From Hero To Anti-hero: Protagonist’s Dilemma In T.S.Eliot’s Early Poetry

The early20th century witnesses the catastrophic WWI, great social chaos as well as an unprecedented boom in literary and aesthetic innovation, which is vividly called "Montage Modernism." With the fame of learnedness and classicism, T. S. Eliot advocates in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" that a poet should write within the whole of the literary tradition of Europe from Homer. And he locates his "tradition" at the ideal order, unity and heroism of the classical literature, which is best presented in the image of epic hero. Unfortunately, the early20th century is not an era of hero, but a high time for anti-hero. Thus, Eliot in his poetry portrays numerous kinds of anti-heroes with parody, irony and mock-heroic technique.From epic hero to anti-hero, the image of hero reflects the decline of faith and the rise of individualism in western civilization. Tracing Eliot’s literary career before his conversion in a chronological order, this study endeavors to explore the evolution of Eliot’s protagonist, which also reflects how Eliot articulates his experience of modernity.Eliot’s very first poem volume portrays a typical anti-hero, Prufrock. The confidence and power of epic hero is replaced by Prufrock’s indecision and awkwardness. He is a typical man of thought. In the second volume, Sweeney appears and subverts the dominant position of Prufrock as the man of action. This duality between thought and action remains throughout Eliot’s early poetry. In light of Walter Benjamin’s evaluation of Baudelaire, this study finds Eliot’s protagonist caught in the dilemma of greatness and idleness, just like Baudelaire and Conrad’s Kurtz. This line of thought goes further into The Waste Land. Eliot means Tiresias to be the central consciousness of the poem, but the dilemma still exists in him. He splits into the mourner and the quester, still a man of thought and a man of action. Yet what matters to Eliot is not to achieve harmonious reconciliation, but rather to find a way to articulate his experience of modernity. On aesthetic level, Eliot intentionally makes the language difficult, making a seemingly lunatic out of the modern hero.