Notes of the 4^th of April 2012

Eliot wished to underline some key-words, especially “culture” as an expression of civility, where people live together in a community, not individually (as happened during his age).

Middle Age was his model: in that time there was balance, order, unity. Eliot lives the breakdown of the traditional values: those values had been the reference mark till that moment for European people. There’s too much fragmentation  and disorder and Eliot decides to make not use of the myth. “An individual is shaped by the culture into which he or she is born”. Indeed each of us gives meanings to the things depending from the culture and civility he comes from, so when this culture is in crisis, the capacity of everybody to find links slows down. The crisis and the sense of inability produces confusion, anxiety and nostalgia. “Nostos” is an epic poem about the return home of an hero and is an expression referring to the way of living into which we are deep-rooted. Eliot makes a poetry where is evident the fragmentation: in his dramatic monologues (a technique borrowed from the theatre) he juxtaposes the scenes like in a collage (for example he mentions the Easter sacrifice of the lamb, he cites the sacrificial victim, then he speaks about the catholic rite of the Eucharist). For Mr. Eliot art has to be universal and impersonal: he dislikes the uniqueness of the individual typical of Romanticism. Human being can’t live for his uniqueness, while imagination is the key for expressing subjective reaction. The poet thinks people has to live in community with some reference marks and a sense of belonging to a group: he is American, from the Somerset, and he lived particularly the fragmentation and the searching for the promise Land (he already had the idea of the united Europe). At the same time he wants to transmit to the reader the sense of loss and confusion of the contemporary man throughout poetry. Culture is a mix of everything: art, usages, customs, traditions, cookery and has a sense of continuity (there’s a link between temporal and timeless given by connections). Man has to run away from romantic emotions because they bring to solipsism and individualism. The dialogue with other people is very difficult, people prefer to go to the stadium!

Mr. Eliot tries to react against the habit of the 19^th century and criticizes Arnold’s theories, which thought that culture was just a frame of human life: for the American poet the culture wasn’t enough to give meaning to the reality.