Dr.

BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR MARATHWADA

UNIVERSITY, AURANGABAD (MS)

TITLE OF THE PROJECT

MODERNISM AS REFLECTED INTO THE
WORKS OF T.S ELIOT, W.B. YEATS AND TED
HUGHES
&
RESTORATION PERIOD : RESTORATION COMEDY,
COMEDY OFMANNERS AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
DRAMAS
SUBMISSION OF THE PROJECT BY
Mayur Bhimraj Sapkale

B. A. T. Y. (MAIN),
UNDER THE GUIDANCE OF
Department of English

Dr. Shrikant Jitendra Jadhav Dr. Pramod Ambadasrao Pawar

Assistant Professor Assistant Professor & Head
AUGUST 2021
 Ted Hughes
1930–1998

One of the giants of 20th century British poetry, Ted Hughes was
born in Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire in 1930. After serving as in the Royal
Air Force, Hughes attended Cambridge, where he studied archeology
and anthropology, taking a special interest in myths and legends. In
1956 he met and married the American poet Sylvia Plath, who
encouraged him to submit his manuscript to a first book contest run
by The Poetry Center. Awarded first prize by judges Marianne
Moore, W.H. Auden, and Stephen Spender, The Hawk in the
Rain (1957) secured Hughes’s reputation as a poet of international
status. According to poet and critic Robert B. Shaw, “Hughes’s poetry
signaled a dramatic departure from the prevailing modes of the
period. The stereotypical poem of the time was determined not to
risk too much: politely domestic in its subject matter, understated
and mildly ironic in style. By contrast, Hughes marshaled a language
of nearly Shakespearean resonance to explore themes which were
mythic and elemental. ” Hughes’s long career included
unprecedented best-selling volumes such
as Lupercal (1960), Crow (1970), Selected Poems 1957-1981 (1982),
and The Birthday Letters (1998), as well as many beloved children’s
books, including The Iron Man (1968). With Seamus Heaney, he
edited the popular anthologies The Rattle Bag (1982) and The School
Bag (1997). Named executor of Plath’s literary estate, he edited
several volumes of her work. Hughes also translated works from
Classical authors, including Ovid and Aeschylus. An incredibly prolific
poet, translator, editor, and children’s book author, Hughes was
appointed Poet Laureate in 1984, a post he held until his death.
Among his many awards, he was appointed to the Order of Merit,
one of Britain’s highest honors.
The rural landscape of Hughes’s youth in Yorkshire exerted a
lasting influence on his work. To read Hughes’s poetry is to enter a
world dominated by nature, especially by animals.
This holds true for nearly all of his books, from The Hawk in the
Rain to Wolfwatching (1989) and Moortown Diary (1989), two of his
late collections. Hughes’s love of animals was one of the catalysts in
his decision to become a poet.
According to London Times contributor Thomas Nye, Hughes once
confessed “that he began writing poems in adolescence, when it
dawned upon him that his earlier passion for hunting animals in his
native Yorkshire ended either in the possession of a dead animal, or
at best a trapped one. He wanted to capture not just live animals, but
the aliveness of animals in their natural state: their wildness, their
quiddity, the fox-ness of the fox and the crow-ness of the crow.”
However, Hughes’s interest in animals was generally less
naturalistic than symbolic. Using figures such as “Crow” to
approximate a mythic everyman, Hughes’s work speaks to his
concern with poetry’s vatic, even shamanic powers. Working in
sequences and lists, Hughes frequently uncovered a kind of
autochthonous, yet literary, English language.
According to Peter Davison in the New York Times, “While
inhabiting the bodies of creatures, mostly male, Hughes clambers
back down the evolutionary chain. He searches deep into the riddles
of language, too, those that precede any given tongue, language that
reeks of the forest or even the jungle. Such poems often contain a
touch—or more than a touch—of melodrama, of the brutal tragedies
of Seneca that Hughes adapted for the modern stage.”
 Hughes’s posthumous publications include Selected Poems 1957-
1994 (2002), an updated and expanded version of the original 1982
edition, and Letters of Ted Hughes (2008), which were edited by
Christopher Reid and showcase Hughes’s voluminous
correspondence.
According to David Orr in the New York Times, Hughes’s “letters are
immediately interesting and accessible to third parties to whom they
aren’t addressed… Hughes can turn out a memorable description
(biographies of Plath are ‘a perpetual smoldering in the cellar for us.
There’s always one or two smoking away’), and his offhand
observations about poetry can be startlingly perceptive.” The
publication of Hughes’s Collected Poems (2003) provided new insights
into Hughes’s writing process. Sean O’Brien in the Guardian noted,
“Hughes conducted more than one life as a poet.” Publishing both
single volumes with Faber, Hughes also released a huge amount of
work through small presses and magazines.
These poems were frequently not collected, and it seems
Hughes thought of his small-press efforts as experiments to see if the
poems deserved placement in collections. O’Brien continued: “Clearly
[Hughes] needed to be writing all the time, and many of the hitherto
uncollected poems have the provisional air of resting for a moment
before being taken to completion—except that half the time
completion didn't occur and wasn't even the issue… as far as the
complete body of work went, Hughes seems to have been more
interested in process than outcome.”

Though Hughes is now unequivocally recognized as one of the

greatest poets of the 20th century, his reputation as a poet during his
lifetime was perhaps unfairly framed by two events: the suicide of
Plath in 1963, and, in 1969, the suicide of the woman he left Plath
for, Assia Wevill, who also took the life of their young daughter,
Shura. As Plath’s executor, Hughes’s decision to destroy her final
diary and his refusal of publication rights to her poems irked many in
the literary community .Plath was taken up by some as a symbol of
suppressed female genius in the decade after her suicide, and in this
scenario Hughes was often cast as the villain. His readings were
disrupted by cries of “murderer!” and his surname, which appears on
Plath’s gravestone, was repeatedly defaced.Hughes’s unpopular
decisions regarding Plath’s writings, over which he had total control
after her death, were often in service of his definition of privacy; he
also refused to discuss his marriage to Plath after her death.
Thus it was with great surprise that, in 1998, the literary world
received Hughes’s quite intimate portrait of Plath in the form
of Birthday Letters, a collection of prose poems covering every aspect
of his relationship with his first wife.
The collection received both critical praise and censure; Hughes’s
desire to break the silence around Plath’s death was welcomed, even
as the poems themselves were scrutinized. Yet despite
reservations, Katha Pollitt wrote in the New York Times Book
Review that Hughes’s tone, “emotional, direct, regretful, entranced—
pervades the book’s strongest poems, which are quiet and thoughtful
and conversational. Plath is always ‘you’—as though an old man were
leafing through an album with a ghost.”
Though marked by a period of pain and controversy in the 1960s,
Hughes’s later life was spent writing and farming. He married Carol
Orchard in 1970, and the couple lived on a small farm in Devon until
his death.His forays into translations, essays, and criticism were
noted for their intelligence and range. Hughes continued writing and
publishing poems until his death, from cancer, on October 28, 1998.
A memorial to Hughes in the famed Poets’ Corner of Westminster
Abbey was unveiled in 2011.
Critical Analysis of Modernism Poems by Ted Hughes

