Eliot Ness

Author T.S. Eliot’s Influence on American Literary History Author T.S. Eliot, was an American-English poet, playwriter, literary critic, an editor and was a major contributor and leader of the Modernist movement in poetry. From his works like “The Waste Land” and then the what some call sequel “The Hollow Men,” Eliot’s style of writing not only had a huge influence on American literary history but also influenced many other writers such as Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite. After reading some…

Eliot opens the essay by redefining the word “tradition” and arguing that criticism in his view “is as inevitable as breathing.” The first principle of criticism that he asserts is to focus not solely upon what is unique in a poet but upon what he shares with “the dead poets, his ancestors.” This sharing, when it is not the mere and unquestioning following of established poetic practice, involves the historical sense, a sense that the whole of literary Europe and of one’s own country “has a…

He is extremely dispirited with this thought. He is caught in the pangs of alienation. A dictionary of literary terms defined alienation as; ‘Alienation is the state of being alienated or being estranged from something or somebody; it is a condition of the mind’. Encyclopedia Britannica defines alienation as ‘the state of feeling estranged or separated from ones milieu, work, products of work or self. Different interpreters of alienation have given different definitions. According to Arnold…

“Beethoven” by Shane Koyczan is a descriptive poem that uses vivid imagery to explore the theme of love. Beethoven was unable to find love at home, and suffered from severe physical and emotional abuse. Therefore, he found it very difficult to connect with others and in a way, isolated himself. In addition, he felt as if he was not loved at home and that forced him to find love elsewhere. He found that love in music. It was that love of music that helped guide him through his adolescence and…

Similarly to how sexual isolation pushes Prufrock farther away from people, Eliot uses nature images to increase the feeling of isolation. The nature imagery in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is stunningly beautiful; yet at the same time, it indicates isolation. In the third full stanza, a metaphor of a yellow fog that sounds like a cat is used. Cats only make themselves visible when they want something, otherwise they tend to be alone. Both fog and cats can come and go at any point…

Throughout his life T.S. Eliot struggled with religion and belief. He was raised in a Unitarian home where he was surrounded by religious ideology. Once Eliot left his home he began his own research of all the possible religions, and based his beliefs on his research. A large portion of his writings included religious illusions. The central subject of The Waste Land is really a religious one. The Waste Land illustrates for us the concrete image of a spiritual plan with the help of analogy.…

2. The Crying of Lot 49: modernism or postmodernism? In my arguing that The Crying of Lot 49 can also be construed as a late-modernist text, I will turn to Harvey’s essay ‘The Cry from Within or Without? Pynchon and the Modern – Postmodern Divide’ where he fervently argues against McHale’s ‘claim’ that The Crying of Lot 49 is fundamentally a modernist text by presenting two core arguments relating to a) intertextuality and b) Oedipa’s search for truth. Before I will dispute any arguments of…

John Ruskin coined the term ‘Pathetic Fallacy’ in 1856 to “signify any representation of inanimate natural objects that ascribes to them human capabilities, sensations, and emotions” (Abrams 203). This idea of emotion being projected onto the surrounding environment till nature becomes a kind of mirror is epitomised in Lord Alfred Tennyson’s poem ‘Mariana’. The poem, published in 1830, was inspired from a scene in William Shakespeare’s play Measure for Measure, where Mariana waits for her lover…

Although written by the same poet, Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken” and “Carpe Diem” both reflect a vaguely different style and moral of the poem. Despite conveying an entirely different message beneath the unique stories, Robert Frost manages to use the same figurative languages for both poems, such as personification, repetition, and natural imagery. Each one of these figurative language used has their own significant within the poem, whether it is for delivering the message or reiterating…

Throughout Fyodor Dostoevsky’s work, Notes from Underground, the protagonist, the underground man, portrays himself as a spiteful, self-contradictory, and overly conscious melancholy man. He continuously over analyzes and questions everything, and this prevents him from taking any real action. The underground man is lonely and constantly vacillates between wanting society’s acknowledgment or to be socially desired and wanting to be completely isolated from society. He gives off the impression…