Representative Of Modernist Poetic Views

T.S.Eliot is one of the greatest poet and the most important critic of the twentieth century in the English-speaking world. His poetic renovations have had a profound and enduring influence on a whole generation of poets, critics and intellectuals in the West. This thesis, on the basis of analyzing Eliot's literary views and his poetic practice, is a tentative endeavor to get the conclusion that Eliot's literary views and poetic practice embody the features of English and American modernist literature.To start with, the thesis gives an introduction of Eliot's literary theories, including "unified sensibility" , "impersonality" and "objective correlative" , and analyzes the influence of these theories. "Unified sensibility" means that poets should reunify intellect and emotion when creating poems. According to Eliot, poets up to the seventeenth century thought and felt and saw together, but in the seventeenth century a fatal split occurred. In fact, the poet ought to have a unified sensibility; he ought to pass from feeling to object as if there are no distinctions between them. "Impersonality" expresses the meaning that the work of art is located somewhere between the writer and the reader. The poet, when creating poems, should exit himself. So, every poet should find a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events to express the particular emotion. That is the theory of "objective correlative " . These theories give great influence to modern poets.Then, the thesis begins to analyze the themes and anti-heroes of Eliot's works. Eliot is mostly concerned in one way or another with the wasteland, with aspects of the decay of culture in the modern western world. In his famous poems, ugliness of modern life, spiritual emptiness and loss of humanity and despair can be found here and there. And some anti-heroes, no matter Prufrock, hollow man or Gerontion, are the representatives of modern people. These figures, from different aspects, embody the features of modern man.The following part of this thesis is to analyze the stylistic features and poetictechniques of Eliot. As stylistic features are concerned, disjointed form is the most striking. The aim of Eliot's using disjointed form is for readers to see and feel the fragmentary nature of life. And the disjointed form makes his poem very difficult to understand. As to techniques, Eliot always makes his poem dramatic monologue, since Eliot considers the theater to be the ideal medium for poetry. Formulating on a wide range of images to depict a chaotic modern world is another technique used by Eliot. At the same time, stream-of-consciousness and montage can also be found in Eliot's works.All the above-mentioned aspects embody the features of English and American modernist literature and have influenced modern poets greatly. With his theories and his works, Eliot becomes the milestone of modernist poetry. His poetic views, literary theories and poetic practices best represent modernism.