Literary modernism, or modernist literature, has its origins in the

late 19th and early 20th centuries, mainly in Europe and North
America. Modernism is characterized by a self-conscious break with
traditional styles of poetry and verse. Modernists experimented with
literary form and expression, adhering to Ezra Pound’s maxim to
“Make it new. ” The modernist literary movement was driven by a
conscious desire to overturn traditional modes of representation and
express the new sensibilities of their time.The horrors of the First
World War saw the prevailing assumptions about society reassessed
such as Sigmund Freud questioned the rationality of mankind.
Edward James “Ted” Hughes, OM (17 August 1930 – 28 October
1998) was an English poet and children’s writer. Critics routinely rank
him as one of the best poets of his generation. Hughes was British
Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death. Hughes was married to
American poet Sylvia Plath, from 1956 until her suicide in 1963 at the
age of 30. His part in the relationship became controversial to some
feminists and (particularly) American admirers of Plath.His last poetic
work, Birthday Letters (1998), explored their complex relationship.
These poems make reference to Plath’s suicide, but none of them
addresses directly the circumstances of her death. A poem
discovered in October 2010, Last letter, describes what happened
during the three days leading up to Plath’s suicide. In 2008 Hughes
was ranked fourth on the list of “The 50 greatest British writers since
1945”. Hughes’ earlier poetic work is rooted in nature and, in
particular, the innocent savagery of animals, an interest from an early
age.He wrote frequently of the mixture of beauty and violence in the
natural world.
 Animals serve as a metaphor for his view on life: animals live out a
struggle for the survival of the fittest in the same way that humans
strive for ascendancy and success. Examples can be seen in the
poems “Hawk Roosting” and “Jaguar”. The West Riding dialect of
Hughes’ childhood remained a staple of his poetry, his lexicon lending
a texture that is concrete, terse, emphatic, economical yet powerful.
The manner of speech renders the hard facts of things and wards off
self-indulgence. Hughes’ later work is deeply reliant upon myth and
the British bardic tradition, heavily inflected with a modernist,
Jungian and ecological viewpoint. He re-worked classical and
archetypal myth working with a conception of the dark sub-
conscious. Poem Analysis of The Owl It’s a complex poem, inevitably,
because it’s primarily about Ted’s relationship with Sylvia Plath,
which you can’t really reduce to a few sentences. You have at least to
take into account the complexity of any really intimate relationship,
when it’s about a meeting of minds as well as a meeting of bodies.

You start to see the world through the other person’s eyes. To
give a trivial example, I met my wife in Aberdeen, her home town,
where my Yorkshire accent was an oddity and she was at home in a
linguistic world made up of Scots and Gaelic. The first time she visited
my home, I vividly remember her panic in Leeds, suddenly
surrounded for the first time in her life by Yorkshire accents –
suddenly she was the odd one out in a big city, her voice was the
strange voice.Now imagine that sort of thing in every aspect of
life.Then add another huge layer of complexity because Plath was not
just another person, she was also one of the most gifted poets in
English of the last century. She saw the world strangely, but with
incredible acuity (as an owl’s eyes are sensitive to even very low
levels of light, if you like). But Hughes isn’t just seeing the world now
through Plath’s astonishing eyes – he’s seeing it through her
children’s eyes, Frieda and Nick, and Sylvia is dead.

And in an appalling repeat, so is Assia Wevill, who was Ted’s

lover in the period shortly after Sylvia died.Assia, like Sylvia, killed
herself, but she also killed her daughter, Shura, at the same time (Ted
himself believed that Shura was his child). So there are layers of
tragedy in these different layers of perception that Ted talks about in
the poem with his references to ‘your children’s eyes’. Now add to
those layers of complexity the fact that Hughes is also seeing the
world through the owl’s eyes (in much the same way that in Hawk,
Roosting he sees the world through the hawk’s eyes – owls are birds
of prey, remember, like hawks) Few people have really attempted
this getting inside an animal’s head like Hughes did – one rare other
person is Les Murray, in Translations from the Natural World, which
would give you a point of reference away from Hughes or Plath. And
of course Sylvia herself was also a great nature poet, with her own
specialised knowledge of natural history (her father was an expert
beekeeper). So there’s no way to reduce this to a handful of
formulae, I’m afraid.There’s much more in the poem than I’ve
touched on, and you really need to have a basic grasp of Ted and
Sylvia’s relationship, and how Ted responded to her death (especially
in Birthday Letters, and in the poem that surfaced late last year
specifically about the night of her suicide – it got blanket coverage in
the British media when Melvyn Bragg unearthed it) It’s also pretty
much impossible to address all these issues without addressing the
continuing debate over Ted’s responsibility for and response to
Sylvia’s death. And the tragedy continues, as Nick committed suicide
just a few years after Ted’s death.Crow: From the Life and Songs of
Crow Hughes describes Crow as wandering around the universe in
search of his female Creator.
 In the second developed episode he meets a hag by a river. He has
to carry the hag across the river while trying to answer questions that
she puts to him, mostly about love. Hughes describes several of the
poems, particularly ‘Lovesong’, ‘The Lovepet’ and ‘Bride and Groom
Lie Hidden for Three Days’ (part of Cave Birds but included in
Hughes’s recording of Crow) as Crow’s attempts to answer these
questions.When he reaches the other side of the river the hag turns
into a beautiful girl. For some critics, notably Keith Sagar, Crow is the
abortion of a great work, and has been misinterpreted, mainly
because, as the first edition stated, The Life and Songs of the Crow
covers only the first two thirds of Crow’s journey, bringing him to his
lowest point, whereas the narrative had been designed to conclude
with Crow’s triumphant marriage to his Creator (Sagar, Laughter, xii).
However, it is arguable that the published book owes much of its
success to its unfinished, undecidable and provocative character.The
jacket of early editions of Crow was illustrated by a striking drawing
by Hughes’s friend, the American artist Leonard Baskin. Seeing
Baskin’s drawings of crows had inspired Hughes to embark on the
sequence but, in contrast to later books such as Cave Birds and Under
the North Star, Baskin was not involved in the development of the
project. The most important influence on Crow is Trickster
mythology. Paul Radin says of the Trickster, ‘he became and
remained everything to every man—god, animal, human being, ero,
buffoon, he who was before good and evil, denier, affirmer,
destroyer and creator’ (Radin, The Trickster, 169). This captures
perfectly Crow’s own ambivalent identity.You can see his Trickster
character in a poem such as ‘A Childish Prank’, where he remedies
God’s failure to animate man and woman by biting the Worm in two:
He stuffed into man the tail half With the wounded end hanging out
He stuffed the had half headfirst into woman And it crept in deeper
and up To peer out through her eyes…
Is Crow’s invention of sexuality clever and resourceful, or crass and
foolish?

The shock that poems like this caused when first published was
intensified by the style, epitomised by phrases like ‘stuffed into man
the tail half’, which Hughes at the time described as a ‘super-simple,
super-ugly language’. He seemed to be assaulting religion and poetry
simultaneously. By adopting this narrative style Hughes implicitly
identifies himself with his protagonist. At the core of Crow is a group
of poems, including this one, which re-accent the story of the
Creation, the Fall (‘Apple Tragedy’), the Crucifixion (‘Crow Blacker
than Ever’).

But the book is not merely an attack on Christianity. The figure

and style of Crow gave Hughes a means of ranging widely across
Western Civilisation within a loosely unified sequence. He placed
himself explicitly in a tradition of primitive literature especially
through his use of Trickster mythology, but also by drawing of a wide
range of folktales and oral devices such as repetition. But Crow is not
merely a primitive pastiche: like much of the greatest modernist art,
primitive motifs are combined with a vivid contemporaneity, often to
powerful emotional effect.
 T. S. Eliot
1888–1965

T.S. Eliot, the 1948 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is one of
the giants of modern literature, highly distinguished as a poet,
literary critic, dramatist, and editor and publisher.

