【文章內容簡介】 to write his dissertation, Eliot began writing for literary journals. 上海立信會計學院本科生畢業(yè)論文 8 In The Sacred Wood, Eliot studied some of the canonical works of English literature and tried to isolate the qualities that inform their greatness. On the basis of this analysis, Eliot then tried to generalize principles that would help the critic evaluate both classic and contemporary literature. The Sacred Wood contained many reinterpretations of the English literary tradition, especially in the book?s second half. But the heart of the work appeared in the first half, which contained the more theoretical essays. “?Tradition and the Individual Talent? is the classic statement of Eliot?s critical theory. As an experimental writer who had at first found it difficult even to publish his verse much less earn critical or popular favor, Eliot was aware that ?traditional? ways of interpreting poetry only hindered his generation of writers. He therefore looked for a way that artists could be judged by the standards of the past by them. He found the answer in his highly personal conception of tradition.”(2) 上海立信會計學院本科生畢業(yè)論文 9 Chapter 3 Characteristics of His Poetry Subject Matter The Second World War destroyed most of the good dreams of the people. The waste land， in Eliot?s view, stands for Western Europe, or for Western civilization as a whole. In this sense, Eliot?s view is the same with that of many other literary men, thinkers and other intellectuals in Western Europe in the 1920s to be exact, the period immediately after the First World War. Another undeniable reason is his unhappy marriage with an English lady. His wife Vivienne alternated between intellectual exuberance and spiritual break down, which made his wife an unbearable and nightmarish one. What Eliot?s poetry describes in the modern world, along with the possibility of either horror or glory, is the boredom. His depiction of urban life in his poetry is about a world of aimless people circling about, without any purpose. In Eliot?s opinion, the postwar Europe has collapsed into a restless, pointless barren world in which the whole civilization has been degenerated. The waste land inhabitants were so bored that life was only life in death, that is to say, they were spiritually dead. While we can not use “spiritual death” on Prufrock, for Prufrock has as least something to pursuit, no matter he realized it or not. That is because The Waste Land is written after the First World War. The revolutionary in Eastern Europe and the murders in city suburbs, added to spiritual death. “So the subject matter of his poetry is to expose the sterility and futility of the Western culture, to reveal the breakdown of munication between human beings, to show man?s disillusionment and frustration caught between his sense of meanings and his sense of meaninglessness, and to quest for a spiritual 上海立信會計學院本科生畢業(yè)論文 10 regeneration by finding salvation in religion.”(3) For Eliot, as for Freud, the primal energy, at its most basic, is sexual. The difference is that according to Eliot it is the failure to restrain this energy that has caused the discontent of modern civilization. Literary Allusion Complex literary allusion is characteristic of Eliot?s poetry. “For his allusion, even today someone still account him as a ?difficult? poet. But in fact, Eliot?s poetry dose not contains more allusions than that of Milton or Spenser. Eliot selfconsciously made his poetry difficult, characteristic of a master, in order to increase the status of poets: the response of the early critic to The Waste Land represented an attitude that Eliot accused.” (4) Eliot needed to provoke that outrage in order to make his works different. Eliot used many allusions in his works, and this made him different, and because of this, he is regarded as an expert in using allusions. With time passed, Eliot had written more poems, he had the ability to form a more selfconscious theory of allusion. This theory has reached a peak in Eliot?s most famous masterpiece The Waste Land. In this poem, Eliot?s allusion does not just seem simply ironic because they are presented in dramatic contexts: the allusions are spoken by dramatic voices in particular scenarios, and the aural quality of the poem often makes the echoes seem less learned than ghostly as if other voices were speaking from the past. In an essay, Eliot draws an outline of a theory of dramatic “doubleness” which describes effects he had already achieved in The Waste Land: In The Waste Land, Eliot achieved the effect in ways even more subtle and spookier. 上海立信會計學院本科生畢業(yè)論文 11 Eliot begins the third movement of the poem, “?The Fire Sermon?, with naturalistic description of the Thames, but that logic is quickly disrupted by the presence of ?nymphs? on the riverbank.” (5) The landscape then bees urban and modern. Although it seems unsuited to that landscape, it does not seem merely ironic。 rather, it makes us wonder if there is some other presence in this powdery landscape and a power in the verse to perceive it. This power is often retained by the allusions in the poems of the latter half of Eliot?s career, as are the personal and historical aspects of the allusions. Generally, Eliot does not seek to ruffle his readers with allusion in the later work: he wants to understand the poems more easily. While the motivations behind Eliot?s allusions changed, however, and while the effect of the allusions on his readers changed in turn, Eliot?s tendency to think and feel through allusion remained constant in all his masterpieces. Myth “The point at which religion do not so easily coherer is in their understanding of man?s and society?s habitual relations with God and the implications of these relationships. At this point even mystics can be seen to be born to different societies and to as