How to Answer a poetry question

Think of your introduction as a road map. You have been given a destination (the question) and there are lots of perfectly acceptable ways of getting there. In your introduction you lay out clearly what directions you’ll take in your essay. Your conclusion is where you look back on the highlights of your journey and recap on what you have learnt along the way!

INTRODUCTION: MAKE SURE TO USE THE WORDS FROM THE Q – but don’t begin by simply parroting back the question word for word. There is nothing worse than the predictable “I agree 100% that…..”. You could begin with a quote and/or with a dramatic statement and you must engage with the question asked.

Each introduction needs the following:

• Thesis (main idea) = eg. Plath’s poetry is filled with the fears we all share.
• Main topics to be discussed = (1), (2), (3)
• Answer the Question = PR – my personal response (sentences using “I” or “me”)

Imagine the question is “Plath’s poetry offers us a frightening yet fascinating insight into her personal demons”
Sample introduction:

(Thesis) Plath’s poetry captures the fear in the heart of us all. Fear of failure, fear of unhappiness, fear of hitting the bottom and being unable to claw our way back to sanity. (1) In the poems “Morning Song” and “Child”, Plath is afraid that despite her best intentions she is will not be a good mother to her children. (2) In “Mirror” and “Elm” she fears that her depression & disappointment with life will destroy her. (3) In “Pheasant” and “The Arrival of the Beebox” she worries that power corrupts people in frightening ways. (PR) I found this exploration of human fears and insecurities in her poetry both fascinating & disturbing.

CONCLUSION: MAKE SURE TO USE THE WORDS FROM THE QUESTION but don’t simply repeat what you said in the introduction and don’t introduce new ideas.

Each conclusion must:

• Link the last paragraph to the first.
• Repeat the thesis (main idea) but rephrase it.
• Taking each idea in turn (1. motherhood, 2. depression, 3. power) say what you learned from studying each issue & this poet in general. By doing this you will be showing how you have proved your thesis/answered the Q

 Sample conclusion:

(Thesis) Thus we see that Plath’s poetry begins in fear and ends in fear. Yet studying her poetry and getting an insight into her personal demons was for me an uplifting as well as a depressing experience. (1)I personally admired her determination to provide only the best for her children and learnt that parenting can involve many difficult challenges. (2)I found her exploration of the loss of youth in Mirror and the loss of love & sanity in Elm truly disturbing, but in a positive way these poems encouraged me to avoid putting pressure on myself to be ‘perfect’ in appearance and behaviour. (3) Finally, Plath’s poetry challenged me to avoid exploiting the power I have over nature and to have a greater respect for the environment. Accompanying Plath on her journey to the bottom was not easy but I learnt a lot about life on the way and I would strongly recommend her poetry despite it’s difficult subject matter.

Some obvious things that need to be said:

Don’t put in the bits in bold/brackets – I’m just putting them in to make it really obvious what each sentence is doing.

This is a good introduction and conclusion FOR THIS PARTICULAR ESSAY TITLE. But don’t be rubbing your hands together in glee, saying ‘yey, I’ll just learn off this introduction and conclusion and write them if Plath comes up‘ – you can’t write a definitive introduction and conclusion in advance because you don’t know what the question will be until you open the exam paper. And you MUST answer the question. And there’s also the not so small matter of plagiarism to consider!

Modernism and T.S Eliot

The Waste Land was published in London and New york in autumn 1922. Earlier in the same year, James Joyce's Ulysses had been published. These two works, the poem and the novel, quickly came to be recognised as the central literary texts of modernism.

The Waste Land forces readers to face difficult questions concerning values, related to religion, morality, history and art. 

Are values communal or individual?

We, as readers, are addressed and interrogated by the poem and responses are demanded of us; the poem does not provide answers or solutions. 

Although it is obviously a construction of its time and incorporated itself contemporary developments in the visual arts, music, and cinema as well as literature, it continues to broadcast beyond its period of creation, beyond the twentieth century. 

No poet of any ambition since 1922 can afford to ignore The Waste Land, and no individual concerned with how to live a decent or significant life can ignore the challenge set by the poem.

Modernism designates the broad literary and cultural movement that spanned all of the arts and even spilled into politics and philosophy. Like Romanticism, Modernism was highly varied in its manifestations between the arts and even within each art. The dates when Modernism flourished are in dispute, but few scholars identify its genesis as being before 1860 and World War II is generally considered to mark an end of the movements height. Modernist art initially began in Europe's capitals, primarily London,Milan, Berlin, St. Petersburg and especially Paris; it spread to the cities of the United States and South America after World I; by the 1940s, Modernism had thoroughly taken over the American and European academy, where it was challenged by nascent Postmodernism in the 1960s.

