Suvmitted In Partial Fulhlment Of The Requirements For The M.A.Degree In English Language And Literature

T. S. Eliot is one of the precursor of modernism, he made new experiments and innovations in the composition of poetry, and produced a kind of new poetry which enlarged the range and form of poetic expression as a medium of the modem consciousness. Several of his poems are considered milestone in English modernist poetry. And his most famous poem The J49ste Land is an epoch-making work in 2OtI1 century Western literature. The author of this article chooses "The Love Song of J.A Hi-ed Frufrock",one of the earliest poems to earn fame for T. S. Eliot, and "The Waste Land" and compares and contrasts them in a systematical way, trying to find out in what way Eliot progressed in versification and what stimulated all the evolvement. The whole thesis is composed of six parts. Part 1 briefly introduces the poet T. S. Eliot, his background, his views and the two poems, emphasizing each poem's achievements. Part 2 Part5 investigate into the main elements of these two poems, including themes (boredom, sterility, life and death, love and lust, desperation and hope, tribulation and salvation),characters(Prufrock and Tiresias, and the woman characters ), techniques(wit play, irony, symbolism, juxtapositions, shifts and allusions ).The author of this article tries to trace Eliot's evolving versification before his conversion by comparing and contrasting the similarities and differences of these two poems and also tries to seek reasons for these. Part 6 deals with the conclusion that th ultimate meaning of the comparative study of these two great poems is the progressing consistency in these two poems, and that The Waste Land is a deepening continuation of The Love Song off AlfiedPrufrockin terms of the themes and the techniques, which in lhe J44~ste Land were developed to the full extent and made it an epic- like poem. The developing and evoJving consistency in these two poems is what this thesis mainly concerns about.