T.S. Eliot's Spiritual Salvation

Thomas Stems Eliot is one of the most influential poets and critics in the past century. As the forerunner of modernism, he made new innovations in the creation of poetry, and produced a kind of new poetry which enlarged the range and form of poetic expression as a medium of the modern consciousness. Some of his poems are considered milestone in English modernist poetry, which reveals the hope of reestablishing a new order spoiled by the modern civilization. This thesis attempts to state that Eliot, from the beginning of writing poems, expressed his desire and belief of saving the degenerated society, and finally found the way out.The whole thesis is composed of four chapters. Chapter One briefly introduces the poet T. S. Eliot, his background, and the scholar's study about him both at home and abroad. Chapter Two and Chapter Three illustrate Eliot's long journey to find the way of salvation. Chapter Two puts Eliot's masterpiece The Waste Land into analysis. By resorting to symbolic death-and-rebirth images: wasteland, water and fire, which connote both hopelessness, despair, death and expectation, hope and revival, Eliot presents his perception of the contemporary world as a wasteland inhabited by dead life, and the attempt at a rebirth of it. Chapter Three argues that Eliot's idea of saving the west by Christianity is soundly expressed in his great work Four Quartets. Eliot describes the wild mess of the west and the westerners' spiritual crisis, and finally found the ways of salvation: the Word of God, Christian Humility and Prayer, Falling into Darkness, Sin and Purgation.Chapter Four is the conclusion that from the very beginning of composing his...