In 1910 and 1911, while still a college student, he wrote “The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and other poems that are landmarks in the
history of literature. In these college poems, Eliot articulated
distinctly modern themes is in forms that were both a striking
development of and a marked departure from those of 19th-century
poetry.Within a few years he had composed another landmark poem,
“Gerontion” (1920), and within a decade, one of the most famous
and influential poems of the century, The Waste Land (1922). While
the origins of The Waste Land are in part personal, the voices
projected are universal. Eliot later denied that he had large cultural
problems in mind, but, nevertheless, in The Waste Land he diagnosed
the malaise of his generation and indeed of Western civilization in
the 20th century.Eliot is also an important figure in 20th-century
drama. He was inclined from the first toward the theater-his early
poems are essentially dramatic, and many of his early essays and
reviews are on drama or dramatists. By the mid 1920s he was writing
a play, Sweeney Agonistes (published in 1932, performed in 1933); in
the 1930s he wrote an ecclesiastical pageant, The Rock (performed
and published in 1934), and two full-blown plays, Murder in the
Cathedral (performed and published in 1935) and The Family
Reunion (performed and published in 1939); and in the late 1940s
and the 1950s he devoted himself almost exclusively to plays, of
which The Cocktail Party (performed in 1949, published in 1950) has
been the most popular. His goal, realized only in part, was the
revitalization of poetic drama in terms that would be consistent with
the modern age. He experimented with language that, though close
to contemporary speech, is essentially poetic and thus capable of
spiritual, emotional, and intellectual resonance. His work has
influenced several important 20th-century playwrights,
including W.H. Auden and Harold Pinter. Eliot also made significant
contributions as an editor and publisher. From 1922 to 1939 he was
the editor of a major intellectual journal, The Criterion, and from
1925 to 1965 he was an editor/director in the publishing house of
Faber and Faber. In both capacities he worked behind the scenes to
nurture the intellectual and spiritual life of his times.
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888 in St. Louis,
Missouri; he was the second son and seventh child of Charlotte
Champe Stearns and Henry Ware Eliot, members of a distinguished
Massachusetts family recently transplanted to Missouri. Eliot’s family
tree includes settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, prominent
clergymen and educators, a president of Harvard University (Charles
William Eliot), and three presidents of the United States (John
Adams, John Quincy Adams, and Rutherford B. Hayes). In 1834 the
poet’s grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, a graduate of Harvard
Divinity School, moved to St. Louis to establish a Unitarian mission.
He quickly became a leader in civic development, founding the first
Unitarian Church, Washington University (which he served as
president), Smith Academy, and Mary Institute.
The Eliot family lived in downtown St. Louis, not far from the
Mississippi River, and the poet spent his formative years in a large
house (no longer standing) at 2635 Locust Street. His family
summered in New England, and in 1897 Henry Ware Eliot built a
house near the sea at Gloucester, Massachusetts. The summers in
this spacious house on Cape Ann provided the poet with his happiest
memories, which he tapped through the years for poems such as
“Marina” (1930) and The Dry Salvages.
From these few facts, several points emerge as relevant to Eliot’s
mind and art. First, feeling that “the U.S.A. up to a hundred years ago
was a family extension” (as he wrote in a 1928 letter to Herbert
Read), Eliot became acutely conscious of history—his own, that of his
family, his country, his civilization, his race—and of the ways in which
the past constantly impinges on the present and the present on the
future. Second, despite the fact that Eliot was blessed with a happy
childhood in a loving family, he was early possessed by a sense of
homelessness. In 1928, just after he had changed his religion from
Unitarian to Anglican and his citizenship from American to British, he
summed up the result of these formative years in Missouri and
Massachusetts, describing himself in a letter to Read as “an American
who ... was born in the South and went to school in New England as a
small boy with a nigger drawl, but who wasn’t a southerner in the
South because his people were northerners in a border state ... and
who so was never anything anywhere.” As he had written to his
brother, Henry, in 1919, a few years after settling in London, “one
remains always a foreigner.” Third, Eliot had an urban imagination,
the shape and content of which came from his childhood experience
in St. Louis. In a 1930 letter quoted in an appendix to American
Literature and the American Language (1953), he said that “St. Louis
affected me more deeply than any other environment has done.”
Several of his signature images—city streets and city slums, city rivers
and city skies—were etched on his mind in St. Louis. City scenes, even
sordid ones, as he suggested in a 1914 letter to Conrad Aiken, helped
him to feel alive, alert, and self-conscious.
Eliot was educated at Smith Academy in St. Louis (1898-1905), Milton
Academy in Massachusetts (1905-1906), Harvard University (B.A.,
June 1909; M.A., February 1911; Ph.D. courses, October 1911-May
1914), University of Paris-Sorbonne (October 1910-June 1911), and
Merton College, Oxford University (October 1914-May 1915). He
devoted a further year (1915-1916) to a doctoral dissertation on the
philosophy of F.H. Bradley, eventually published in 1964.
As an undergraduate at Harvard, Eliot emphasized language and
literature—Latin, Greek, German, and French. Perhaps the most far-
reaching consequence of his undergraduate career was his accidental
discovery in December 1908 of Arthur Symons’s Symbolist Movement
in Literature (1899), a book that he claimed had changed the course
of his life. First, Symons introduced him to the poetry of Jules
Laforgue and Charles Baudelaire. From Laforgue, Eliot learned how to
handle emotion in poetry, through irony and a quality of detachment
that enabled him to see himself and his own emotions essentially as
objects for analysis. From Baudelaire, he learned how to use the
sordid images of the modern city, the material “at hand,” in poetry,
and of even greater consequence, he learned something of the
nature of good and evil in modern life. Second, Symons stimulated
Eliot to take a course in French literary criticism from Irving Babbitt in
1910. Babbitt nurtured Eliot’s budding Francophilia, his dislike of
Romanticism, and his appreciation of tradition. These tastes are
evident in most of Eliot’s early literary criticism.
Arriving at Oxford in October 1914, Eliot found that most of the
British students had left for the Western Front. He had hoped to
meet Bradley, a member of Merton, but the old don was by this time
a recluse, and they never met. At the end of the academic year, he
moved to London and continued working on his dissertation, which
he finished a year later. Eliot’s immersion in contemporary
philosophy, particularly in Bradley’s idealism, had many effects, of
which two proved especially important. Positively, these materials
suggested methods of structure that he was able to put to immediate
use in his postwar poems. Negatively, his work in philosophy
convinced him that the most sophisticated answers to the cultural
and spiritual crisis of his time were inadequate. This conclusion
contributed to his decision to abandon the professorial career for
which his excellent education had prepared him and instead to
continue literary pursuits.
Eliot’s career as a poet can be divided into three periods—the first
coinciding with his studies in Boston and Paris and culminating in
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in 1911; the second coinciding
with World War I and with the financial and marital stress of his early
years in London, and culminating in The Waste Land in 1922; and the
third coinciding with his angst at the economic depression and the
rise of Nazism and culminating in the wartime Four Quartets in 1943.
The poems of the first period were preceded only by a few exercises,
published in school magazines, but in 1910 and 1911 he wrote four
poems: “Portrait of a Lady,” “Preludes,” “Rhapsody on a Windy
Night,” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”—that introduce
themes to which, with variation and development, Eliot returned
time and again. One of the most significant is the problem of
isolation, with attention to its causes and consequences in the
contemporary world. In “Portrait of a Lady” a man and woman meet,
but the man is inarticulate, imprisoned in thought. In this ironic
dramatization of a “conversation galante,” the woman speaks
without thinking and the man thinks without speaking (a structure to
be repeated in “A Game of Chess” in The Waste Land).

The profound isolation of the characters in “Portrait of a Lady”

becomes in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” an isolation that is
absolute. The specific lady is succeeded by generalized women; the
supercilious youth by the middle-aged intellectual he will become, for
whom women and indeed the entire universe exist as abstractions.
The poignance of this poem derives in part from a tension between
Prufrock’s self-generated isolation and his obsession with language.
Although he is afraid to speak, he can think only in the language of
dialogue. This dialogue with himself, moreover, consistently turns on
the infinite possibilities (or impossibilities) of dialogue with others. In
“Rhapsody on a Windy Night” the female Other, similarly isolated and
isolating, is a young prostitute in a stained dress hesitating in a
doorway, desired and despised at once, overshadowed by an old
prostitute, the pockmarked moon, smiling feebly on the midnight
walker.

In these early poems, the progression from a feeble attempt to

communicate in “Portrait of a Lady” to a total failure in “The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is paralleled on other levels. The isolation
is sexual, social, religious, and (because Eliot is a poet) vocational. In
“Portrait of a Lady,” other people and perhaps God exist, but they are
unreachable; in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Rhapsody
on a Windy Night” they exist only as aspects of the thinker’s mind; in
“Preludes,” the Other, whether human or divine, has been so
thoroughly assimilated that he/she can no longer be defined. This
situation is explicitly aesthetic. The drawing-room protagonist of
“Portrait of a Lady” is paralleled by an artist in the concert room, and
both the suitor and the pianist fail to reach their listeners. In both
cases, the failure is described in ceremonial terms that superimpose
the religious on the sexual and aesthetic. J. Alfred Prufrock—as lover,
prophet, poet—also fails to reach his audience. These failures are
skillfully layered by the use of imagery that defines Prufrock’s
problem as sexual (how to relate to women), religious (how to raise
himself from the dead, how to cope with his own flesh on a platter),
and rhetorical (how to sing, how to say, how to revise). And as “The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” shows most clearly, the horizontal
and vertical gaps mirror a gap within, a gap between thought and
feeling, a partition of the self.