In the world of art, generally speaking, Modernism was the beginning of the distinction between "high" and "low" art. The educational reforms of the Victorian Age had led to a rapid increase in literacy rates, and therefore a greater demand for literature of all sorts. A popular press quickly developed to supply that demand. The sophisticated Literati looked upon this new popular literature with scorn. Writers who refused to bow the popular tastes found themselves in a state of alienation from the mainstream society. To some extent, this alienation fed into the stereotype of the aloof artist, producing nothing of commercial value for the market. It's worth mentioning that this alienation worked both ways, as the reading public by large turned their backs on many 'elitist' artists. The academic world became something of a refuge for disaffection artists, as they could rub elbows with fellow disenfranchised intellectuals. Still, the most effective poets and novelists did manage to make profound statements that were absorbed by the whole of society and not just the writers inner circles. in the later years of the modernist period, a form of populism returned to the literary mainstream, as regionalism and identity politics became significant influences on the purpose and direction of artistic endeavor. 

How to study a poem

Poetry is the most challenging kind of literary writing. In your first reading you may well not understand what the poem is about. Don't jump too swiftly to any conclusions about the poem's meaning.

Read the poem many times, including out loud. After the second or third reading, write down any features you find interesting or unusual.

What is the poem's tone of voice? What is the poem's mood?

Does the poem have an argument? Is it descriptive?

Is the poet writing in his or her own voice? Perhaps they are putting on a persona or a mask?

Is there anything special about the kind of language the poet has chosen? Which words stand out? Why?

What elements are repeated? Consider alliteration, assonance, rhyme, rhythm, metaphor and ideas.

What might the poems images suggest or symbolise?
 
What might be significant about the way the poem is arranged in lines? Does the grammar coincide with the ending of the lines or does it 'run over'? What is the effect of this?

Do not consider the poem in isolation. Can you compare and contrast the poem with any other work by the same poet with any other poem that deals with the same theme?

What do you think the poem is about?
 
 Every argument you make about the poem must be backed up with details and quotations that explore it's language and organisation?

Always express your ideas in your own words.

 

Useful language to use

Other words for suggests...

• Propose
• Put forward
• Recommend
• Advise
• Imply
• Insinuate
• Hint
• Evoke
• Intimate
• Indicate

Other words for creates...

• Compose
• Devise
• Initiate
• Establish
• Produce
• Generate
• Makes
• Constructs
• Stimulates
• Attains

Other words for effect...

• Impact
• Impression
• Meaning
• Significance
• Import

Practice Questions

How does Eliot comment on the act of writing poetry? How does his perspective change over the course of his career? Is he optimistic or pessimistic about the power of poetry to influence the modern world?

2. Describe the various speakers and characters in Eliot’s poems, particularly “Prufrock” and The Waste Land. Which of these poems, or which sections of these poems, would you call monologues? How does Eliot adapt the dramatic monologue form?

3. How does Eliot use the relationships between men and women to comment on society and culture? Why is “Prufrock” a “love song”?

4. What kinds of imagery does Eliot use? How do these sets of imagery change from “Prufrock” to Four Quartets?

5. Think about Eliot’s use of form and language. What is most “poetic” about his works? What linguistic devices does he use?

6. Describe Eliot’s range of cultural references. How do references to Eastern religions fit in with allusions to Christ and Dante? Why does Eliot include untranslated bits from non-English works?

7. What is the place of religion in Eliot’s work? How does this change over the course of his career?

8. What is the “Waste Land” Eliot describes? What other kinds of physical settings does Eliot use? How do they influence the messages of his poems?

9. Why is Eliot so fascinated with death imagery? What does the recurring imagery of drowning symbolize?

10. Describe the kind of person Eliot creates in “Prufrock.” How does Prufrock fulfill or rebut stereotypes of the modern intellectual?

