In many ways, TS Eliot's poems “expressed the disillusionment of a younger, post-World War I generation with values ​​and conventions – both both literary and social – of the Victorian era” (American National). Eliot used The Waste Land and The Hollow Men to illustrate his feelings about a time of brutal war. The Waste Land was “taken up by the postwar generation as a rallying cry for their sense of disillusionment” (American National). These feelings of disillusionment gave way to a more stable religious theme, as in The Journey of the Magi, later in Eliot's career. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essayT. S. (Thomas Stearns) Eliot was born September 26, 1888. Until the age of eighteen, Eliot lived in St. Louis, then attended Harvard. At twenty-two, after earning a bachelor's and master's degree, Eliot moved to the Sorbonne University in Paris. After spending a year at the Sorbonne, Eliot returned to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in philosophy, but in 1914 he moved to England. In 1915, Eliot married his first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, and they moved into a London flat with Bertrand Russell. Russell not only shared his apartment with the Eliots, but he also shared his social relationships with them. With Russell's help, Eliot met many of Europe's elite, including Ezra Pound. Pound helped Eliot meet many of his contemporary authors, poets, and artists. Eliot and Russell's relationship deteriorated due to Russell's romantic involvement with Vivienne, leading to Eliot not pursuing his doctorate. thesis defense. It was at this time that Pound recognized Eliot's poetic ability, and "in 1917 he received a huge boost from the publication of his first book, Prufrock and Other Observations, printed by the Egoist with the support silent financier of Ezra and Dorothy. Book” (US National). Prufrock established Eliot as one of the leading poets of the 20th century. Eliot's years of poetic maturation were accompanied by family difficulties. Eliot's father died in 1919, at the same time that Vivienne's mental and physical health began to deteriorate, and the emotional strain on Eliot was taking its toll. In 1921, Eliot suffered a nervous collapse and, on the advice of his doctor, he underwent a three-month restive course of treatment. Whether due to depression or the long-awaited rest he subsequently received, Eliot recovered from a serious case of writer's block. . He took the time to finish a poem begun in 1919, which would become The Waste Land. The intensity of the poem comes from a mixture of the horrors of Eliot's life, the recently fought war, and many literary influences from English mythology. Although it was written at a very difficult time in his life, it was the publication of The Waste Land that allowed Eliot's “reputation to assume almost mythical proportions; by 1930, and for the next thirty years, he was the most dominant figure in poetry and literary criticism in the English-speaking world” (American National). The Waste Land proves to be a fitting title, especially when the difficult and dreamlike verses have given up their secrets. The melancholy and morose lyrical celebration reveals the aridity and impotence of modern civilization in a series of mythological episodes, sometimes realistic, sometimes surreal, whose perspectives overlap and emphasize each other with an indescribable total effect. The entire poem cycle is only 436 lines long, but it actually contains more meaning and impact than most novels of that many pages. The WasteLand is now over eighty years old, but sadly he has proven that his catastrophic visions still have intact foresight in the shadow of the digital age, and as Eliot said of his own work: "I do not see why the prospect of human annihilation should affect the poet differently from men of other vocations. It will affect him as a human being, no doubt in proportion to his sensitivity” (Hall Interview 221). The surreal nature of The Waste Land is itself a means to achieve Eliot's goals. The poetic juxtapositions he uses allow Eliot to produce a sense of shock and awe to counterbalance his message of a desperate new age. From this point of view, the discontinuity of the poem is a symbolic form of the confusion of awakening from a deep sleep. The use in the poem of allusions to the past as well as its form must be read as a sign of the disruptive power of primitive forces which reassert themselves. It is encouraging for a Christian society to believe that it lives in a world where God is not dead, but the poem is not about such a world. The hope that The Waste Land arouses is negative: “the fact that men have lost the knowledge of good and evil prevents them from being alive” (Brooks 186). The Waste Land not only reflects the passing of Victoria's golden age, but shows Eliot's feelings towards a society where people walk around morally dead. Behind Eliot's scathing criticism lies a "deep and painful disillusionment, and from this disillusionment [is born] a feeling of sympathy, and from this sympathy arises a growing need to rescue from the ruins of confusion the fragments whose order and stability could be restored” (Nobel). The Waste Land was Eliot's first long poem and can be read as his philosophy on the necessity of pursuing destructive human desires. There is little