Metropolitan Spirit In Eliot's Poems

Modernist writers like T.S. Eliot tended to live and write in the capital cities of Great Britain and Europe, using the city as a source of inspiration, a research tool, and a setting for his literature. City living encouraged the formation of literary coteries, which in turn encouraged development of new styles of writing to meet modern needs. Modernism is a general term applied retrospectively to the wide range of experimental and avant-garde trends in the literature (and other arts) of the early 20th century (worldbook)and the Modernists refused to accept the nineteenth-century notion that certain subjects were 'unsuitable' for literature.

Their credo, 'make it new', inspired them to search for new subject matter, and new forms of language, which would allow them to express their view of the modern world. For example, T. S. Eliot replaced the logical exposition of thoughts with collages of fragmentary images and complex allusions. Modernist writing is predominantly cosmopolitan, and often expresses a sense of urban cultural dislocation. The Modernist view of the city lean towards a pessimistic sense of urban failure, and a feeling of mixed fascination and revulsion is discernible in Eliot's poems.

However, it must be remembered that this interpretation of the city is "written by, and for, a metropolitan intelligentsia," who shared an ambivalence towards city life, and who were using the city in a literary experiment designed to find new forms of expression for the modern age.

For the Modernists, the failure of communication is one element in the fragmentation of communities that the city encourages. Inherent in their notion of the city is a "view of life as irretrievably isolated." This alienation of the conscious individual among the unthinking masses is seen as responsible for the sordid loneliness of city life, as is the breakdown of family relationships, religion and morality. Eliot suggests that humans find it hard to communicate; they are separated by misunderstanding or selfishness. People betray each other. Sometimes they live in their own world. Eliot questions people's sense of reality:

'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak'(A Game of Chess)

'But if Albert makes off, it won't be for lack of telling' (A Game of Chess)

Eliot was trying to show that, in the city, real communication is impossible, due to the isolating effects of city life.In his early poetry, the city's failure to meet the needs of its inhabitants is attributed to the spiritual sickness of the Western World. His portrayal of the city in his poems constantly reinforces this sense of social decay. There is an image of fruitless sexuality given out by the character of the woman in Preludes, whose inner self has been corrupted by her boring life in the city slums:

"The thousand sordid images

Of which your soul was constituted" (Preludes)

Eliot uses the technique of "disembodied body parts" as a kind of artistic creation to organize the chaotic feelings and images into a pattern. The " disembodied body parts" became a means to emphasise the depersonalising effect of city life. This technique, in 'Preludes', suggests the monotony and lack of individuality that rented accommodation in a large city brings:

"One thinks of all the hands

That are raising dingy shades

In a thousand furnished rooms."(Preludes)

Eliot's attitude towards the city is the sense of 'the masses', a vast, undifferentiated class of people, to whom most of the characters, and the authors, are socially superior. The view that city life is destructive of individuality "belongs not to the modern city in general, but rather to one distinctive group within it. ... it rests upon a repudiation of the broad city middle class, the commercial bourgeoisie."

Eliot shares the Modernist conceptualisation of the city-dwellers as an uncaring multitude , and his poetry is populated by the 'herds' of common people:

"Or trampled by insistent feet

At four and five and six o'clock;

And short square fingers stuffing pipes,

And evening newspapers, and eyes

Assured of certain certainties,

The conscience of a blackened street

Impatient to assume the world."(Preludes)

Throughout their works, the Modernists expressed their disgust with the dirt, decay and desolation of the city. However, The Modernist portrayal of the city is by no means all negative. They also experienced a fascination with city life that outweighed their disgust. Their development of a city language enabled them to "melt down and transform into strange and beautiful images" the harsh realities of city life. This element of Modernism and its relation the city emerges in T.S.Eliot's The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock, where the pollution that covers the city is described in sensual, almost affectionate terms:

"The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains."(Prufrock)

Another famous poem of his,The Waste Land which included A Game of Chess, expressed his horror at the spiritual emptiness of Europeans due to the experience of the first world war and the polarisation of society brought about by industrialisation

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