美国文学5、T.S.Eliot艾略特.ppt

T.S.Eliot Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888 - 1965) Thomas Stearns Eliot poet, dramatist, and critic During his studies at Harvard in America, the Sorbonne in Paris, and Oxford in England, Eliot mastered French, Italian, English literature, as well as Sanskrit. With the help of Pound he published his best-known work, The Waste Land, in 1922. won the 1948 Nobel Prize in literature classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion Poetry Prufrock and Other Observations(1917) Gerontion (1920) The Waste Land (1922) Ash Wednesday (1930) Four Quartets (1935–42) Poetry Eliot’s early poetical works employing myths, religious symbolism, and literary allusion, signified a break with 19th-century poetic traditions, express the anguish and barrenness of modern life and the isolation of the individual, particularly as reflected in the failure of love. Their models were the metaphysical poets, Dante, and French Symbolists. Their meter ranged from the lyrical to the conversational. Eliot turned from spiritual desolation to hope for human salvation. His Style of Poetry Eliot attempted to produce “pure imagery” with no added meaning or symbolism. He began adding one image to another in such a way that his attitude and mood became clear. In his best works, the image, his own philosophy and the music of words are all blended although he mingled grand images with commonplace ones and combined trivial and tawdry images with traditional poetic subjects. Eliot rarely made his meaning explicit. The internal logic of his poems is carried out by swiftly accumulating images, suggestions and echoes, depending for their interpretation upon the imagination of the reader. Plays His plays attempt to revitalize verse drama and usually treat the same themes as in his poetry. The most important is: Murder in the Cathedral (1935) Thomas Becket, the 12th-century Cathedral Plays According to his theory, verse drama should conform to natual-rhythm and not