Message of Hope in Eliots The Waste Land, Gerontion, and The Love Song

Message of Hope in Eliots The Waste Land, Gerontion, and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Thomas Stearns Eliot was not a revolutionary, yet he revolutionized the way the Western domain writes and reads poetry. Some of his works were as imagist and incomprehensible as could be most of it in free verse, yet his concentration was always on the meaning of his language, and the lessons he wished to teach with them. Eliot consorted with modernist literary iconoclast Ezra Pound merely was obsessed with the traditional works of Shakespeare and Dante. He was a man of his time yet was obsessed with the past. He was born in the United States, but later became a royal subject in England. In short, Eliot is as complete and total a contradiction in terms as any artist of his time, as is evident in his poetry, drama, and criticism. But the prevailing of his contradictions involves two major themes in his poetry history and trust. He was, in his life, a self-described Anglo-Catholic, but wa s raised a Midwestern Unitarian in St. Louis. Eliot biographer Peter Ackroyd describes the religion of Eliots ancestors as a corporate trust that resides in the Church, the City, and the University since it is a faith primarily of social intent, and concerned with the nature of moral obligations within a society. It places its trust in good works, in reverence for authority and the institutions of authority, in human beings service, in thrift, and in success (18). It is through Eliots insistence of these moral obligations that his didactic poetry gives us a glimpse of both his outwardly rejected faith and his inability to shun its tenets. He becomes, through his greatest poetry, a professor of that which he supposedly does not believe. Eliots ... ...In The Waste Land, Eliot delivers an indictment against the self-serving, irresponsibility of modern society, but not without giving us, particularly the youth a message of hope at the end of the Thames River. And in Ash Wednesday, El iot finally describes an example of the small, graceful images perfection gives us as oases in the Waste Land of modern culture. Eliot constantly refers back, in unconsciously, to his childhood responsibilities of the missionary in an unholy world. It is only through close, quick reading of his poetry that we can come to understand his faithful message of hope. Works Cited Ackroyd, Peter. T.S. Eliot A Life. New York Simon & Schuster, 1984. Kenner, Hugh. T.S. Eliot A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ apprentice Hall, 1962. Tate, Allen. T.S. Eliot The Man and His Work. New York Delacorte Press, 1966.