Modernism – Page 15 – Interesting Literature

A Short Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Hysteria’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) published his first collection of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, in 1917. This slim volume included poems written in a wide variety of styles and modes, from vers libre to Shakespearean blank verse, from dramatic monologues to short lyrics. The volume also included one prose poem, ‘Hysteria’, which T. S. Eliot had written in November 1915. Below we offer some notes towards an analysis of ‘Hysteria’, which you can read here.

A Short Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Hippopotamus’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Hippopotamus’ is one of T. S. Eliot’s quatrain poems, written just after the First World War and published in his 1919 volume, Poems. By turns comical and serious, sincere and playful, high satirical and almost nonsense-like, ‘The Hippopotamus’ shows a very different T. S. Eliot from the one we glimpse in The Waste Land. It is even more interesting as a satire against the Church in light of Eliot’s later conversion to the Church of England, in 1927. You can read ‘The Hippopotamus’ here; below is our analysis.

The ‘quatrain’ poems which make up all but one of the English poems in Poems (the volume also contains a few poems written in French) were inspired by the French example of Théophile Gautier (1811-72), whose volume Émaux et Camées Eliot had been encouraged to read by Ezra Pound. The hard, sculptured feel to these quatrain poems was the result of Pound’s influence: this precise and controlled kind of poetic form was something which Pound thought Eliot could work with to good effect.

A Summary and Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Morning at the Window’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Morning at the Window’ was written by T. S. Eliot in autumn 1914 and published in Eliot’s first collection, Prufrock and Other Observations, three years later. You can read ‘Morning at the Window’ here; below is our analysis of the poem.

Five Fascinating Facts about T. E. Hulme

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) 1. Hulme wrote what is arguably the first modern poem in the English language. There are numerous candidates for who was the first truly modern English poet, but one could do worse than propose T. E. Hulme (1883-1917). In 1908, on the back of a hotel bill, Hulme wrote … Read more

A Short Analysis of T. E. Hulme’s ‘Conversion’

Dr Oliver Tearle’s summary of a classic imagist poem

T. E. Hulme’s poetry offers something different from the poetry being written by his near-contemporaries, ‘Georgian’ poets such as Rupert Brooke and John Drinkwater – or, indeed, the surviving ‘Victorian’ poets such as Thomas Hardy. ‘Conversion’ is not quite as famous as several of Hulme’s other poems, but it was one of the six poems he allowed Ezra Pound to reprint in the facetiously titled ‘The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme’, at the end of Pound’s 1912 volume Ripostes. Here is ‘Conversion’, with a few comments on it, that are designed to serve as preliminary analysis of its form, meaning, and imagery.