The Modernist Movement and T. S. Eliot - ELSA online Meet, January 31, 2021

 

 

The Modernist Movement and T. S. Eliot

The inspiration for the countless readers, poets and critics alike, T. S. Eliot is considered one of 20th century's major poets, a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry, the author of The Waste Land, widely regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry. T. S. Eliot, surely, if nothing else, the notion that his poetry is barely readable, let alone intelligible, is also a part of The Waste Land’s reputation among readers. Despite this what makes him a great poet was a question that inspired Prof. Ghosh to bring him to the discussion arena of the latest Elsa meet. Also, the year 2021 marks the centenary of his writing The Waste Land, published a year later in 1922.

In his opening remarks, Prof. Ghosh touched upon different dimensions of Eliot’s Poetry and discussed stream of consciousness technique in his poetry. He also shared his rare insight into the intimate workings of the poet with reference to 1981 memoir “Conversation in Bloomsbury” by Mulk Raj Anand. Having set the stage for further discussion he invited Ms. Dhruvee Sinha who shared her perspective on the topic Eliot’s Concept of Impersonality of Poetry  highlighting the impersonal aspect of poetry with special reference to the essay  “Tradition and Individual Talent.” Dr. Santosh Gupta went on to discuss the important features of Eliot’s early poetry highlighting the multi-dimensional aspect and the use of deeply authentic images employed in his early poems like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “The Waste Land” and other poems.  Dr. Roopali Khanna’s presentation on “Projection of Women in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot with special reference to “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Portrait of A Lady” broke new grounds by highlighting a significant but less discussed area of Eliot and his work. In her view, Eliot seems to treat women almost as objects of wonder or as objects to be scorned upon. Dr. Manju expressed her views on “Inadequacy of Language in T. S. Eliot's ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’” showcasing the irony inherent in the very title of the poem.

There is no denying the fact that Eliot masterfully utilizes the images in a strange and unconventional way through his poetry. Ms. Anjali Singh presented her views on the topic Showcasing Images in Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Often considered the most influential poetic work of the 20th century, Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, which almost immediately developed a cult-like following from all literary corners, inspired Dr. Tanya Mander to dwell on aspects that made the poem a landmark in modern history of literature. Dr. Archana Prasad made her presentation on the topic, “The Wasteland and the Contemporary Scenario.” Dr. Pramila Chawla examined  T. S. Eliot’s “Humanism” by analysing his works and all the statements that have a bearing on his theory of humanism in the light of Eliot's thought. While Ms. Jessica Joel analysed Eliot’s poem “Journey of the Magi,” Mr. Saurabh Agarwal discussed Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral in the context of its socio- economic aspect rather than the spiritual one.  In the end, Prof. Nibir K. Ghosh conclusively examined the influences of Dante, Baudelaire, Ezra Pound and others on Eliot by way of direct quotations and thematic elements.

Why Read Eliot? : Reflections on ‘The Wasteland’ Centenary

Nibir K. Ghosh

As a student, scholar and teacher of literature I have always admired the writings of T. S. Eliot. When I first read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and came across the image of the “evening spread out against the sky/ Like a patient etherised upon a table” right at the beginning of the poem, I couldn’t help thinking, like F. R. Leavis, “Is this Poetry”? As my fascination for Eliot led me to volunteer to teach his poetry and criticism to my PG students, I found the challenge of making the complexity of  Eliot comprehensible to them both exciting and rewarding.  The way Eliot construed his images of chaos and disorder to create order and meaning through a deliberate play of words seemed to define for me the technical virtuosity required of a poet to establish the veritable connection between tradition and individual talent, time past and time future, the sublime and the profane. Some of the lines of Eliot which have left their indelible imprints on my mind are:

‘I must borrow every changing shape/ To find expression.’ -- Portrait of a Lady

‘Teach us to care and not to care./ Teach us to sit still.’ -- Ash Wednesday

‘Last year's words belong to last year's language, / Next year's words await another voice.’ -- Little Gidding

‘The end and the beginning were always there/ Before the beginning and after the end./ And all is always now.’ --  Four Quartets

‘Where is the Life we have lost in living? / Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?/ Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?/ … The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries/ Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.’ -- Choruses from The Rock

