Year: 1990
Type: article
Abstract: Eliot», writes Peter Ackro yd in the 1984 biography, «always needed a safety net, as it were, before he indul ged in his own acrobatics» l Very tru e: like Pound, like Joyce, he was incapable of inventing either a character or a situation to put him in.Moreover, he was at a loss to create even a poetical style and dietion which was entirely his own; when he tried (in Sweeney Ag onistes, for example ) confidence quickly flagged, and the works remained fragments .His great gift was manipulation: the taking of other writers ' forms, ideas and particularly language, and assirnilating them within an original literary designo The guiding hand of other writers lay particularly heavily upon the opening lines of his major poems -Chaucer in «The Waste Land», Guido Cavalcanti «<Perch» lo Non Spero Di Tornar G iamai) in «Ash Wednesday» -as if he needed other «voices» to , as it were, kickstart himself into composition.Beginning «J ourney of the Magi» with an adaptation of an extraet from Lancelot Andrewes' 1622 Christmas sermon is, then , no departure from his usual method of composition.Yet in other poems , even though the narrative voice shifts continually (from Chauce r to Ezekiel to Wagner to Dante via James Frazer in «The Burial of the Dead») there is no bracketing off of one «contributorx from the other.The effeet given is that of one homogeneous persona -Prufrock the knight of the Grail legends -through whom Eliot is speaking.
Source: e_Buah
Author: Robert K. Shepherd
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W590922611