T.S. Elitist (Part One of Three)

There's no hiding my distaste for much of T. S. Eliot's work: not only for his nasal, aristocratic, patriarchal sense, nor simply for his belief that one shouldn't move from the class they were born into, but because of his lacking sense of love or devotion and complete misunderstanding of his female audience. Although not as offensive as William Faulkner, who was a bigot and a chauvinist, Eliot is still an unsettling male writer, who has no real sense that women are capable of being intellectual, noting that the women he portrays are consistently superficial little flowers, sometimes sour, spiteful, apathetic and/or aging horribly. I am simply meant to disagree, and cannot avoid this, even if his semantics are admirably supportive of his chosen themes, and even if I can appreciate his poetic talent, as a writer.

I have to admit really dreading writing this essay, as I prefer to show my undying respect for authors, but I find it unachievable in this case, being that my viewpoint varies so vastly from Eliot. My sense of what it is to be a woman will certainly not match Eliot's entirely domesticated version. T.S. Eliot went to Harvard, and he traveled and read quite extensively, but the non-English major might consider him a snob, especially if from an underprivileged background, by his standards. I approach in this essay three poems ("The Wasteland," "Gerontion," and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock") and a play (The Cocktail Party).

Eliot's monotone, dry oration does much to punctuate his barren, aged feeling in The Wasteland, from the start. The piece, written in classical rhyme, consists of five parts and was heavily edited by Ezra Pound (whom a colleague of mine claims should've had his name listed as co-author). Eliot admitted that "The Wasteland" could not be fully understood without reading From Ritual to Romance by Jessie L. Weston, which dealt with the Celtic search for the Holy Grail, so one can imagine the toiling sense of a muddied (soul-tainted) population, in the quest for inner oneness with God. Much research goes into understanding an Eliot piece, and the reader finds it even more taxing than his chosen game of chess, wondering if the task is worth approaching diligently, to fully comprehend.

"April is the cruelest month," only for those who regard love as cruel. Spring is representative of rebirth, renewal, and new love for Romantics, whereas Eliot's April is cold, windy, dirty, and chaotic, and rooted in literary inferences, as to catalog history. The images in the first section ("Burial of the Dead") are "dead;" "dry;" "shadows." Primitive and bloodthirsty man is the influence of The Golden Bough by Sir James George Frazer, which is represented by the German inferences, while Dante's Inferno is inferred by the sense of sin and fraud in society, as it decays, along with the people's moral values (in Eliot's biased light, since he was definitely a pessimist).

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