The kaleidoscopic range and depth of emotions expressed through Eliot’s inimitable style and idiom can convince one easily as to Eliot’s undisputed claim as the pioneer of the modernist movement in English poetry. His striking humility in acknowledging his allegiance to poets from different climes and times like Dante, Shakespeare, Jules Laforgue, Baudelaire, Ezra Pound, among others, as well as to diverse cultures like Greek, Roman, Oriental, European, speaks volumes of his ability to assimilate diverse cultural traits to portray contemporary reality which is both temporal and universal. In an essay, “What Dante Means to Me,” Eliot remarks:

“From Baudelaire I learned that the sort of material that I had, the sort of experience that an adolescent had had, in an industrial city in America, could be the material for poetry; and that the source of new poetry might be found in what had been regarded hitherto as the impossible, the sterile, the intractably unpoetic … the business of the poet was to make poetry out of the unexplored resources of the unpoetical; that the poet, in fact, was committed by his profession to turn the unpoetical into poetry.”

In the same essay, he provides very sound advice to practicing poets: “The whole study and practice of Dante seems to me to teach that the poet should be the servant of his language, rather than the master of it. … To pass on to posterity one’s own language, more highly developed, more refined, and more precise than it was before one wrote it, that is the highest possible achievement of the poet as poet.”

 

To those who avoid or evade reading Eliot on the ground that it is all Latin and Greek, I would refer them to a statement that Eliot made in a talk entitled The Classics and the Man of Letters delivered on Easter 1942: “Without knowing any Latin you may write English poetry; I am not sure whether without Latin you can wholly understand it.” I would like to end this note by referring to an excerpt from Eliot’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1948 that is both instructive and inspirational:

“We must remember, that while language constitutes a barrier, poetry itself gives us a reason for trying to overcome the barrier. To enjoy poetry belonging to another language, is to enjoy an understanding of the people to whom that language belongs, an understanding we can get in no other way. We may think also of the history of poetry in Europe, and of the great influence that the poetry of one language can exert on another; we must remember the immense debt of every considerable poet to poets of other languages than his own; we may reflect that the poetry of every country and every language would decline and perish, were it not nourished by poetry in foreign tongues.

 

When a poet speaks to his own people, the voices of all the poets of other languages who have influenced him are speaking also. And at the same time he himself is speaking to younger poets of other languages, and these poets will convey something of his vision of life and something of the spirit of his people, to their own. Partly through his influence on other poets, partly through translation, which must be also a kind of recreation of his poems by other poets, partly through readers of his language who are not themselves poets, the poet can contribute toward understanding between peoples.”

 

These words uttered by Eliot three-quarters of a century ago continue to remind us that the “Wasteland” was, is, and will always be there both within and without be it in the form of war, hunger, poverty, discrimination, oppression or the haunting pandemic that we are currently trying to come to terms with. Let us immerse ourselves in poetry from different lands and cultures to promote “understanding between peoples” to usher in “peace that passeth understanding.”

Eliot’s The Waste Land

  Santosh Gupta 

T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) has become an iconic text of the twentieth century, capturing the age’s moral, political and emotional turmoil. It is a multi-layered portrayal of the anxieties, frustrations and losses human beings have suffered even while unprecedented industrial advancement has occurred. A deep undercurrent of despair coupled with a search for hope of redemption, a moral rebirth lends it a special significance. Eliot’s poetry took the contemporary  literary world by storm. It  made the world aware of a clear, decisive break from whatever was being written so far in the English poetry. His poetry written during 1910 to 1920 startled everyone with their absolutely original sequence of images and structure. Deeply influenced by the French poets like Laforgue and Mallarme, the American poet, Gertrude Stein and the different experiments which were being held in painting, Eliot created a very new style, tone and content in poetry. He mainly tried to create a new relation between  “art” and “life”.

Eliot has always been a difficult poet. Some barriers he cultivated deliberately, leaving a string of images, disconnected and obscure, literary allusions ranging from the Bible, the whole of the English poetry and Dante. He created complex  intertextual structures of allusions. He brought together in his poems and other writings references from many ancient myths, legends, and religions. There are in the poems like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, “The Portrait of a Lady” and “Preludes” a constant spray of irony and satire, depicting the shallowness and pretentiousness of human relations, more so in the modern era. A humorous touch pervades these poems, as he depicts characters whose over- indulgence in sensual pleasures has created a world weariness in them. A sense of decadence is seen, perhaps a forewarning of the moral sterility seen in the later, more grim works. Eliot became internationally acknowledged for bringing in great flexibility in versification and for his comments on the moral losses that were being experienced in the aftermath of the two world wars. He was able to bring modernist movement to many parts of the world.