Analysing Eliot

Eliot attributed a great deal of his early style to the French Symbolists—Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Laforgue—whom he first encountered in college, in a book by Arthur Symons called The Symbolist Movement in Literature. It is easy to understand why a young aspiring poet would want to imitate these glamorous bohemian figures, but their ultimate effect on his poetry is perhaps less profound than he claimed. While he took from them their ability to infuse poetry with high intellectualism while maintaining a sensuousness of language, Eliot also developed a great deal that was new and original. His early works, like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and The Waste Land, draw on a wide range of cultural reference to depict a modern world that is in ruins yet somehow beautiful and deeply meaningful. Eliot uses techniques like pastiche and juxtaposition to make his points without having to argue them explicitly. As Ezra Pound once famously said, Eliot truly did “modernize himself.” In addition to showcasing a variety of poetic innovations, Eliot’s early poetry also develops a series of characters who fit the type of the modern man as described by Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and others of Eliot’s contemporaries. The title character of “Prufrock” is a perfect example: solitary, neurasthenic, overly intellectual, and utterly incapable of expressing himself to the outside world.

As Eliot grew older, and particularly after he converted to Christianity, his poetry changed. The later poems emphasize depth of analysis over breadth of allusion; they simultaneously become more hopeful in tone: Thus, a work such as Four Quartets explores more philosophical territory and offers propositions instead of nihilism. The experiences of living in England during World War II inform the Quartets, which address issues of time, experience, mortality, and art. Rather than lamenting the ruin of modern culture and seeking redemption in the cultural past, as The Waste Land does, the quartets offer ways around human limits through art and spirituality. The pastiche of the earlier works is replaced by philosophy and logic, and the formal experiments of his early years are put aside in favor of a new language consciousness, which emphasizes the sounds and other physical properties of words to create musical, dramatic, and other subtle effects.

However, while Eliot’s poetry underwent significance transformations over the course of his career, his poems also bear many unifying aspects: all of Eliot’s poetry is marked by a conscious desire to bring together the intellectual, the aesthetic, and the emotional in a way that both honors the past and acknowledges the present. Eliot is always conscious of his own efforts, and he frequently comments on his poetic endeavors in the poems themselves. This humility, which often comes across as melancholy, makes Eliot’s some of the most personal, as well as the most intellectually satisfying, poetry in the English language.

The man behind the poetry

Thomas Stearns Eliot, or T.S. Eliot as he is better known, was born in 1888 in St. Louis. He was the son of a prominent industrialist who came from a well- connected Boston family. Eliot always felt the loss of his family’s New England roots and seemed to be somewhat ashamed of his father’s business success; throughout his life he continually sought to return to the epicenter of Anglo- Saxon culture, first by attending Harvard and then by emigrating to England, where he lived from 1914 until his death. Eliot began graduate study in philosophy at Harvard and completed his dissertation, although the outbreak of World War I prevented him from taking his examinations and receiving the degree. By that time, though, Eliot had already written “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and the War, which kept him in England, led him to decide to pursue poetry full-time. 

 

 

Eliot met Ezra Pound in 1914, as well, and it was Pound who was his main mentor and editor and who got his poems published and noticed. During a 1921 break from his job as a bank clerk (to recover from a mental breakdown), Eliot finished the work that was to secure him fame, The Waste Land. This poem, heavily edited by Pound and perhaps also by Eliot’s wife, Vivien, addressed the fragmentation and alienation characteristic of modern culture, making use of these fragments to create a new kind of poetry. It was also around this time that Eliot began to write criticism, partly in an effort to explain his own methods. In 1925, he went to work for the publishing house Faber & Faber. Despite the distraction of his wife’s increasingly serious bouts of mental illness, Eliot was from this time until his death the preeminent literary figure in the English-speaking world; indeed, he was so monumental that younger poets often went out of their way to avoid his looming shadow, painstakingly avoiding all similarities of style.  

Eliot became interested in religion in the later 1920s and eventually converted to Anglicanism. His poetry from this point onward shows a greater religious bent, although it never becomes dogmatic the way his sometimes controversial cultural criticism does. Four Quartets, his last major poetic work, combines a Christian sensibility with a profound uncertainty resulting from the war’s devastation of Europe. Eliot died in 1965 in London.

 

 

 

Themes, motifs & symbols

Themes

The Damaged Psyche of Humanity

Like many modernist writers, Eliot wanted his poetry to express the fragile psychological state of humanity in the twentieth century. The passing of Victorian ideals and the trauma of World War I challenged cultural notions of masculine identity, causing artists to question the romantic literary ideal of a visionary-poet capable of changing the world through verse. Modernist writers wanted to capture their transformed world, which they perceived as fractured, alienated, and denigrated. Europe lost an entire generation of young men to the horrors of the so-called Great War, causing a general crisis of masculinity as survivors struggled to find their place in a radically altered society. As for England, the aftershocks of World War I directly contributed to the dissolution of the British Empire. Eliot saw society as paralyzed and wounded, and he imagined that culture was crumbling and dissolving. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917) demonstrates this sense of indecisive paralysis as the titular speaker wonders whether he should eat a piece of fruit, make a radical change, or if he has the fortitude to keep living. Humanity’s collectively damaged psyche prevented people from communicating with one another, an idea that Eliot explored in many works, including “A Game of Chess” (the second part of The Waste Land) and “The Hollow Men.”

