Eliot Critics

• Portrait of a Lady

  • 'The poem depicts the emptiness and sterility of the life of a cultured women surrounded by bric-a-brac'
  • 'social malice' in poem; the speaker is suspended between feelings of attraction and repulsion
  • brutal destruction of lilac 'could be perceived by the speaker as an expression of her desire to keep and style him by refusing to let him go'
• The Hollow Men

  • Seamus Perry - 'all the resources to make poetry sing are denied to us'
  • Much of Eliot's poetry was written 'looking into the eyes of a demon'
  • 'sterility, inaction, detachment and despair dominate Eliot's poetry'
• Journey of the Magi

  • Eliot wanted to present faith as an 'inner shift so deep that you hardly notice it, yet giving you a new perspective on everything'
  • Zabel states 'Eliot's exploration of Christain themes deprived his art of its once incomparable distinction in style and theme'
• Preludes

  • 'there appears to be an acceptance of the futility of life and an inability to halt time'
  • 'the images of cooking smells and shuttered rooms imply an ache, a yearning after significance whilst significance is withheld'
  • sharply aware of 'the disorder, the futility, the meaningless, the mystery of life and suffering'
  • 'Each moment is an isolated, fragmentary image, producing its own effect, including suggestions of some larger action or situation of which it is but an arrested moment'
• The Lovesong of J.Alfred Prufrock

  • 'nearly every line of it was written looking into the eyes of the demon'
  • 'ironic contrast between the illusory, heroic past and the banal, anti-heroic present'
  • Ezra pound - 'prufrock is a portrait of failure
  • 'sterility, inaction, detachment and despair dominate Eliot's poetry'
  • Prufrock is an insecure socially paralysed narrator'