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MTentor - T.S. Eliot's Modernist Poetry and Metaphysical Poetry. What the Thunder Said.
by MTentor - (2012-04-11)
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1) The thunder's advice is interpreted in different ways : first of all the advice is perceived from gods as the action of giving alms, differently from gods men take into consideration the advice as a form of compassion, and last but not least, the thunder's advice is perceived as an awareness of being in control from demons.

 

2) "these fragments" represent the desperation of human kind, they see a world broken, where hopes, and feelings can't be seen as real, because people has lost faith on believe in something.

 

3) The massage of the concluding lines is conveyed through the image of the fisher king, the image of sterility. In this way Eliot wants to represent the ambivalence of the world, once harsh, and on the other hand full of hope, the possibility to regenerate the world. I think the last words are in Sanskrit because of the cyclicity of cultures. Eliot passed from the traditional culture of Europe, to the oriental cultural, in order to show the importance of the relationship between cultures, traditions and the importance of the past cultures in relations with the present culture.

 

4) I think Eliot's experimental poetry is difficult, because Eliot uses a lot of images related to religion, or related to other poets' poetry, in this way he uses intertextuality, that comes from past centuries. Another difficult point of Eliot's poetry is his use of different cultures, he passes from the European culture to the oriental culture, in order to show how the poetry and life is influenced by the entire world, and how the world has different points of view.

 

5) Eliot's poetry is sometimes obscure because there are many relations between what is represented in the poetry and its meaning. It explains the juxtaposition of the scenes, that I think is one of the thinks which creates a sense of darkness of knowledge.