The Power of Literary History

Eliot maintained great reverence for myth and the Western literary canon, and he packed his work full of allusions, quotations, footnotes, and scholarly exegeses. In “The Tradition and the Individual Talent,” an essay first published in 1919, Eliot praises the literary tradition and states that the best writers are those who write with a sense of continuity with those writers who came before, as if all of literature constituted a stream in which each new writer must enter and swim. Only the very best new work will subtly shift the stream’s current and thus improve the literary tradition. Eliot also argued that the literary past must be integrated into contemporary poetry. But the poet must guard against excessive academic knowledge and distill only the most essential bits of the past into a poem, thereby enlightening readers. The Waste Land juxtaposes fragments of various elements of literary and mythic traditions with scenes and sounds from modern life. The effect of this poetic collage is both a reinterpretation of canonical texts and a historical context for his examination of society and humanity.  

The Changing Nature of Gender Roles

Over the course of Eliot's life, gender roles and sexuality became increasingly flexible, and Eliot reflected those changes in his work. In the repressive Victorian era of the nineteenth century, women were confined to the domestic sphere, sexuality was not discussed or publicly explored, and a puritanical atmosphere dictated most social interactions. Queen Victoria’s death in 1901 helped usher in a new era of excess and forthrightness, now called the Edwardian Age, which lasted until 1910. World War I, from 1914 to 1918, further transformed society, as people felt both increasingly alienated from one another and empowered to break social mores. English women began agitating in earnest for the right to vote in 1918, and the flappers of the Jazz Age began smoking and drinking alcohol in public. Women were allowed to attend school, and women who could afford it continued their education at those universities that began accepting women in the early twentieth century. Modernist writers created gay and lesbian characters and re-imagined masculinity and femininity as characteristics people could assume or shrug off rather than as absolute identities dictated by society.

Eliot simultaneously lauded the end of the Victorian era and expressed concern about the freedoms inherent in the modern age. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” reflects the feelings of emasculation experienced by many men as they returned home from World War I to find women empowered by their new role as wage earners. Prufrock, unable to make a decision, watches women wander in and out of a room, “talking of Michelangelo” (14), and elsewhere admires their downy, bare arms. A disdain for unchecked sexuality appears in both “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” (1918) and The Waste Land. The latter portrays rape, prostitution, a conversation about abortion, and other incidences of non reproductive sexuality. Nevertheless, the poem’s central character, Tiresias, is a hermaphrodite—and his powers of prophesy and transformation are, in some sense, due to his male and female genitalia. With Tiresias, Eliot creates a character that embodies wholeness, represented by the two genders coming together in one body.

 

Motifs

Fragmentation

Eliot used fragmentation in his poetry both to demonstrate the chaotic state of modern existence and to juxtapose literary texts against one another. In Eliot’s view, humanity’s psyche had been shattered by World War I and by the collapse of the British Empire. Collaging bits and pieces of dialogue, images, scholarly ideas, foreign words, formal styles, and tones within one poetic work was a way for Eliot to represent humanity’s damaged psyche and the modern world, with its barrage of sensory perceptions. Critics read the following line from The Waste Land as a statement of Eliot’s poetic project: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” (431). Practically every line in The Waste Land echoes an academic work or canonical literary text, and many lines also have long footnotes written by Eliot as an attempt to explain his references and to encourage his readers to educate themselves by delving deeper into his sources. These echoes and references are fragments themselves, since Eliot includes only parts, rather than whole texts from the canon. Using these fragments, Eliot tries to highlight recurrent themes and images in the literary tradition, as well as to place his ideas about the contemporary state of humanity along the spectrum of history.

