By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The Anglo-American modernist poet T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) was arguably the most influential poet of the twentieth century. With poems like ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, The Waste Land, ‘The Hollow Men’, and Four Quartets, Eliot changed the landscape of poetry forever.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the meaning of T. S. Eliot’s famous opening words to his greatest poem
‘April is the cruellest month’ is the opening line to T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land. There are, actually, two things I could say in response to the statement I’ve just typed. One of them is that ‘April is the cruellest month’ is not the opening line of The Waste Land (all will be explained in a moment).
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
In his 1921 essay ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, T. S. Eliot made several of his most famous and important statements about poetry – including, by implication, his own poetry. It is in this essay that Eliot puts forward his well-known idea of the ‘dissociation of sensibility’, among other theories. You can read ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ here before proceeding to our summary and analysis below.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Journey of the Magi’ by T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) was the first of a series of poems written by the poet for his employer, the publisher Faber and Faber, composed for special booklets or greetings cards which were issued in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Eliot claimed he wrote ‘Journey of the Magi’ in 1927, on a single day, one Sunday after church.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘What the Thunder Said’ concludes The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot’s landmark 1922 work of modernist poetry. In many ways, this is the most difficult section of The Waste Land to analyse. Nevertheless, what follows is an attempt to sketch out one possible reading or analysis of ‘What the Thunder Said’ in terms of its meaning, language, and use of literary allusions. You can read ‘What the Thunder Said’ here.