Eliot For the CSET

You need to know about T.S. Eliot if you are studying for the CSET English or the CSET Multiple Subject exam.

Thomas Stearns Eliot (September 26, 1888 – January 4, 1965) was an American (naturalized British) poet, dramatist and literary critic, whose works, such as The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, and Four Quartets, are considered defining achievements of twentieth century Modernist poetry. In 1948, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was one of the most influential poets of the 20th century.

Read this Wikipedia article about T.S. Eliot then return to this lesson:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._S._Eliot

In Modernist poetry, the speaker himself is uncertain about his or her own ontological bearings. The speaker of modernist poems characteristically wrestles with the fundamental question of “self,” often feeling fragmented and alienated from the world around him. In other words, a coherent speaker with a clear sense of himself/herself is hard to find in modernist poetry.

Such ontological feelings of fragmentation and alienation, which often led to a more pessimistic and bleak outlook on life as manifested in representative modernist poems such as T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917), were prompted by fundamental and far-reaching historical, social, cultural, and economic changes in the early 1900s. These changes transformed the world from one that seemed ordered and stable to one that felt futile and chaotic.

Modernism, which flourished from the 1890s to 1939, arose from a set of occurrences — cultural, scientific and material — that changed the nature of modern life. Modernism altered perceptions while capturing the imagination of patrons and publishers and worrying the stalwarts of the establishment. Some of its more flamboyant creations intrigued, frustrated, inspired and even enraged the public.

The Modernists reformed all of the arts — architecture, dance, literature, music and painting — by appropriating the great technological breakthroughs of the period into the fields of artistic endeavor and cultural production.