Between the poems of 1910-1911 and The Waste Land, Eliot lived
through several experiences that are crucial in understanding his
development as a poet. His decision to put down roots, or to discover
roots, in Europe stands, together with his first marriage and his
conversion, as the most important of his entire life. Eliot had been
preceded in London by his Harvard friend Aiken, who had met Ezra
Pound and showed him a copy of “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock.” Eliot called on Pound on September 22, 1914, and Pound
immediately adopted him as a cause, promoting his poetry and
introducing him to William Butler Yeats and other artists. In 1915, at
a time when Eliot was close to giving up on poetry, Pound arranged
for the publication of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
in Poetry magazine, and in 1917 he facilitated the publication
of Prufrock and Other Observations. Pound continued to play a
central role in Eliot’s life and work through the early 1920s. He
influenced the form and content of Eliot’s next group of poems, the
quatrains in Poems (1919), and more famously, he changed the shape
of The Waste Land by urging Eliot to cut several long passages.
The impact of Pound, however, pales beside that of Vivienne (or
Vivien) Haigh-Wood, the pretty English governess Eliot married in
1915. In an April 24 letter to Hinkley describing his social life at
Oxford, Eliot mentioned that he had met an English girl named
Vivien. Pound, as part of his strategy for keeping Eliot in England,
encouraged him to marry her, and on June 26, without notifying his
parents, he did so at the Hampstead Registry Office. However
lovingly begun, the marriage was in most respects a disaster. In the
1960s, in a private paper, Eliot admitted that it was doomed from the
start: “I think that all I wanted of Vivienne was a flirtation or a mild
affair: I was too shy and unpractised to achieve either ... I came to
persuade myself that I was in love with her simply because I wanted
to burn my boats and commit myself to staying in England. And she
persuaded herself (also under the influence of Pound) that she would
save the poet by keeping him in England.” The odd nature of this
misalliance was immediately evident to Eliot’s friends, including
Russell, Mary Hutchinson, and Virginia Woolf. Vivienne Eliot, who had
suffered from “nerves” for years, became irrecoverably ill after the
marriage, and Eliot, himself in fragile health, felt partially responsible
for her deterioration.
Eliot had arrived in England the month that World War I began.
Like his European friends, he was deeply disturbed by unfolding
events and desperately worried about acquaintances on the
battlefield. In May 1915 his close friend Jean Verdenal was killed. On
May 31, the first German bomb hit London, killing 28 people and
wounding 60. Within a week or two of this watershed event, Eliot
moved to the City (the financial district), where he remained
throughout the war. In 1916 he wrote to his brother that “The
present year has been ... the most awful nightmare of anxiety that
the mind of man could conceive.” Eliot, who loved both France and
England, tried to enlist, but his application was complicated by his
failure to pass the medical exam. By the time the war ended in
November 1918, an influenza epidemic was sweeping over the world,
claiming nearly three times as many lives as had been lost in the war.
By then both Eliots were gravely ill, and it took them years to recover
completely.

The events of these years were formative in Eliot’s life and art. First,
the precipitous marriage complicated his attitude toward sexuality
and human love. Some of the poems written during and immediately
after the war (“Sweeney Erect,” for example, and The Waste
Land) connect sexuality with violence in troubling ways. Second, the
marriage, the war, and the change of vocation generated
estrangement from America in general and from his family in
particular. His family disapproved of the marriage and the decision to
drop philosophy as a career, and because the family lived in America,
far from the bloodshed, they had a superficial idea of the suffering in
Europe. Eliot continued to brood over the fact that his dying father
believed that his son had made a mess of his life. Third, the events of
these years led to severe financial distress. To support himself and his
chronically ill wife, Eliot took a job as a teacher—in the fall of 1915 at
High Wycombe Grammar School, and throughout 1916 at Highgate
Junior School. Finding the teaching of young boys draining work, he
gave it up at the end of 1916, and in March 1917 he began work in
the Colonial and Foreign Department of Lloyds Bank. Although he
stayed with Lloyds for the next nine years, he discovered that
banking, like teaching, did not produce nearly enough income to
cover his expenses and Vivienne Eliot’s medical bills. He was thus
forced to supplement his duties as teacher, banker, and nurse to his
wife with night work as lecturer, reviewer, and essayist. Working
from 1916 to 1920 under great pressure (a 15-hour workday was
common for him), he wrote essays, published in 1920 as The Sacred
Wood, that reshaped literary history.
Eliot’s early essays can be seen as a discursive variation on the
subjects underlying the early poems; his awareness, for example, of
the problem of isolation, its causes and its consequences, is evident
in the essays. In the poems, the emphasis is on isolation of individuals
and classes from one another and on the human isolation from God.
In the literary criticism, the emphasis is on the artist in isolation, cut
off from his audience and from great artists and thinkers of both the
present and the past. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919),
Eliot attempts to cope with the isolation of the artist resulting from
the early 20th century’s massive repudiation of the past, a
repudiation that severed man’s intellectual and spiritual roots. Eliot
deals with the implications of this disaster by defining “tradition” as
an ideal structure in which the “whole of the literature of Europe
from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his [the
artist’s] own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a
simultaneous order.” To put it more simply, he defines tradition not
as a canon but as an ongoing and fluid relationship of writers, living
and dead, within the mind and bones of the contemporary poet.
Eliot’s reaction against Romanticism, similarly, is related to the fact
that Romanticism celebrates the artist in isolation. Eliot’s notion that
modern poetry should be complex derives in part from his attempt to
overcome his isolation from his readers by forcing them to become
involved as collaborators in his poetry. He suggests that a text is a
self-sufficient object and at the same time a construct collaboratively
achieved by a reader. His account of the way a poet’s mind works by
unifying disparate phenomena is consistent with his dialectical
imagination, as is his account of literary history.

Eliot’s most significant single poem between 1911 and 1922 was
“Gerontion.” Important in itself, it also serves as a transition to The
Waste Land, to which, for thematic reasons, Eliot considered it an
appropriate prelude, and to which, until dissuaded by Pound, he
considered prefixing it. Formally, “Gerontion,” like “The Love Song of
J. Alfred Prufrock,” descends from the dramatic monologue, but it is
bolder and more comprehensive. The earlier poem is a portrait of an
individual mind, but “Gerontion” is a portrait of the Mind of Europe,
a container for fragments of history from the Battle of Thermopylae
in 480 BCE to the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. The title character, as
his name indicates, is old; born in ancient Greece, he survives as a
desiccated Socrates “waiting for rain” on the doorstep of modern
Europe. Like Prufrock, Gerontion is an intellectual, and the poem
consists of his thoughts. To order these thoughts, Eliot uses the
structural metaphor of houses within houses.

One of the most significant houses in this Chinese box-like poem is

war-ravaged Europe, a house of horrors with “many cunning
passages, contrived corridors.” Eliot began writing the poem in 1917,
with the war still raging, and finished it in early 1919, a few months
after the Armistice. Europe’s great dynastic and political houses lay in
ruins, and nine million of her young had been slain for Western
civilization. Different people analyzed the crisis in different ways; for
Eliot, the violence was inseparable from a collapse of common
ground in culture, the loss of the mythic substructure that enables
the individual to understand his relatedness to anyone or anything.
The collapse of shared assumptions in many fields—religion, physics,
philosophy, art—produced a crisis in epistemology, in knowing, and
this crisis is basic to all of Eliot’s work.
These years of unmitigated anxiety culminated, finally, in serious
illness. In 1921, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, Eliot was
forced to take a rest leave from the bank. In October he went for a
month to Margate; and then, leaving Vivienne Eliot in Paris, he went
to a sanatorium in Switzerland. In this protected environment, he
devoted himself to completing the “long poem” that had been on his
mind for years, a work in which his illness is included as part of the
material. In January 1922 Eliot returned to London, stopping briefly in
Paris, where he left the typescript of the poem, then called “He Do
the Police in Different Voices,” with Ezra Pound. The latter
immediately recognized it as a work of genius but thought it needed
to be reduced in length. Eliot accepted most of Pound’s suggestions
and later testified that Pound was “a marvelous critic because he ...
tried to see what you were trying to do.” In October 1922 The Waste
Land appeared in England in the first issue of the Criterion, the
journal Eliot edited for most of the next two decades; in November it
appeared in America in the Dial, with Eliot receiving the Dial Award of
$2,000.

