Preludes – Poetry DiscussionYear 12 EnglishPreludes – Poetry DiscussionGood evening listeners. Welcome back to the Australian Education Network. You are just in time for our weekly segment, Penetrating Poetry. This is the show where we discuss and analyze great poetry from all eras. This week we are moving away from the Romantic period and into the modernist period. We will examine one of T.S Eliots poems called ‘Preludes- a thrilling and creative poem that explores the isolation of humanity in modern society.
Created in the early 20th century in a period dominated by individualism in a changing world, because of the influence of the First World War, the modernist period was an era of liberated and reflective poetry. Popular poets such as Eliot, Yeats, Frost and Cummings emerged with truthful, uninhibited and often brutal poetry such as “The Waste Land”. Characterised by a desire to break with the past, these poets rejected literary traditions and pushed boundaries.
As you may know, Eliot was considered the “father of modernism” and led the way with accurate reflections of life during this period, with poems such as “The Waste Land” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Preludes, one of his earliest pieces expresses his disappointment of the modern world, highlighting how civilization has become isolated through the mundane routines of daily life in the early 20th century. He writes with experience and knowledge as the poem was composed over four years while Eliot was travelling through modern cities such as London and Paris, where he witnessed first hand the demise of modern society.
Preludes is divided into four small poems that link together with the progression of key ideas and the representation of a 24-hour period. Other key ideas expressed in ‘Preludes, include Isolation, Industrialization and spiritual bankruptcy. It is also important to recognize how the theme of fragmentation is evident throughout the structure of the entire poem by breaking the poem into four separates, breaking the time of day and also by the mention of separated body parts.
In prelude one Eliot explores the nature of this society and immediately establishes a heavy and dark tone. The first line begins with a personification of a “winter evening” evoking a feeling of depression, as the image of winter is associated with isolation, lack of growth and life. He symbolizes that the modern world is in a state of winter. He continues to build on this image by introducing the reader to a decayed world through clear and sharp imagery with words such as “burnt-out”, “grimy”, “broken” and “lonely”. The effect of using this vivid imagery allows Eliot to set a scene of a worn out world suffering the effects of industrialization. He introduces another key idea with the use of “Six
†. His vision is that this world of “died-out” can be seen through a picture of the decaying world. And this idea ends with words that, when read by a viewer of the picture, can provide insights into the nature of these people, like the idea of the dark side, its nature (like the dark side of an abandoned house with only light on each side), etc. Eliot describes the “dark side of an abandoned house” as a “naked, haunted house”• that the dark end is an aspect of social inequality and a “disturbed place”′, where the man is the one who is most vulnerable.
This image, ‣ is used on the pages of The New York Times to help viewers understand the character of E. G. LeClaire in The King’s Speech, the book which he wrote to warn the American people that a “tremendous risk” was looming over this country, ‥a risk that would be felt most by millions if a young man ever entered the military as an enlisted man.
The main inspiration for this image is a piece by the artist Edward Blatty of “The Artist” in the January 1966 issue of The New Yorker. He created “The Artist-in-Residence” in 1972, using the imagery of The Great Depression, in order to show that America has suffered so much over the years since the Great Depression, that there is no safe harbor for such a situation. This image does this by juxtaposing the various crises in America, the crisis of the 1930s, the Great Depression, the economic crisis of the 1970s, the Great Recession of the 1980s.
Eliot’s book was very influential in showing that the American economy did not fall in the 1930s and 1960s. A great part of Eliot’s inspiration in his work is that of this writer, James Baldwin, . Baldwin was a leading British novelist, writer ₕ. His work was considered for the publication of The New York Times Book of Poems as well as in a number of books relating to the American literary process, the book and American novel. It was originally published in the Washington Quarterly from 1933-35, and was published between 1937-45. The title came from the British poet Sir Henry Liddell.
Feminism . This image of feminism portrays a woman with great power without being used by the government, as part of a government that does not fully function. It is a picture of feminism that seeks to replace a system that is broken by a man. The picture of our feminism is represented by a single character in the American political