T.S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in 1888 in Saint Louis but he chose to be an English, not an American artist. He was well educated, studied at Harvard, Oxford and Paris Universities. He set up a magazine called 'Criterion' which concerned social, political and cultural issues. Eliot deeply believed that an author must be also a literary critic, that they must be sophisticated and conscoius of which artistic path do they choose.

T.S. Eliot was writing about a world where everyone is lost. He was fascinated by things and phenomena that are awful, scarying, disturbing or even apocalyptic. He searched for inspirations in other books and antique culture. What is more, Eliot employed a lot of stylistic devices taken from music.

Preludes

I
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

And then the lighting of the lamps.

This time I decided to show you only a fragment of a poem - this one was too long to put here all its four parts. Nevertheless, I think that this fragment is enough to behold some distinguisging characteristics that I wrote about above. Firsly, T.S. Eliot chose the form of preludes which is taken from the world of classical music in which it can be both an 'introduction' to the main part of a work or a self-standing piece of art. We see that the author used some rhymes that dynamise the poem, makes it more musical, but also, in my opinion, more disturbing. What is more, he chose adjectives such as 'gusty', 'grimy', 'vacant' or 'smoky', which create very depressing and bleak atmosphere. Everything in here is overwhelming and against us.

Based on: Wikipedia note and LINK.

* you can read the whole poem here.