The Waste Land was taken by some critics as a tasteless joke, by

others as a masterpiece expressing the disillusionment of a
generation. As far as Eliot was concerned, it was neither. He needed,
he explained in a 1959 Paris Review interview, to get something off
his chest, adding, “one doesn’t know quite what it is that one needs
to get off the chest until one’s got it off.” In a lecture at Harvard,
quoted in The Waste Land facsimile (published in 1971), he
responded to those who considered the poem to be a cultural
statement: “To me it was only the relief of a personal and wholly
insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical
grumbling.” The grumbling is personal, of course, which is why he
calls it insignificant, but its causes are inseparable from those that set
a generation or more of intelligent Westerners to grumbling. Eliot’s
grouse against life is part of a larger and shared discontent about
postwar civilization and the conditions of modern life. Another aspect
of Eliot’s grumbling that is more than personal is his anxiety about
possibility in art. A major theme in his poetry and prose from the
beginning had been the situation of the artist who is isolated from his
audience by a collapse of common ground in culture. Deprived of a
shared mythic or religious frame, the modern artist was forced to
come up with other means of unity. He had to find, as Eliot put it in
his review of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), “a way of controlling, of
ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense
panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.” The
“narrative method,” rooted in sequence, in an orderly flow of life
(and of stories) from beginning to end, had been rendered obsolete
by modern science and by conditions of history.

T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock carries the

characteristics of modernist poetry such as objective correlative,
fragmentation, free verse and irregular rhyming. It suggests a direct
break with English romantic poets such as Coleridge and Wordsworth
(Levis 75). Sara Thorne states that unlike the Romantic poets, Eliot
attempts to convey the essence of life; and the content represents
actual contemporary life rather than an escape from the grinding
nature of reality . 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ exemplifies
Thorne’s definition of Eliot’s poetic art clearly.

The poem is about a middle-aged man who cannot make a

progress in life and dare to approach women due to his timidity.
Hence, the title of the poem is ironic since Prufrock never talks about
his feelings of love throughout the poem. His indecisiveness is also
caused by self-isolation from the society as a modern man. He finds
himself in a society which is not different from a hell for him, so Eliot
portrays the complexities of the modern world vividly through the
inconsistent psychology of Prufrock.

Elisabeth Schneider clarifies that 'The Love Song’ is more than a

retreat from love, however; it is the portrait of a man in Hell, though
until his truth is clearly realized, the hell appears to be merely the
trivial one of the self-conscious individual in a sterile society .
Apart from the content, in the form Eliot uses objective correlative to
relate feelings through the use of objects.

The poem focuses on the dilemma caused by modern urban

civilization and therefore, the purpose of this paper is to show how
T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock reflects modernism in
terms of its content and structure respectively.

T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” carries the

characteristics of modernist poetry such as objective correlative,
fragmentation, free verse and irregular
rhyming. It suggests a direct break with English romantic poets, such
as Coleridge and Wordsworth (Levis, 75). Sara Thorne states that
unlike the Romantic poets, Eliot “attempts to convey the essence of
life; and the content represents actual contemporary life rather than
an escape from the grinding nature of reality”. ‘The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock’ clearly exemplifies Thorne’s definition of Eliot’s
poetic art.
 The poem is about a middle-aged man who cannot progress in life
and, consequently, does not dare approach women, due to his
timidity. Hence, the title of the poem is ironic, since Prufrock never
talks about his feelings of love throughout the poem. His
indecisiveness is also caused by self-isolation from the society
as a modern man. He finds himself in a society which is not different
from a hell for him, so Eliot portrays the complexities of the modern
world vividly through the inconsistent
psychology of Prufrock. Elisabeth Schneider clarifies that ‘The Love
Song’ is more than a retreat from love. It is the portrait of a man in
Hell, though until his truth is clearly realized,
the hell appears to be merely the trivial one of the self-conscious
individual in a sterile society” . Apart from the content, in the form
Eliot uses objective correlative to relate feelings through the use of
objects.

The poem focuses on the dilemma caused by modern

urban civilization and therefore, the purpose of this paper is to show
how T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” reflects
modernism in terms of its content and structure respectively.
Eliot emphasizes uncertainty of the modern world by creating such
obscurities in the poem.

Besides being thematically modern, the form of “The Love Song of

Prufrock” also highlights the characteristics of modernist poetry. T.S
Eliot was highly influenced use of figurative language also reflects his
fragmentation. For instance, he talks about humanity through the
synecdoche of certain body parts.
 Thorne explains: References to detached body parts (face, hands,
voices, eyes, arms) intensify the loss of humanity by reducing
individuals to fragments. Similarly, Prufrock sees himself in terms of
his bald spot and legs and his clothes; in terms of the face he must
prepare for society.

This literary device implies that people are isolated from each
other just like their body parts in the modern world and this leads to
loneliness among people. Moreover, rhyme scheme of the poem is
irregular and this can be associated with the disorder in the modern
world. Also, the number of words in a line varies, in that, some lines
such as “Do I dare / Disturb the universe” consist of just three words
while others “Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald)
brought in upon a platter,”

These variations can be related to the irregularities of modern

societies as well as the modernist writer’s breakaway from traditional
forms of writing which involves meter and rhyme. Furthermore, there
are lots of fragmented sentences such as “And time yet
for a hundred indecisions, / And for a hundred visions and revisions, /
Before the taking of a toast and tea.” The fragmentation obvious in
these lines can be associated with the inconsistency of modern life. In
addition to fragmented sentences, the unequal number of lines and
variable speech rhythms highlight the chaos in 20th century society.

Eliot repeats some sentences within the same line intentionally

to foreground Prufrock’s problem with the modern society as well as
himself. For example, the repetitions in lines “There will be time,
there will be time” , “To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I
dare?” or “I grow old [...] I grow old [...]” underline “the tedium of
the chic but superficial world Prufrock inhabits” . Actually, these
lines may also refer to Prufrock’s routine and boring life which he is
fed up with.

His repetition of words like “evenings, mornings, afternoons” in

lines “For I have known them already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,” (49-50) backs up
the idea that he leads a mundane life.

The sequence of the events is chaotic, that is, there is

inconsistency in his speech in terms of time which means that he
confuses past and present; “And the afternoon, the
evening, sleeps so peacefully” . He goes back and forth in time and
this leads the readers to deduce that Prufrock is mentally confused
like other people in the modern world.
As a consequence, T.S Eliot’s poetic style in “The Love Song of
Prufrock” shows his departure from romanticism to modernism. The
poet introduces new themes together with techniques such as
irregular rhyming, free verse and fragmentation in form.
These irregular sentence structures and rhyme patterns are closely
related to the personality of the main character. J. Alfred Prufrock
does not feel comfortable in his society, since he is tired of his
artificial society and his search for a secure sense of identity turns out
to be a big failure.

He suffers from not only mental but also physical weaknesses. Craig
Raine lists the reasons for Prufrock’s failure as “Prufrock feels
physically inadequate, socially disadvantaged, nervous,
romantically charged, reluctant to imperil a relationship and
physically impure. So he fails to act”. The poem finishes where it
begins since Prufrock does nothing to express himself.
For this reason, it is not exactly clear what Eliot would like to mean
as Prufrock states in the poem “It is impossible to say just what I
mean! / But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in
patterns on a screen:”. However, it can be put forward that Eliot
reflects the despair and anxiety of the people in the modern world
through the protagonist. Besides, he criticizes the 20th century
societies in which there is lack of communication among people
through Prufrock.

