The outline of the period

Pound's interests and reading were universal. His adaptations and brilliant, if sometimes flawed, translations introduced new literary possibilities from many cultures to modern writers.

His life-work was The Cantos, which he wrote and published until his death.

They contain brilliant passages, but their allusions to works of literature and art from many eras and cultures make them diff

icult. Pound's poetry is best known for its clear, visual images, fresh rhyths, and muscular, intelligent, unusual lines, such as, in Canto LXXXI, "The ant's a centaur in his dragon world," or in poems inspired by Japanese haiku, such as "In a Station of the Metro" (1916).

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a well- to-do family with roots in the northeastern United States. He received the best education of any major American writer of his generation at Harvard College, the Sorbonne, and Merton College of Oxford University. He studied Sanskrit and Oriental philosophy, which influenced his poetry. Like his friend Pound, he went to England early and became a towering figure in the literary world there. One of the most respected poets of his day, his modernist, seemingly illogical or abstract iconoclastic poetry had revolutionary impact. He also wrote influential essays and dramas, and championed the importance of literary and social traditions for the modern poet.

As a critic, Eliot is best remembered for his formulation of the "objective correlative," which he described, in The Sacred Wood, as a means of expressing emotion through "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events" that would be the "formula" of that particular emotion. Poems such as "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915) embody this approach, when the ineffectual, elderly Prufrock thinks to himself that he has "measured out his life in coffee spoons," using coffee spoons to reflect a humdrum existence and a wasted lifetime. The famous beginning of Eliot's "Prufrock" invites the reader into tawdry alleys that, like modern life, offer no answers to the questions of life.

Similar imagery pervades The Waste Land (1922), which echoes Dante's Inferno to evoke London's thronged streets around the time of World War I. The Waste Land's vision is ultimately apocalyptic and worldwide. The Waste Land is often read as a representation of the disillusionment of the post-war generation. The Waste Land is a highly influential 433-line modernist poem, it is perhaps the most famous and most written about long poem of the 20th century, dealing with the decline of civilization and the impossibility of recovering meaning in life. With its slippage between satire and prophecy with abrupt changes of speakers, locations, and times, the melancholic and intimidating summoning up of a vast and unsympathetic range of cultures and literatures. To showcase this, the poem is broken up into five sections: “The Burial of the Dead,” “A Game of Chess,” “The Fire Sermon,” “Death by Water,” and “What the Thunder Said.” The first four sections of the poem correspond to the Greek classical elements of Earth (burial), Air (voices), Fire (passion), and Water. The poem has nonetheless become a familiar touchstone of modern literature. Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruellest month" (its first line); "I will show you fear in a handful of dust"; and the Sanskrit "Shantih shantih shantih" (its last line).In October 1922, Eliot would get The Waste Land published in The Criterion, and then in book form by December 1922.

The largest form of criticism about Eliot’s Waste Land came as being called not real poetry. Another critique concerned Eliot’s widespread use of quotes from other authors into his work. Notes at the end of Waste Land give the source of many of the quotes, but not all, reinforcing the argument that Eliot is a plagiarizer. This has been defended as a necessary salvaging of tradition in an age of fragmentation, and completely integral to the work, as well adding richness through unexpected juxtaposition.

Eliot's other major poems include "Gerontion" (1920), which uses an elderly man to symbolize the decrepitude of Western society; "The Hollow Men" (1925), a moving dirge for the death of the spirit of contemporary humanity; Ash-Wednesday (1930), in which he turns explicitly toward the Church of England for meaning in human life; and Four Quartets (1943), a complex, highly subjective, experimental meditation on transcendent subjects such as time, the nature of self, and spiritual awareness. His poetry, especially his daring, innovative early work, has influenced generations.

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