Discuss T.S. Eliot as a modern poet.

T.S. Eliot

Introduction

There are so many features of a modern poet in his poems. If we find these modes trends in any poet's poems then we will call him a modern poet. If we go through the poems of T.S. Eliot then we will see them full of modern trends of poems. These trends make T.S. Eliot a modern poet. Let discuss these modern trends on this poet.

T.S. Eliot as a modern poet

T.S. Eliot is the true representative of his age. One of his greatest achievements consists in his having given expression to the dominant anxieties and feelings of his age. Through the medium of his poems he has rendered the torturing impact of a great metro poli.... the human soul, the anguish, the ennui, the boredom, the neurosis which such a life generates. But he is not merely a representative poet, he is also a critic and physician of his age who tries to cure "the strange disease of modern life.” Eliot is a modern poet not merely because of the novelty of his themes and by a keen awareness of his time but chiefly because he has a new method of poetic communication. 

He felt that it was high time that poetry was restored from the excess of artificiality and musical elaboration into which it had lapsed. Eliot evolved the triple formula of the mythical method, the auditory imagination and the objective correlative. He also brought to the use of poetry the suggestiveness of the symbolist technique.

The first landmark in Eliot's career as a author was Prufrock and Other Observations (1917). The book was slightly ahead of its time, and received little contemporary acknowledgement, but it excellently shows an urban civilization in the process of an utterly sordid collapse. The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock opens in a way in which the conventional romantic opening is savagely let down by a blunt modern image:

"Let us go then, you and I/ 

When the evening is spread out against the sky/ 

Like a patient etherised upon a table".

His real breakthrough came to the publication of The Waste Land in 1922. In it, Eliot pioneered a new style, a new approach, and a whole new outlook,

thoroughly opposed to the essentially optimistic and late romantic poetry that was typical of the pre-war era.

The Waste Land is a masterpiece of modern poetry, a profound panorama of futility and anarchy of the modern civilization. The greatness of the poem lies in its novel form and technique which have enabled the poet to concentrate his thought on the interpretation of a whole condition of human civilization with great success.

Eliot is modern in his objectivity or impersonality of poetry. The imagery and vocabulary of the modern poet reflect the influence of science and scientific inventions. Realism in subject matter has led the modern poet to reject the highly ornate and artificial poetic styles of the romantics in favour of a language which resembles closely the language of everyday life. 

Conclusion

Modern poetry is characterized by the use of colloquial diction, speech rhythms and prosaic words. This realism in diction and versification and in the subject matter is a marked feature of the poetry of T.S. Eliot. Whatever adverse criticisms are there against T.S. Eliot, he is undoubtedly one of the greatest modern poet of our time. His modernity may be traced in his innovative technique, realistic subject matter, objectivity, anti-romantic attitude to life, metaphysical note, indirectness, psychological insight and in many other things.