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
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
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