The failure of communication stands for the isolation and

loneliness of the people and thus, the poet achieves to represent the
paradoxes of modern urban civilization.

The Waste Land as a Modernist Text

BY NASRULLAH MAMBROL ON MARCH 29, 2016
TS Eliot‘s The Waste Land, which has come to be identified as the
representative poem of the Modernist canon, indicates the pervasive
sense of disillusionment about the current state of affairs in the
modern society, especially post World War Europe, manifesting itself
symbolically through the Holy. Grail legend and the fertility legends
discussed in JG Frazer‘s The Golden Bough:
A Study of Magic and Religion (1890) and Jessie Weston‘s From
Ritual to Romance (1920).Originally titled ” He do the Police in
Different Voices;” The Waste Land, based on the legend of the Fisher
King and the quest for the holy grail in the Arthurian cycle, presents
modern London as an arid waste land.
 Though the legendary Fisher King’s waste land has the hope of
redemption through the healing of his impotency, Eliot’s waste land
does not seem to:have any such hope. Much of the symbolism of The
Waste Land suggests these ancient fertility rites, but always gone
awry, particularly in such instances as the fortune-teller Madame
Sosostris.
Built around the symbols of drought and flood, representing
death and rebirth, the poem progresses by abrupt transitions through
five sections — “The Burial of the Dead”, “A Game of Chess”, “The
Fire Sermon”, “Death by Water” and “What the Thunder Said,” and is
a powerfully moving presentation of sterility and disruption. Eliot’s
work is informed by Irving Babbit‘s view of the unity and multiplicity
of experience, and an urge to return to the Renaissance ideal of a
“complete” man with “unification of sensibility”, Pound’s Imagism
and fragmentation techniques, the French Symbolists’ use of
sensuous language and an eye for unnerving and anti-aesthetic
detail.
The poem Presents the picture of a desolate London (populated by
ghostly figures like Stetson, the fallen war comrade) abounding in
physical, moral and spiritual decay, symbolized by rats and garbage
surrounding the speaker in “The Fire Sermon” — among
whom Buddha and St. Augustine appear as the representations of
Eastern and Western philosophy, unable to transcend the World on
their own, despite their intense spiritual ardor — thus, revealing the
futility of man’s struggles, however fervent and passionate.

“The Burial of the Dead” (title taken from Anglican burial

service), presents four different person’s perspectives — an
autobiographical snippet from the childhood of an aristocratic
woman, a prophetic, apocalyptic invitation to journey into a desert
waste, imaginative tarot card reading, and a surreal picture of a
speaker who walks through London populated by ghosts of the dead.
“A Game of Chess” (title from Middleton’s play A Game of Chess),
denotes stages in seduction by presenting two pictures — one of an
affluent, highly groomed woman surrounded by exquisite furnishings,
and the other of a London bar-room where two women discuss a
third woman. “The Fire Sermon” (title from Buddha’s sermon)
describes a polluted river representing spiritual degeneration, and
concludes with a river song and a religious incarnation. “Death by
Water”, describes Phebas, the Phoenician man’s who died by
drowning, and suggests the mortality and ephemerality of life “What
the Thunder Said” describes the quest for salvation and inner peace
through three “objective correlatives”: the journey to Emmaus, the
approach to the chapel Perilous, the present decay of Eastern
Europe. Seeking refuge in the ancient Indian wisdom, alluding to
the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, Eliot concludes with a message of
hope with “Datta” (give); “Dyadhvam” (sympathise) and ‘Damyata”
(be. controlled). This resorting to oriental philosophy, he believes, will
help in the regeneration of present disintegrated and pessimistic
society.

These allusions add symbolic weight to the poems contemporary

material, to encourage free association and to establish a tone
of pastiche, seeming to collect all the shards of an exhausted
civilization into one huge patchwork of modern existence. Perhaps it
is also a response to the dilemma of coming at the end of a great
tradition; the poet seeks to address modern dilemmas and at the
same time to participate in a literary tradition.

The method of assembling “fragments” or “broken images” from the

past into a sort of mosaic allows him at once to suggest parallels
between contemporary problems and earlier historical situations and
 to disorient the reader, turning the reading process into a model of
modern, urban confusion. It parallels the Cubist use of collage, calling
attention to the linguistic texture of the poem itself and to the
materials (both literary and popular) out of which it is constructed.
Influenced by Pound and Joyce, allusion, for Eliot, became a favorite
technique for reconciling formal experiment with an awareness of
literary tradition. Thus, with allusions and quotations in various
languages, The Waste Land stands as a collage of poetic fragments
representing an entire culture in crisis.
 B.What is Restoration period?
Write a detailed note on restoration comedy, Comedy of
manners and eighteenth century dramas.
Restoration literature is the English literature written during the
historical period commonly referred to as the English
Restoration (1660–1689), which corresponds to the last years
of Stuart reign in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. In general,
the term is used to denote roughly homogenous styles of literature
that centre on a celebration of or reaction to the restored court
of Charles II. It is a literature that includes extremes, for it
encompasses both Paradise Lost and the Earl of Rochester's Sodom,
the high-spirited sexual comedy of The Country Wife and the moral
wisdom of The Pilgrim's Progress. It saw Locke's Treatises of
Government, the founding of the Royal Society, the experiments and
holy meditations of Robert Boyle, the hysterical attacks on theatres
from Jeremy Collier, and the pioneering of literary criticism from John
Dryden and John Dennis. The period witnessed news become a
commodity, the essay develop into a periodical art form, and the
beginnings of textual criticism.
The dates for Restoration literature are a matter of convention, and
they differ markedly from genre to genre. Thus, the "Restoration"
in drama may last until 1700, while in poetry it may last only until
1666 (see 1666 in poetry) and the annus mirabilis; and in prose it
might end in 1688, with the increasing tensions over succession and
the corresponding rise in journalism and periodicals, or not until
1700, when those periodicals grew more stabilized. In general,
scholars use the term "Restoration" to denote the literature that
began and flourished under Charles II, whether that literature was
the laudatory ode that gained a new life with restored aristocracy,
 the eschatological literature that showed an increasing despair
among Puritans, or the literature of rapid communication and trade
that followed in the wake of England's mercantile empire.