Mythic and Religious Ritual

Eliot’s tremendous knowledge of myth, religious ritual, academic works, and key books in the literary tradition informs every aspect of his poetry. He filled his poems with references to both the obscure and the well known, thereby teaching his readers as he writes. In his notes to The Waste Land, Eliot explains the crucial role played by religious symbols and myths. He drew heavily from ancient fertility rituals, in which the fertility of the land was linked to the health of the Fisher King, a wounded figure who could be healed through the sacrifice of an effigy. The Fisher King is, in turn, linked to the Holy Grail legends, in which a knight quests to find the grail, the only object capable of healing the land. Ultimately, ritual fails as the tool for healing the wasteland, even as Eliot presents alternative religious possibilities, including Hindu chants, Buddhist speeches, and pagan ceremonies. Later poems take their images almost exclusively from Christianity, such as the echoes of the Lord’s Prayer in “The Hollow Men” and the retelling of the story of the wise men in “Journey of the Magi” (1927).

Infertility

Eliot envisioned the modern world as a wasteland, in which neither the land nor the people could conceive. In The Waste Land, various characters are sexually frustrated or dysfunctional, unable to cope with either reproductive or non reproductive sexuality: the Fisher King represents damaged sexuality (according to myth, his impotence causes the land to wither and dry up), Tiresias represents confused or ambiguous sexuality, and the women chattering in “A Game of Chess” represent an out-of-control sexuality. World War I not only eradicated an entire generation of young men in Europe but also ruined the land. Trench warfare and chemical weapons, the two primary methods by which the war was fought, decimated plant life, leaving behind detritus and carnage. In “The Hollow Men,” the speaker discusses the dead land, now filled with stone and cacti. Corpses salute the stars with their upraised hands, stiffened from rigor mortise. Trying to process the destruction has caused the speaker’s mind to become infertile: his head has been filled with straw, and he is now unable to think properly, to perceive accurately, or to conceive of images or thoughts.

Symbols

Water

In Eliot’s poetry, water symbolizes both life and death. Eliot’s characters wait for water to quench their thirst, watch rivers overflow their banks, cry for rain to quench the dry earth, and pass by fetid pools of standing water. Although water has the regenerative possibility of restoring life and fertility, it can also lead to drowning and death, as in the case of Phlebas the sailor from The Waste Land. Traditionally, water can imply baptism, Christianity, and the figure of Jesus Christ, and Eliot draws upon these traditional meanings: water cleanses, water provides solace, and water brings relief elsewhere in The Waste Land and in “Little Gidding,” the fourth part of Four Quartets. Prufrock hears the seductive calls of mermaids as he walks along the shore in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” but, like Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey (ca. 800 b.c.e.), he realizes that a malicious intent lies behind the sweet voices: the poem concludes “we drown” (131). Eliot thus cautions us to beware of simple solutions or cures, for what looks innocuous might turn out to be very dangerous.

The Fisher King

The Fisher King is the central character in The Waste Land. While writing his long poem, Eliot drew on From Ritual to Romance, a 1920 book about the legend of the Holy Grail by Miss Jessie L. Weston, for many of his symbols and images. Weston’s book examined the connections between ancient fertility rites and Christianity, including following the evolution of the Fisher King into early representations of Jesus Christ as a fish. Traditionally, the impotence or death of the Fisher King brought unhappiness and famine. Eliot saw the Fisher King as symbolic of humanity, robbed of its sexual potency in the modern world and connected to the meaninglessness of urban existence. But the Fisher King also stands in for Christ and other religious figures associated with divine resurrection and rebirth. The speaker of “What the Thunder Said” fishes from the banks of the Thames toward the end of the poem as the thunder sounds Hindu chants into the air. Eliot’s scene echoes the scene in the Bible in which Christ performs one of his miracles: Christ manages to feed his multitude of followers by the Sea of Galilee with just a small amount of fish. 

Music and Singing

 Like most modernist writers, Eliot was interested in the divide between high and low culture, which he symbolized using music. He believed that high culture, including art, opera, and drama, was in decline while popular culture was on the rise. In The Waste Land, Eliot blended high culture with low culture by juxtaposing lyrics from an opera by Richard Wagner with songs from pubs, American ragtime, and Australian troops. Eliot splices nursery rhymes with phrases from the Lord’s Prayer in “The Hollow Men,” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is, as the title, implies a song, with various lines repeated as refrains. That poem ends with the song of mermaids luring humans to their deaths by drowning—a scene that echoes Odysseus’s interactions with the Sirens in the Odyssey. Music thus becomes another way in which Eliot collages and references books from past literary traditions. Elsewhere Eliot uses lyrics as a kind of chorus, seconding and echoing the action of the poem, much as the chorus functions in Greek tragedies.