Prof. Santosh Gupta, University of Rajasthan, Jaipur

                                             100 Years of The Waste Land

 Tanya Mander 

Published in 1922, the poem The Wasteland essentially underscored the deep disillusionment and despair experienced after the war; threading the discursive ideas through the narrator Tiresias, who offers a testimonial account of infertile, purposeless and desolate people and world; Eliot explores through plurality of myths, historical references, voices, distorted literary passages. Critics like Jean Michel Rabate believe that ‘The Waste Land is fundamentally a poem about Europe’, metaphorically reflecting the European society, and underscoring the ‘disillusionment of a generation’.

Divided in five different sections, The Wasteland moves from individual anguish to collective redemption: the first section The Burial of the Dead, puts horror and despair center-stage, underscoring the degradation all around; the second section A Game of Chess’ brings many characters to play, each narrating their experiential reality, desperately seeking to speak; the third section The Fire Sermon navigates the philosophical interrogation of idea of death and self denial through multiple religious understandings, the title taken from sermon given by Buddha; the fourth section Death by Water is a petition and the final section  What the Thunder said concludes with images.

The most interesting dimension of the poem is its fragmentation, or its discontinuity, the poem does not chart a linear progression; offers no subject and the only aspect that keeps the chaotic poem seemingly bound is its disorder.  Eliot wanted the reader to discern the fundamental principle guiding the life of modern individuals was fragmentation: fragmented fractured images, reality, and individual psyche. The disconnect, is tangible to accentuate the anguish and the struggle; the uncertainty of truth and meaning; dichotomies cannot be reduced to whole. Human relationships are offered as lifeless, making any meaningful communication impossible; the loneliness and isolation are the markers of this barren world. At one point in the poem the speaker says.  ‘Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak. What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? I never know what you are thinking. Think.’

A complex and deep poem, The Waste Land offers an accurate and a tragic reflection of modern society though Eliot described the poem as a ‘relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life . . .just a piece of rhythmical grumbling’.  However, in the present times as the poem is taught across the world, the fact that its open to interpretation has seen a shift in reading of the poem in the present century. I have come across number of academic forums deliberating in detail as students view The Waste Land as ‘abortion poem’; it ‘stages and performs racial and gender violence, and investigates trans experiences’; many courses today frame questions such as: How is sex connected to violence, ritual and power in the poem? Or  ‘Why is Tiresias ‘Old man with wrinkled female breasts’ the primary source of knowledge in the poem?’ or ‘How does poem confront sexualized violence?’ or comments from students in the class that read ‘the hyacinth girl’ as an assault victim.

As we mark 100 years of the poem, one does find prophetic resonances of the present world in the poem: unreal city, plurality of voices, spiritual despondency, and death; and the new interpretations one can easily say that The Waste Land will not be losing its allure.

Dr. Tanya Mander, RGNLU, Patiala

Inadequacy of Language in T S Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Manju

Language is known as an expression of feelings and ideas but T S Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ which is a modernist poem rejects it as the speaker in the poem cannot tell a story.  It seems as if he does not have the linguistic machinery to deliver the emotional entanglement and so the speaker says, “Oh, Do not ask, “What is it?” Let us go and make our visit.” The poem talks about metropolitan alienation which leads to human isolation causing social crisis as the speaker in the poem is living in the society which neither respects him nor receives him warmly rather his physical appearance is mocked at as he fears, “They will say “But how his arms and legs are thin”. The poem addresses the complexities of modern life through an interesting relationship between neurosis and narrative. At some point of story the speaker will say it is impossible to say what I meant and the incapability to say what you meant to say is very much part of modernist tradition. If we dive deep into the things we find many other poets and the writers feeling inadequacy of language consequently using new techniques like defamiliarization and stream of consciousness.

