George Eliot

dilemmas from which there is no escape. They wander through a barren landscape, which reflects the spiritually, emotionally and intellectually crippling world, a land, where humanity is offered no solace or hope. Similarly in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” Eliot criticises modern life through the description of a city at night and the dehumanization of humanity by alienation. Eliot’s use of central images of the poem, “death’s kingdoms” and “the eyes”, serve to foreground the lack of direction of…

Imagism is a literary movement that had its origin in the artistic world and reinvented the traditional conventions in art and poetry. This movement emerged in the early 20th century and its main representatives are Ezra Pound, H.D., William Carlos Williams, and James Joyce among others. The main characteristics of Imagism were written down by Ezra Pound in an article published in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in 1913 with the title of: ‘A Few Dont’s by an Imagiste’ in which Pound describes the…

leaving this earth behind with unfinished business as the travel to the unknown, but expected. In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, the poet T. S. Eliot weaves a tale about the passing of time through the strategically placed questions in the poem, the use of figurative language, and the shifts in the mood of this famed poem. Throughout the poem, Eliot places rhetorical questions that not only indicate the passing of time, but also provide insight into the slow toll that time takes on the…

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…