efforts, and he frequently comments
on his poetic endeavors in the poems themselves. This humility, which often comes across as
melancholy, makes Eliot’s some of the most personal, as well as the most intellectually satisfying,
poetry in the English language.