Modernism In T. S Eliot

The term modernism has been used to designate T.S Eliot’s tendency of revolt that represented a complete break with the contemporary poetry. When eliot appeared on the scene , English poetry was dominated by the Georgian poets who tried to carry on the Victorian romantic tradition .Eliot revolted against the Georgian school of poetry as it ignored the complexities of the new age , and played on the lowest artistic responses of a large audience. georgian poetrt was external and fit to be communicated to the public and against this sort of poetry . eliot advocated and practiced poetry which was inner, secret ,mystrios , taught to a select few. Referring to this fact Maxwell has observed in the poetry of t. s eliot “from 1900 until first world

In most of his poems eliot uses vers libre or free verse instead of the traditional verse in regular metres. Like the French symbolist poets, wliot also discards and rejects the conventional ways of connecting the oarts of the poem through logic and grammar or narrative sequence.his poems do not convey and depict meaning through logically connected statements , but through images which evoke a mood or an emotion. At the meaning of these images and the interconnection among them is not explicitly stated , eliots poems are often very difficult to understand . the difficulty is further increased by eliots frequents use of learned allusions drawn from his vast reading in many subjevts and in many languages and generally made ina a very oblique and remote manner . modernism in eliots poetry is reflected noy only in form but also in theme and content . one of the inescapable effects of industrial civilization is the dominant place in it of the large city or metropolis with its anonymous , rootless citizen. Yet there are very few poems in English after the middle of the eighteenth century which have the city as their subject or background though blake poem London is striking exception. For the poet’s of the nineteenth centrury the city was somehow alien and unsuitable as a object of poetry. Writing in the early years of the twentieth century the Georgian shared this attitude and there poetry is traditional in formal and largely rural in setting .in this context the urban setting of eliots poems was quite revolutionary and he has been righly described as “ the great master of city theme among the modern poets “. The poetry of eliot is regarded modern also because it rejects the belief in human progress characteristic of the ninenteenth century . the common theme of many poems of ts eliot is the boredom and futility of modern life . the most of his poems like THE LOVE SONG OF J ALFRED PRUFROCK