Historical context
During the Interregnum, England had been dominated
by Puritan literature and the intermittent presence of
official censorship (for example, Milton's Areopagitica and his later
retraction of that statement). While some of the Puritan ministers
of Oliver Cromwell wrote poetry that was elaborate and carnal (such
as Andrew Marvell's poem, "To His Coy Mistress"), such poetry was
not published. Similarly, some of the poets who published with the
Restoration produced their poetry during the Interregnum. The
official break in literary culture caused by censorship and
radically moralist standards effectively created a gap in literary
tradition. At the time of the Civil War, poetry had been dominated
by metaphysical poetry of the John Donne, George Herbert,
and Richard Lovelace sort. Drama had developed the late Elizabethan
theatre traditions and had begun to mount increasingly topical and
political plays (for example, the drama of Thomas Middleton). The
Interregnum put a stop, or at least a caesura, to these lines of
influence and allowed a seemingly fresh start for all forms of
literature after the Restoration.
The last years of the Interregnum were turbulent, as were the last
years of the Restoration period, and those who did not go into exile
were called upon to change their religious beliefs more than once.
With each religious preference came a different sort of literature,
both in prose and poetry (the theatres were closed during the
Interregnum). When Cromwell died and his son, Richard Cromwell,
threatened to become Lord Protector, politicians and public figures
scrambled to show themselves as allies or enemies of the new
regime. Printed literature was dominated by odes in poetry, and
religious writing in prose. The industry of religious tract writing,
despite official efforts, did not reduce its output. Figures such as the
founder of the Society of Friends, George Fox, were jailed by the
Cromwellian authorities and published at their own peril.
During the Interregnum, the royalist forces attached to the court
of Charles I went into exile with the twenty-year-old Charles II and
conducted a brisk business in intelligence and fund-raising for an
eventual return to England. Some of the royalist ladies installed
themselves in convents in Holland and France that offered safe haven
for indigent and travelling nobles and allies. The men similarly
stationed themselves in Holland and France, with the court-in-exile
being established in The Hague before setting up more permanently
in Paris. The nobility who travelled with (and later travelled to)
Charles II were therefore lodged for more than a decade in the midst
of the continent's literary scene. As Holland and France in the 17th
century were little alike, so the influences picked up by courtiers in
exile and the travellers who sent intelligence and money to them
were not monolithic. Charles spent his time attending plays in France,
and he developed a taste for Spanish plays. Those nobles living in
Holland began to learn about mercantile exchange as well as the
tolerant, rationalist prose debates that circulated in that officially
tolerant nation. John Bramhall, for example, had been a strongly high
church theologian, and yet, in exile, he debated willingly with Thomas
Hobbes and came into the Restored church as tolerant in practice as
he was severe in argument.[1] Courtiers also received an exposure to
the Roman Catholic Church and its liturgy and pageants, as well as, to
a lesser extent, Italian poetry.
Initial reaction:
When Charles II became king in 1660, the sense of novelty in
literature was tempered by a sense of suddenly participating in
European literature in a way that England had not before. One of
Charles's first moves was to reopen the theatres and to grant letters
patent giving mandates for the theatre owners and
managers. Thomas Killigrew received one of the patents, establishing
the King's Company and opening the first patent theatre at
the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane; Sir William Davenant received the
other, establishing the Duke of York's theatre company and opening
his patent theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields.[2] Drama was public and a
matter of royal concern, and therefore both theatres were charged
with producing a certain number of old plays, and Davenant was
charged with presenting material that would be morally uplifting.
Additionally, the position of Poet Laureate was recreated, complete
with payment by a barrel of "sack" (Spanish white wine), and the
requirement for birthday odes.[3]
Charles II was a man who prided himself on his wit and his
worldliness. He was well known as a philanderer as well. Highly witty,
playful, and sexually wise poetry thus had court sanction. Charles and
his brother James, the Duke of York and future King of England, also
sponsored mathematics and natural philosophy, and so spirited
scepticism and investigation into nature were favoured by the court.
Charles II sponsored the Royal Society, which courtiers were eager to
join (for example, the noted diarist Samuel Pepys was a member),
just as Royal Society members moved in court. Charles and his court
had also learned the lessons of exile. Charles was High Church (and
secretly vowed to convert to Roman Catholicism on his death) and
James was crypto-Catholic, but royal policy was generally tolerant of
religious and political dissenters. While Charles II did have his own
version of the Test Act, he was slow to jail or persecute Puritans,
preferring merely to keep them from public office (and therefore to
try to rob them of their Parliamentary positions). As a consequence,
the prose literature of dissent, political theory,
and economics increased in Charles II's reign.

Authors moved in two directions in reaction to Charles's return. On

the one hand, there was an attempt at recovering the English
literature of the Jacobean period, as if there had been no disruption;
but, on the other, there was a powerful sense of novelty, and authors
approached Gallic models of literature and elevated the literature of
wit (particularly satire and parody). The novelty would show in the
literature of sceptical inquiry, and the Gallicism would show in the
introduction of Neoclassicism into English writing and criticism.

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW OF RESTORATION AGE

The period from 1660 to 1700 is known as the Restoration period or
the Age of Dryden. Dryden was the representative writer of this
period. The restoration of King Charles II in 1660 marks the beginning
of a new era both in the life and the literature of England. The King
was received with wild joy on his return from exile. The change of
government from Commonwealth to Kingship corresponded to a
change in the mood of the nation.
In this period the Renaissance delight in this world and the unlimited
possibilities of the exploration of the world, and the moral zeal and
the earnestness of the Puritan period could no more fascinate the
people of England. Moody and Lovett remark: ―But in the greater
part of the Restoration period there was awareness of the limitations
of human experience, without faith in the extension of the resources.
There was the disposition to accept such limitations, to exploit the
potentialities of a strictly human world.‖ The historical events like the
Restoration of Charles II in 1660, the religious controversy and the
revolution of 1688 deeply influenced the social life and the literary
movements of the age.

The Restoration :
The Restoration of Charles II brought about a revolutionary change in
life and literature. During this period gravity, moral earnestness and
decorum in all things, which distinguished the Puritan period, were
thrown to the winds. The natural instincts which were suppressed
during the previous era came to violent excesses. The King had a
number of mistresses and numerous children. He was surrounded by
corrupt and degenerate ministers. Profligacy was glorified in the royal
court. Corruption was rampant in all walks of life. The Great Fire of
1665 and the Plague that followed were popularly regarded as
suitable punishments for the sins of the profligate and selfish King.
While London was burning and the people were suffering, the King
and his nobles kept up their revels. The beginning of the Restoration
began the process of social transformation. The atmosphere of gaiety
and cheerfulness, of licentiousness and moral laxity was restored.
The theatres were reopened. There was a stern reaction against the
morality of the Puritans. Morality was on the wane. There was laxity
everywhere in life. All these tendencies of the age are clearly
reflected in the literature of the period.
During the Restoration period there was a rapid development of
science. The establishment of the Royal Society was a landmark in
history of England. The interest in science began to grow. The
growing interest in science resulted in the beginning of rational
inquiry and
scientific and objective outlook. Objectivity, rationality and
intellectual quality also enlivened the literature of this period. The
French influence was predominant during this period because the
King had spent the period of his exile in France. The French manners
and fashion spread from the court to the aristocracy. It also
influenced contemporary literature.

Religious and Political Conflicts

This era also witnessed the rise of two political parties the Whigs and
the Tories. These parties were to play a significant role in English
politics. The Whigs sought to limit the powers in the interest of the
people and the Parliament. The Tories supported the Divine Right
theory of the King, and strove to restrain the powers of the people in
the interest of the hereditary rulers. The rise of these political parties
gave a fresh importance to men of literary ability. Almost all the
writers of this period had political affiliations. Dryden was a Tory. The
religious controversies were even more bitter. The supporters of the
Puritan regime were fanatically persecuted. The nation was
predominantly Protestant and the Catholics were unduly harassed.
The religion of the King himself was suspect. His brother James was a
Papist (Roman Catholic). As Charles II had no legitimate heir, it was
certain that after him his brother James, a Catholic, would succeed to
the throne. Efforts were made to exclude James from the throne. The
King sided with his brother and he removed all obstacles for the
accession of James. Dryden‘s famous poemAbsalom and
Achitophel reflects these religious and political conflicts of the day.

The Revolution
James II ascended the throne in 1685. He soon revealed his Roman
Catholic prejudices and he secretly tried to establish Catholicism in
the country. He became unpopular within three years and the whole
nation rose against him. The bloodless revolution of 1688 called the
Protestant William and Mary of Orange to the throne. The country
was once again restored to health and sanity. These deep and
vigorous movements brought about certain changes in the inner
social life. With the revival of factions and parties and the excitement
caused by the Popish plot, a quality of force and ardour revived in
civic feelings, so that the tone of literature and of social life is
somewhat modified. With the political and moral transformation
which began in 1688, the very Keynote of English literature, as of
English life, was greatly changed. It can be said that the last years of
the seventeenth century form a distinct period. It is a brief but well-
marked transition separating the Restoration from the age of
classicism.

LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS OF RESTORATION AGE

The literature of the Restoration period marked the complete
breaking of ties with the Renaissance literature. It reflected the spirit
of the age. The spirit of corruption and moral laxity, which were
predominant in the social life of the restoration, are reflected in
literature. The following are the chief feature of the period:
1 Rise of Neo-classicism

The Restoration marks a complete break with the past. The people
believed in the present, the real and the material. Moody and Lovett
remark: ―In all directions it appeared as a disposition towards
conservation and moderation. Men had learned to fear individual
enthusiasm, and therefore they tried to discourage it by setting up
ideals of conduct in accordance with reason and common sense, to
which all men should adapt themselves. Rules of etiquette and social
conventions were established and the problem of life became that of
self-expression within the narrow bounds which were thus
prescribed.‖ All these tendencies were reflected in the literature of
this period. The writers, both in prose and poetry, tacitly agreed upon
the rules and principles in accordance with which they should write.
Rules and literary conventions became more important than the
depth and seriousness of the subject matter to the writers of this
period. They express superficial manners and customs of the
aristocratic and urban society and did not pry into the mysteries of
human mind and heart.

2 Imitation of the Ancient Masters

The authors of the period were not endowed with exceptional
literary talents. So they turned to the ancient writers, in particular, to
the Latin writers, for guidance and inspiration. It was generally
believed that the ancients had reached the acme of excellence and
the modern poets could do no better than model their writings on
the classics. Thus grew the neo-classical school of poetry. The neo-
classicists or pseudo-classicists could not soar to great imaginative
heights or could not penetrate deeply into human emotions. They
directed their attention to the slavish imitation of rules and ignored
the importance of the subject matter. This habit was noticeable in
the age of Dryden. It strengthened in the succeeding age of Pope.

3 Imitation of the French Masters

King Charles II and his companions had spent the period of exile in
France. They demanded that poetry and drama should follow the
style to which they had become accustomed in France. Shakespeare
and his contemporaries could not satisfy the popular literary taste.
Pepys wrote in his diary that he was bored to see
Shakespeare‘s Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Italian influence had
been dominant in Elizabethan period. Now began the period of
French influence, which showed itself in English literature for the
next century. Commenting on the French influence on the literature
of this period W. H. Hudson writes: ―Now the contemporary
literature of France was characterized particularly by lucidity, vivacity,
and by reason of the close attention given to form – correctness,
elegance and finish. It was essentially a literature of polite society,
and had all the merits and all the limitations of such a literature. I was
moreover a literature in which intellect was in the ascendant and the
critical faculty always in control. It was to this congenial literature
that English writers now learned to look for guidance; and thus a
great impulse was given to the development alike in our prose and in
our verse of the principles of regularity and order and the spirit of
good sense. As in verse pre-eminently these were now cultivated at
the expense of feeling and spontaneity, the growth of an artificial
type of poetry was the inevitable result.‖ The famous French writers
like Corneille, Racine, Moliere and Boileau were imitated. Boileau‘s
―good sense‖ ideal became very popular. English writers imitated
the French blindly; rather they copied the worst vices of the French,
instead of their wit, delicacy and refinement. The French influence is
seen in the coarseness and indecency of the Restoration comedy of
manners. The combined influence of French and classical models of
tragedy is seen in the heroic tragedy. The French influence is
responsible for the growth and popularity of opera.

4 Correctness and Appropriateness

The work of the authors of the Restoration period was imitative and
of limited quality. Since they lacked creativity and flight of
imagination, they abandoned freedom altogether and slavishly
followed the rules. Edward Albert writes: ―Thus they evolved a
number of ―rules‖ which can usefully he summarised in the
injunction ―Be Correct‖, correctness means avoidance of
enthusiasm, moderate opinions moderately expressed, strict care
and accuracy in poetic technique; and humble imitation of the style
of Latin Classics.‖
The new tendency, which reached its climax in the Age of Pope, is
very clearly marked in the literature of the Restoration period. To
Dryden Dr. Johnson applied the term ―Augustan‖, saying that
Dryden did to English literature what Augustus did to home, which he
found ―of brick
and left of marble.‖ Dryden was the first representative of the new
ideas that were to dominate English literature till the end of the
eighteenth century.
5 Realism and formalism
Restoration literature is realistic. It was very much concerned with
life in London, and with details of dress, fashions and manners. ―The
early Restoration writers‖, observes W. J. Long, ―sought to paint
realistic pictures of corrupt court and society, and emphasized vices
rather than virtues and gave us coarse, low plays without interest or
moral significance. Like Hobbes, they saw only the externals of man,
his body and appetites, not his soul and his ideals. Later, however,
this tendency to realism became more wholesome. While it
neglected romantic poetry, in which youth is eternally interested, it
led to a keener study of the practical motives which govern human
action.‖ The Restoration writers eschewed all extravagances of
thought and language and aimed at achieving directness and
simplicity of expression. Dryden accepted the excellent rule for his
prose, and adopted the heroic couplet, as the next best thing for the
greater part of this poetry. It is largely due to Dryden that ―writers
developed formalism of style, that precise, almost mathematical
elegance, miscalled classicism, which ruled the English literature for
the next century.
Comedy of manners, witty, cerebral form of dramatic comedy that
depicts and often satirizes the manners and affectations of a
contemporary society. A comedy of manners is concerned with social
usage and the question of whether or not characters meet certain
social standards. Often the governing social standard is morally trivial
but exacting. The plot of such a comedy, usually concerned with an
illicit love affair or similarly scandalous matter, is subordinate to
the play’s brittle atmosphere, witty dialogue, and pungent
commentary on human foibles.
The comedy of manners, which was usually written by sophisticated
authors for members of their own coterie or social class, has
historically thrived in periods and societies that combined material
prosperity and moral latitude. Such was the case in ancient
Greece when Menander (c. 342–c. 292 BC) inaugurated New Comedy,
the forerunner of comedy of manners. Menander’s smooth style,
elaborate plots, and stock characters were imitated by the Roman
poets Plautus (c. 254–184 BC) and Terence (186/185–159 BC), whose
comedies were widely known and copied during the Renaissance.

One of the greatest exponents of the comedy of manners

was Moliere, who satirized the hypocrisy and pretension of 17th-
century French society in such plays as Lecole des femmes (1662; The
School for Wives) and Le Misanthrope (1666; The Misanthrope).

In England the comedy of manners had its great day during

the Restoration period. Although influenced by Ben Jonson’s comedy
of humours, the Restoration comedy of manners was lighter, defter,
and more vivacious in tone. Playwrights declared themselves against
affected wit and acquired follies and satirized these qualities
in caricature characters with label-like names such as Sir Fopling
Flutter (in Sir George Etherege’s Man of Mode, 1676) and Tattle
(in William Congreve’s The Old Batchelour, 1693).

The masterpieces of the genre were the witty, cynical, and

epigrammatic plays of William Wycherley (The Country-Wife, 1675)
and William Congreve (The Way of the World, 1700). In the late 18th
century Oliver Goldsmith (She Stoops to Conquer, 1773) and Richard
Brinsley Sheridan (The Rivals, 1775; The School for Scandal, 1777)
revived the form.

The tradition of elaborate, artificial plotting and epigrammatic

dialogue was carried on by the Anglo-Irish playwright Oscar
Wilde in Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being
Earnest (1895). In the 20th century the comedy of manners
reappeared in the witty, sophisticated drawing-room plays of the
British dramatists Noël Coward and Somerset Maugham and the
Americans Philip Barry and S.N. Behrman.
References:

Eliot, T. S. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” T.S Eliot: Collected

Poems 1909-1962.
New York: Harcourt Inc., 1963 (3).
Bloom, Harold. T .S., Eliot: Bloom’s Major Poets. Pennsylvania:
Chelsea House Publisher,
1999.
F. R. Leavis. New Bearings in English Poetry. London: Chat to and
Winds, 1961.
Raine, Craig. T. S. Eliot. New York: Oxford UP, 2006.
Schneider, Elizabeth. “Prufrock and After: The Theme of Change”
PMLA 87.5 (1972): 1104.
Smith, Grover. T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and
Meaning. Chicago: The
U of Chicago, 1974.
Spender, Stephen. T. S. Eliot. New York: The Viking Press, 1976.
Thorne, Sara. Mastering Poetry. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Williamson, George. A Reader’s Guide to T. S. Eliot. London: Thames
and Hudson, 1971.

This article was most recently revised and updated by J.E.

Luebering, Executive Editorial Director.
Starrs Roy ,Modernism and Japanese Culture
Edited by Roger Griffin Palgrave MacMillan,2011 .