hope in The Waste Land; its major theme is the inevitable collapse of society through the "Unreal City", which Eliot seems to use to represent post-war urban areas. This “Unreal City” is still “under the brown fog” (Waste Land ll 61 & 208), which seems to represent the veil of death that hung over much of Europe after the First World War. The “Unreal City” is a nightmarish place. this parallels the urban decay and disintegration of the majority of European cities after the First World War. The poem's finale is an orgy of elemental and social violence, with "those who lived now dying" and the "red, sullen faces that sneer and snarl from the cracked house doors" (Waste Land ll 329 & 344- 45), representing the inevitability of death and the fear of man. What the poem attempts here, by emphasizing the slow descent into death and the fear attributed to that death, is the realization of an elaborate code of conduct that is indicative of desires, which Eliot believes should be repressed. However, Eliot, consumed by the rigors of his domestic life, found it difficult to fully appreciate his success. In 1923, Vivienne nearly died, which nearly plunged Eliot into a second emotional breakdown. Over the next two years, Eliot continued on his path of emotional despair, until a chance allowed him to leave his overly demanding job at Lloyd's Bank. Faber and Gwyer's fledgling publishing house saw the advantage of having a literary editor versed in both letters and business and hired Eliot. Eliot had finally found a job he was suitable for. The seeds of his future faith took root in The Hollow Men, although, when published in 1925, the poem read like a continuation of the philosophical despair of The Waste Land. Although The Hollow Menis not truly a sequel to The Waste Land, it is a thematic appendix to this earlier work. Like The Waste Land, The Hollow Men shows the depths of Eliot's despair and his need for a compass to guide him. By beginning the poem with "Mr. Kurtz, he is dead," Eliot draws on Conrad's theme in Heart of Darkness, about the death of the gods of primitive men. The death of Kurtz, Conrad's god of African primitives, overshadows the death of the primitive elemental forces that govern Eliot's life, like an ancient god of thunder. With the death of his primal gods, Eliot becomes one of the hollow men and must find something to fill himself with again. The Hollow Men takes place in a twilight world of lost souls and disembodied forces. This world is populated by “forms without form, nuances without color, paralyzed forms.” forces, gestures without movement” (Creux ll 11-12). These hollow men are walking corpses, soulless individuals who do not know that they have lost their souls. These men live in a “valley of dying stars” (Hollow II 54), a land as hollow as themselves. Hollow men avert their gaze not only from each other, but also from the eyes of the divine; they are empty men, far from God. They are the shadow that isolates men from each other and from the divine; these hollow men are unenlightened masses, devoid of a moral compass. These hollow men share the fate of inhabiting the 'realm of death's dreams', who are not remembered, certainly, as 'lost violent souls', but who, on the other hand, are not even not memorable” (Kenner 161). Although there is little hope for the hollow men in their "twilight realm" (Hollow ll 38), there is life outside in "the other realm of death" (Hollow ll 46) . This other kingdom, that of God, is populated by stuffed men: those who have found their soul and who are no longer hollow. Eliot's hollow men seem to believe, at least to some extent, that if they resist the "realm of twilight" they could be reborn in "the other kingdom of death." Through Eliot's use of excerpts from the Lord's Prayer in the poem's conclusion, he implies that the foreshadowed eyes of the hollow men can once again turn to the divine and that they can become members of the stuffed men. Hollow Men seems to be Eliot's final exorcism. the demons of his troubled youth. Just two years after the poem's publication, Eliot's life began to take a slightly more stable direction. In 1927, two important things happened in Eliot's life: he found God in the Church of England and he became a British citizen. Even as Eliot's marriage and personal life continued to disintegrate, he began to find comfort in his new relationship with God. Thus, the emotional troubles of his youth gave way to a religious maturation both in his person and in his poetry. With his later religious poems such as The Journey of the Magi, Eliot attempts to capture the calming influence of God on his life and share it with others. The Journey of the Magi is the monologue of one of the three wise men, who came to see the Nativity. Even if he believes in the importance of the birth he has just witnessed, as evidenced by his desire to go to Bethlehem, the mage is not jubilant but melancholy. He was “led here for Birth or Death” (Mages II 35-36), but he does not understand what he really came to see: the birth of the child or his own death. It is only when he witnesses the scene that the mage truly knows the answer. During his return journey, the mage realizes the true reason for his journey: “It is not that Birth which is also Death brought him the hope of a new life, but that it revealed to him the.122-124.