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DKopic - T.S. Eliot Modernist Poetry and Metaphysical Poetry. T.S. Eliot's vision of Culture
by DKopic - (2012-04-15)
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T.S. Eliot's vision of culture emerges in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. The culture he likes best is the culture and community of Middle Age or Elizabethan England. So the community, the order is very important for T.S. Eliot, and that is what he tried to find in his works. In the literary works, for example The Waste Land, he uses many other texts and many other language, but this does not present a positive thing, because it is sign of disgregation of society and culture, because the kinship structures were broken, there were no any point of reference, the society and the culture were fragmented. He uses the language in order to express this fragmentation: dramatic monologue is one of techniques used by T.S. Eliot. In The Waste Land, there are many monologues without logical and rational links, but they are unified by the same atmosphere. All these problems of disintegration and collapse of values were present in the Europe of chaos and anarchy-

If the reader consider that "an individual is shaped by the culture into which he or she is born", also the people of the fragmented culture are lost, so the key word of T.S. Eliot are: culture(that unifies timeless and temporal) so it is connected to tradition, but also culture has to be integrated in community (ideal order). For example, the Middle Age when the people were unified by religion.

 In addiction T.S. Eliot was the art to be impersonal, not anymore expression of uniqueness as it was during Romanticism when the imagination and solitude were the most important things for art. In his opinion Dante Alighieri become great because he lived in ordered society. So the art has to be for all, it must escape from personality and self-expression (Modernism was cosmopolitan movement).

 The real revolution is cultural, he gives new idea of unified Europe. Tradition is very important because "tradition gives a culture its sense of continuity and wholeness", it connects past and present, timeless and temporal and it creates relationships, so the people do not fell "in the meddle of nothing."

 T.S. Eliot also did not agree with Matthew Arnold's consideration about culture as a frame of human life, because for him the religion was the most important thing, it was the key, the thing that unify all the people.