Patterns By Amy Lowell Patterns

By looking through a critical lens at T Stearns Eliot’s poetry in light of his 20th century, modernist context, much is revealed about his personal and the rapidly evolving societal beliefs of that era. Through his repeating motif of time and fragmentation throughout his poems, Eliot reveals the prevalent feelings of isolation while in society along with the need to hide one’s feelings and emotions in this degrading society. His exploration of the use of ambiguity and stream of consciousness by Eliot, which is a characteristic of modernist artists, allows his work to resound over decades while being interpreted and differently understood by every audience that encounters them.

Poetry can sometimes allow one to explore the unknown. However, in some works of poetry, one can realise that some known ideas or values remain relevant to current society. This is certainly applicable to T.S. Eliot’s poems, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Rhapsody on a Windy Night. Eliot’s manipulation of poetic techniques in both these poems allows the responder to realise that some ideas prevail in both modern and post-modern society. These poems explore the unknown phenomena of the obscurity regarding the purpose and meaning of life. This unknown phenomena causes the persona in both texts to resort to a sense of isolation or alienation. Eliot uses poetic techniques such as metaphors and personification to convey his ideas.

From John Keats’ dreamy sonnets to the Edgar Allen Poe’s macabre laments, the most renowned poems across movements and writing styles capture and illustrate the fleeting emotions one feels when one soul impacts another. Through diction, devices, and form, a poet imparts the impression of his muse, the source of these emotions, much like an artist illustrates his source of inspiration through any combination of media. Amy Lowell, a twentieth century pioneer of modern poetry, is one such poet. In her poem, “A Lady”, the muse is not only the subject, but the audience, whom she directly addresses. To describe the subject, her muse, Lowell uses allusions to the arts, elegant and domestic imagery, and repetitive sounds; in conjunction, she creates

Amy Lowell was a rebel, whos identity was to be different than others. Amy Lowell was interested in and influenced by the Imagists movement. Lowell earned a reputation for violating conservative standards by flaunting her obesity, swearing, smoking cigars, and having a same-sex lover. She wrote in traditional forms, as well as in free verse and polyphonic prose, often using several forms in a single poem. Amy Lowell’s work involved a combination of intertextuality, symbolism, and allusions.. I will analysis the following poems by Amy Lowell: “The Taxi” “Madonna of the evening flowers” “A decade” and “A lover”. Using these poems I will analyze her common themes, structure, and figurative imagery.

The start of the poem illustrates how women gave up the pleasure and “playthings of her life” (Dickinson). This hints at how women are intimidated in social gatherings, and how they make themselves into the norms of society and make

The two lines suggest that the speaker is well armed with knowledge from the pastness of the past all the way to the beginning of the human race. The speaker has emanated away from the euro-centric sphere and relocated the reader to a more significant place in the world. Referring back to Eliot’s route on how one obtains tradition by great labour, suggests that an individual must recognize the work of the past; the speaker and Eliot’s argument are connected as the speaker recognizes his racial ancestry. Furthermore, the poem continues with, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers”(3), the speaker is suggesting that he apprehends the past civilization of his own people; he is trying to unify himself with a historical sense of the past.

            I think this style of writing is also a reflection of Eliot's feelings about the time.  Eliot was more of a Modernist than Victorian poet and as such held to beliefs like: there is no higher power in the universe, man is alone on this planet to govern his own affairs, everyone is truly alone, there is no unity, no support, for we live in a godless heartless world (Stacey Donohue).  The floating, confusing, jumbled mix of emotions and directions in this poem mirrors the modernist image of society.

Eliot uses metaphor to relate accessible, physical entities and concepts to more abstract themes present in the poem. In

Karl Marx’s perspective thus pertinently illustrates the alienation of the modern individual from the self and their surroundings as a direct cause of their socio-economic circumstance. T.S Eliot’s poetry established him as one of the most eminent modernist poets; attempting to free himself from the constraints of the Victorian movement which pre-dated him, this is evident in the free verse and stream of consciousness narrative style of ‘The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock’. In doing so, Eliot turned his attention towards the plight of the individual, opting for the ambiguous protagonists in his poetry and exploring the often desolate and depressive urban landscape of the time through the inner workings of an individuals mind. Following on from this, throughout the poem, Eliot conveys a sense of the individual conscience as conditioned by society, through exploring the inner workings of the persona of J.Alfred Prufrock. Prufrock’s lack of identity and freedom in the face of society appears to be the predominant issue he faces, as he wanders the ‘half-deserted streets’, signifying scenes of decay and degradation to the reader, of which the most telling is the “sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells”, a stark contrasting comparison of the lower class, “sawdust” covered floors with the elitist imagery of an “oyster”.

Another notable point of poetic style also appears in the final section—the breaking up of the Lord’s Prayer. One analyst cleverly notes not only that the fragmented Lord’s Prayer represents a failure of prayer and spirituality, but that its “pairing with [a] children’s nursery rhyme” makes is seem “interchangeable” and almost frivolous. Through clever use of line spacing, Eliot

T.S Eliot is considered one of the most important modernist poets during his time. In fact, modernism was viewed as "a rejection of traditional 19th-century norms, where artists, architects, poets, and thinkers alike either altered or abandoned earlier conventions in an attempt to re-envision a society in flux" (Britannica). Modernism mainly represented by an orientation towards fragmentation, free verse, contradictory allusions and multiple points of view different from the Victorian and Romantic writing (Britannica). T.S. Eliot’s impact on poetry is unrivaled in the 20th century. Although his work was criticized for nonconformity, Eliot gained a new perspective, causing him to become an influential poet and critic as he pioneered the modern poetry movement.

Q5 "Much of what Eliot writes about is harsh and bleak, but he writes about it in a way that is often beautiful". Comment fully on both parts of this assertion.

Eliot’s use of symbolism can be very disorienting. It has been proposed that this choppy medley is actually furthering his point by representing the “ruins” of a culture. An article

Eliot’s poems generally captured the life of humanity in the 20th century. This was a time that the world including England was recovering from the effects of World War I. It was also a period that experienced a lot of industrialization. In the poem “Preludes” Eliot explores the misery of city life. In “The Boston Evening Transcrpt” he highlights the disparities between individuals that lived life to its fullest and those that just existed and made no meaningful experiences. In “the Love Song of J. Alfred Pufrock” he emphasizes the need to use time effectively in pursuing life’s goals. In these poems, Eliot uses imagery and symbolism to reinforce his themes of suffering, the disconnect amongst people, and time.

All words, phrases and sentences (or just simply images) which make up this poem seem to, in Levi-Strauss’ words, “be a valeur symbolique zero [and the signifier] can take on any value required ”, meaning that the images Eliot uses do not have one fixed signification and consequently conjure up thought-provoking ideas that need to be studied (qtd. in