The entire grammar and machinery of classic realism is breaking up in modernism as they are looking for a different kind of expression which could be more befitting in the new emotional complexity. Even the title of the poem which addresses it a love song is actually a deconstruction of a love song as there is nothing romantic in the poem and it may be because of the complex sensations of human brain that the speaker keeps on procrastinating what he wants to say and the things he wants to do as his plan to visit various places which is never materialized. The speaker says:

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Dr. Manju, UILAH, Chandigarh University 

Role of Chorus in T.S. Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral

 Saurabh Agarwal

T.S. Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral is based on historical conflict of Archbishop Thomas Beckett and King Henry II. The discussions about this verse play have been around the broad themes of sacrifice and martyrdom along with overcoming temptation. While politics and religion are engaged in a conflict it is the common person who dwells in the shadow of fear and uncertainty.  Eliot has implanted Chorus as a voice of common persons, termed as “foolish, immodest and babbling women” by the second priest, yet they bear the testimony to the plight and suffering the peasants of those times had to undergo. The chorus women tell us what seven years of departure of Archbishop have meant to them when they have been “living and partly living”. They have endured failures of crops, cheating of merchants, the disappearance of their girls and “afflicted by taxes”. Chorus says, “We have all had our private terrors, / Our particular shadows, our secret fears.” The fears and tribulations that the ruled are undergoing are visible in the words of the chorus. They have avoided being noticed and have managed to survive so far.

The women in the chorus have the realisation that they “are not ignorant women,” and they “know what” they “must expect and not expect.” What they have gone through so far was tolerable but the event of Beckett’s death that they have been called to witness is going to cause them unbearable pain. Beckett, for them, represents the system of faith through which they find the strength to persist in their hardships. They want Beckett to stay away and save himself for chorus says,  “… save us, save yourself/ that we may be saved;/ Destroy yourself and we are destroyed.”

Amidst all the fear, these women are not without hope for the future for they know the renewal of life will come through martyrdom of Beckett as they say:-

“And war among men defiles the is world,

but death means the Lord renews it,

And the world must be cleaned in the winter,

or we shall have only

A sour spring, a parched summer, an empty harvest.

Saurabh Agarwal is Agra-based entrepreneur. 

                Projection of Women in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot with Reference to

“The Love Song of J. Alfred. Prufrock” and “Portrait of a Lady”

Roopali Khanna

Women in T.S. Eliot’s poems are ostentatiously more at ease and seem to feel more at home in the world in general and the everyday reality of social interactions in particular. However, there is a remarkable concentration on the presentation of women in Eliot’s work which imposes the reader’s eyes to the feminine presentation which, undoubtedly has a key that helps in revealing the shades of meanings.

The women Eliot portrays are different from other poets. Though, usually women do not make the major focus as characters or heroines in his poems, yet their presence cannot go neglected. His woman characters belong to the world where  fair is foul and foul is fair predominantly. Misogyny and sexism are quite evident in his early poetry. Eliot seems to treat women almost as objects to either be looked at with wonder and, at times, fascination or as objects to be scorned upon.

For instance in his poem The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, Eliot talks about women “in the room the women come and go / talking of Michelangelo”. This allusion to Michelangelo shows the contrast between the shallow, idle chatter at the tea parties attended by Prufrock and its monumental subject of conversation dragging the great artist down to the level of pretentious chit-chat  illustrating the superficial nature of the women.

There is no denying the fact that the image of modern women in Eliot’s poetry is often painted as evil and shallow as with the changing times materialism has given birth to vices like doubt, deceit and betrayal, making  man  woman relationship rootless, immoral and full of fractions.  This negative aspect of women is also quite prominent in his poem Portrait Of a Lady. Though portraits are depictions or illustrations of a person with the intent to display their likeness, personality and mood, ironically, the poem becomes more of a portrait of the speaker than the lady as the reader has to rely on the speaker to depict the lady of the poem. The very action of portraiture objectifies the person, in this case the lady, reducing her to an object to be recreated and to an extent reimagined. And if we take the speaker to be the authorial voice of Eliot, the poem is immediately gendered and portrays a man objectifying the female, reducing her autonomy and imposing his own idea or perspective on her.This is quite evident as we read the epigraph of the poem. The poem's epigraph is a famous quotation from Christopher Marlowe's play The Jew of Malta: "thou hast committed - / fornication: but that was in another country, / and besides, the wench is dead." The epigraph immediately signals the attitude of the speaker towards the female of the poem. There is an immediate switch from ‘a lady’ to ‘the wench’ in the epigraph at the beginning of the poem .They are juxtaposing terms to describe a female as a genteel woman immediately linking the woman’s character to a wench which is an alternative name for a prostitute.

