Poetic, Philosophic, And Prophetic

As a Nobel prize laureate and certainly the banner-bearer of Modernist Movement, T. S, Eliot has suffered some decline in his literary fame in recent decades not only because of his willed juxtaposition of broken images in his poetry but also because of his vehement advocacy of Christianity as a suitable institution for human society. This posthumous loss of glory seems quite antithetical to his whole frustration-to-fulfillment career. This thesis takes as its goal to delineate the route of his personality development as it is reflected in his poetry through a plethora of text-based personae. The unity of Eliot the poet and his poetry makes it possible for me to treat his plural personae as a single with a coherent pattern of personality, no matter whether we identify this persona with T. S. Eliot the poet himself.Out of this assumption, I take a holistic methodology in my analysis of Eliot's poetry to bring his oeuvre under a panoramic view. In this paper, I demarcate Eliotic persona into three periods of personality development and qualify them as "poetic", "philosophic", and "prophetic" respectively. Poetic is the first period represented by Prufrock in The Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock, a poem which is lauded as marking the beginning of modern poetry for its stream-of-consciousness use of uncanny images. Philosophic is the second period with The Waste Land as its hallmark. For its collage style The Waste Land becomes a battleground of polyphonic voices and philosophical meditation. The last period is prophetic in the sense that Eliot finally comes into himself and assumes the redemptory role mediating between God and the mundane world. Four Quartets lend voice to this last period of spiritual fulfillment when the persona first explicitly claims his identity and then gradually impersonalises himself on the way towards spiritual transcendence and salvation. Anyhow, a clear-cut simplification must be wisely avoided in this re-formation of a text-based personality.Since this triadic pattern of the personality development is quite parallel to Freud's classification of human consciousness, namely, id, ego, and superego, I will consciously draw references from psychoanalytic literature. Another psychoanalyst relevant to this thesis is Jung for his concept of persona. The theoretical support for my argumentation also comes from Eliot's own literary criticism, say, these conceptssuch as objective correlative, historical sense, poetic impersonality and the like. These concepts I use to illuminate interpretation of his poetry. It is interesting that his poetry and his criticism mirror each other, a fact which is meaningful also when we compare the mirroring state with psychoanalyst disclosure of conscious and unconscious. Thus his criticism stands for the conscious and his poetry for the unconscious. In my hermeneutic of Eliot's poetry, text is the shared ground of personal vision and historical sense, and reading becomes experiencing, shedding light on the conscious and especially on the unconscious that is darkened and effaced by time.