The extent of modernity’s presence in the poetry of T.S Eliot.
- Dominic Taylor
Today in the 21 st century we live in a complex, fast changing world. The experience of past
generations is radically different from ours. For example in our parents time no one had a computer
or mobile phone but today virtually everyone has one. In the distant past radical change of this sort
took place over centuries but beginning with the Industrial Revolution change began to speed up and
by the 19 th and 20 th century radical change occurred every few years. These constant changes over
time made people feel uneasy or insecure, certain practices or traditional things that people had done
all their lives suddenly become obsolete, and this led to an experience of disorientation and alienation
with modern life. Everything stable seemed to slip away and fall apart, there was nothing fixed to
hold onto. This process culminating in WW1 saw the entire edifice of an outmoded way of life
crumble. ‘The twentieth century is an age of disintegration and anxiety. The World War has
unleashed force that could not be controlled…leading to loss of faith in the existing values’ (Singh
P.81). T.S. Eliot saw these changes taking place and his work reflects the crisis spirit of the age and
gives us great insight into modernity. Aptly summed up by Yeats in the line ‘things fall apart; the
centre cannot hold’, in this essay I will concentrate on Eliot’s poems The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock, and The Waste Land, to illustrate this process.
To put “Prufrock” in context it was written in Paris and Munich in 1910-11 (This date is significant
as the English novelist Virginia Woolf proclaimed that, human nature underwent a fundamental
change ‘’on or about December 1910”) and first published, with the help of Ezra Pound, in the
Chicago magazine Poetry in 1915. It later appeared in Eliot’s first collection Prufrock and Other
Observations (1917). The poetic world created by Eliot for “Prufrock” is Dantesque in character as
he brings us on a journey through the wasteland of a modern society in spiritual and moral decline.