In all of the poems Eliot makes the voice of the poem slightly distanced from the women and this, to me, makes the women seem almost untouchable. His women do not appear as fellow human creatures gifted with intelligence, willpower and understanding. Moreover, in his literary depictions of females, he does shine a light on underlying tones of masculine insecurity and anxiety over female agency and power conveying social expectations and binaries of gender, and the threatening potential of disrupting such binaries and social categories to patriarchal systems of dominance and control.

Dr. Roopali Khanna, Director, Kala Sadhna Art Gallery, Agra

Kaleidoscope of Images: Remembering T. S. Eliot

Anjali Singh

T S Eliot – the name springs up an image of a complex personality with an equally complicated literary output; reading him has always been a challenge. I have attempted to share my thoughts on the great literary figure through some images here.

1.    Cartoon images

Though I found these quite amusing, I wondered how Eliot would have reacted to them. Would he have been a sport or be offended at the humorous portrayal?

2.    The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: A Visual delight

I chanced upon a 24-pages comic adaptation by Canadian Julian Peters; being Peters’ favourite poem, it always evoked a lot of imagery in his head right from the first time he read it. He planned to have this for a Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF) 2018! – the same year he participated in comic creation workshop in India.

A challenge to understand Eliot, I always chose other poets over him when it came to poetry. However, when I came across this piece of graphic / visual humorous depiction, I decided to include it for today’s ELSA meet.

Reading it two questions sprang up in my mind –

1. Would Eliot have been a sport to see his cartoon and the associated depiction?

2. How would Eliot have responded to his poetry being transformed into ‘comics’?

The answer to both the questions is a ‘yes’.

I believe that he would be a sport as reading a bit about him, I could gather that he was quite conscious of his public image; being a sport thus compliments it. As for the private, I have this to say – the inside is something that one never truly reveals to the public eye; who better would understand this than the very public figures. Eliot’s life was under a public eye and he did annoy quite a few people there.

Also, Eliot was influenced by symbolism early on in his career and ‘comics’ itself is a symbolic depiction.

Besides, the graphics make it attractive and appealing to those who find the verbal expression of poetry a challenge.

The best example here is a ‘me’; reading the comic depiction has had ‘me’ read it repeatedly – for the pure joy and beauty in it. My daughters aged 8 and 11 too now know who is T. S. Eliot, thanks to this comic representation.

Dr. Anjali Singh, Ph.D. Research Scholar, Agra

 

          

                                   Eliot and His Theory of Impersonality of Poetry

Dhruvee Sinha

T.S. Eliot is known as one of the greatest American-turned-English poet-playwrights. But his real prowess lies in his works as an editor and a literary critic through which he heralded a new dawn of the modernist movement in English Literature. In 1919 his famous essay Tradition and the Individual Talent appeared in the journal The Egoist which was considered to be his unofficial modernist manifesto. The essay provides us with Eliot’s concept of tradition in the first half, and develops his theory of the impersonality of poetry in the latter half, both concepts being very modern in nature. Modernism as a movement and a school of thought arrived in early 20th century. A very significant theme that ran through all modernist works was depiction of world as a fragment, broken place on the brink of disorder which needed stability. These works of art claimed to provide that stability to the collapsing world. In his essay, Eliot defined tradition as “a simultaneous order,” and “a simultaneous existence” in which the temporal and the timeless coexist- a concept that would give a centre to a decentralised world and shape the modern sensibility in English Literature.

The essay, in a very broad sense, talks about the art of poetry. And in that creative process, Eliot digs up the importance of pastness of the past i.e., tradition and his theory of impersonality. According to Eliot, two elements are required to make a poem: (a) the personal elements, i.e. the feelings and emotions of the poet, (b) the impersonal elements, i.e. the ‘tradition’- knowledge and wisdom of the past, which is accumulated and acquired by the poet. These elements blend to form an innovative piece of art, which we call a poem. The poet shall work through both personal and impersonal elements. The poet must filter his personal feelings as to lose his personality. Eliot says that poetry is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. And only those who have a personality can try to escape it. In actuality, the poet doesn't and shouldn’t have a personality. He clarifies that the man who feels and experiences must separate from the artist who writes. He contradicts Wordsworth in defining poetry because Eliot holds the view that poetry is deliberate and calculated even if it is about emotions, and it certainly can never be “spontaneous” as Wordsworth made everyone in Romantic era believe.

The essay discusses timelessness of literary world and thus a good poet must develop the consciousness of the past that directs the present. The relationship between past and present is not one-way traffic; but one of reciprocation. Even though much of present is directed by the past, the present has the ability to alter and modify the past too. Every great poet in the history has added something to the literary tradition out of which has inspired the future poetry. According to Eliot, literary tradition is a stream in which each new writer must enter and swim across to invent a new work of art. Very few of those new works can alter the stream’s current and hence add to or improve the literary tradition. Modernism was often defined as 'making it new' and the movement itself was a return to the roots, a recovery of that which has been forgotten, confronting the burden of past, which often led to re-creations and interpretations.

Being a poet-critic, Eliot often incorporated his criticism into his poems. Eliot's notion that the literary past must be integrated into contemporary poetry, comes into action in his magnum opus The Waste Land. It is a canvas which paints contradictory images and ideas next to each other in a way that depicts modern life from several standpoints. In doing so, Eliot alludes to hundreds of canonical texts including many religious scriptures. This poetic collage presents a reinterpretation of older texts and a calculated context for his examination of society.

Eliot carries the idea of tradition even in his theory of “impersonalisation,” as he modernises an older romantic concept. In 1830 as a reaction to Keats and Shelley’s immediate immersion in selfhood, Tennyson and Browning developed the dramatic monologue form as a means to make the Romantic self universal- a fabricated self who reveals itself in dramatic soliloquies. Eliot’s “escape from personality” is an allusion to Keats’s notions of indeterminate, self effaced and chameleonic nature of the poet, corroborated by his explicit reference to the “Ode to a Nightingale” in his essay.

To conclude, it would not be wrong to say that Eliot's name has become synonymous with modernism. His modern trait converts into poems through his use of myth to show modern experiences, his collage-like juxtaposition of different voices, traditions, and discourses; and his focus on form as the carrier of meaning.

Dhruvee Sinha, Ph.D. Research Scholar, NIT Patna

 

                                            T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi”

Jessica Joel

T.S. Eliot a Nobel laureate in English Literature is one of the most outstanding and renowned modernist poet, although, arguably the one whose works are embellished with the traditional medieval techniques. In the depths of his elitist and formalist visions outlined with the impersonal conception of art and contemporary issues, a certain tinge of nostalgia in themes and styles can be found for the medieval tradition creating an amalgamation between the two aspects.

The Journey of the Magi was written in 1927 an important year for Eliot, part in becoming a British citizen and part in converting to Anglo-Catholicism the emphasis of which can be seen in the poem as Eliot himself undertakes the journey of faith and the birth of spiritualism in himself and the death of his old self. The poem focuses on the epiphany in the Bible and is influenced from the lines from a sermon by an Anglican Bishop Lancelot Andrewes in 1622 which give a kickstart to the poem and is a metaphorical psycho-spiritual journey narrated by one of the Magi. “A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey….”

Eliot kept the medieval theme of nativity as modern as ever by not mentioning the name of Jesus himself, or the star of Bethlehem which guided the Magi, their expensive gifts: gold, frankincense and Myrrh; there is no clue that these Magi are Persian astrologers or Kings from the East.  The three stanzas of the poem are split into the journey of the Magi and deal with the modern issues of frustration, misery, existential crisis during the journey leading to doubt. Then, the arrival to the nativity scene and from the anticipation to simple satisfaction which he reflects in the third stanza as an acknowledgement of a faith and deep revelation on birth, death and alienation. Here the journey is not only from their land to the birthplace of Jesus, but an inner journey to experience spiritual rebirth, a journey of purification of soul on the seismic border of two contrasting worlds pre-Christianity and post Christianity.  The Magi’s magical prowess and socio-religious beliefs are evanesced to adherence of salvation through isolation and connection with God which can be seen towards the end. 

Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” has the components of imagery and tone from ‘The Explorer’ by Rudyard Kipling and from Ezra Pound’s, ‘Exile’s Letter’.  There’s usage of Alliteration in the starting lines, Biblical Allusions in the second stanza, Anaphora to reinforce their hardships, and the remarkable usage of Assonance and Enjambment. 

Jessica Joel, St. Johns College, Agra