浅析T.S.艾略特早期诗歌中的现代人形象.docx

浅析T.S.艾略特早期诗歌中的现代人形象
【摘要】艾略特---20世纪美国着名的诗人，是意象派的代表人物之一。艾略特在他的诗歌中运用了很多典故和意象，这使读者不易理解他的作品。他经历了两次世界大战，早期他生活在混乱的年代，这样他就更有机会了解社会，了解生活在痛苦中的人们，他看清社会的本质。他擅长于描写现代人的形象，这特别体现在他的早期诗歌中。在《荒原》之前，艾略特着重描写第一次世界大战后西方文明的衰败和道德观念的沦落。在他的早期诗歌中，他反映了西方社会的精神危机，反映了现代人的精神空虚、内心矛盾、平庸生活以及对生活的绝望。普鲁弗洛克天生胆小、犹豫、敏感、焦虑、缺乏意志和信心；小老人毫无希望，已经无可救药，即将走向死亡；空心人精神空虚、渺小，没有人会在乎他的存在。艾略特在他早期诗歌中所反映的现代人的形象是无可救药的，也许可以说他们是西方文明衰败的受害者，他们最终是将走向死亡的。本文将详细分析艾略特早期诗歌中的人物行为，从而更清楚地看出现代人的形象。
【关键词】艾略特；空心人；精神空虚；现代人
1. Introduction
Eliot (1888-1965), who is regarded as a great modern perceptive poet in the twentieth century, was born in a rich family in St. Louis, Missouri. He was the son of a successful, cultivated businessman. The excellent family environment provided a good condition for　Eliot to be a well-known scholar. And he had chance to study at many pop universities and received an excellent education, especially in classic literature when he was young.
Eliot was intelligent when he was young. His father was a businessman and had no enough time to cultivate him, while his mother, who was once ambitious to be a Christian poet, gave him much influence on literature. Eliot studied first at Smith Academy in St. Louis, and then went to Harvard for both his undergraduate and graduate studies under the guidance of the famous scholars Irving Babbitt and George Santayana. Both of them influenced him a lot on his later writing. Later, he went to Paris and England. He was fascinated by the poetry of Jules La-Forgue and other recent French poets. After the First World War broke out, he left Germany to study Greek philosophy at Oxford on the Oxford philosopher　Bradley, whose work gave him much help in mind. Eliot also cherished Dante’s works, which also influenced him a lot in his later writings.
In 1914, Eliot met Ezra Pond, the founder of the Imagist movement in poetry, who also put forward the slogan “make it new”. It was Ezra Pond who first found Eliot’s genius in poetry. Pond gave Eliot a lot of help and also gave the imagery effect on him. With the help of Ezra Pond,　Eliot published his first poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in Chicago’s “Poetry” in 1915. And Eliot became world famous after publishing The Waste Land in 1922.
For the reason of various influences, Eliot’s poems appear complex and difficult to understand. Eliot used so many images and allusions in his poems that readers are often confused. Eliot showed us a clear-cut picture of the modern world and what the modern men look like. Besides he explores our mind and imaginations by his poems. He is a great poet in the 20th century.
2. The detailed features of modern men described in　Eliot’s early poems
Eliot had experienced two world wars. In his eyes, the world was not as beautiful as the romantic poets described. The Western civilization had been rotten at that time. And the people were not as pure as they used to be. They began to worship money and became greedy. Many people became more practical in their eyes. Money or material abundant was the most important. People became materialized. At the same time, their spirit was becoming empty. They suffered from serious psychological illness.
With the rapid development of Western industries, the major imperialist countries were not satisfied with the reality. They were searching more and more interests so they planned to invade other countries and the First World War broke out in 1914. Europe hadn’t suffered from the worldwide war for nearly one hundred years; so people were really frightened and confused by the sudden war. After the war, the life changed a lot. As famous British poet William Butler Yeats wrote in his poem The Second Coming: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold, Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and every where, The ceremony of innocence is drowned, The best lack all conviction, while the Worst, Are full of passionate intensity.” [1]
To cater for the need of the capitalist class, the United States entered the war in 1917. Many Western countries were damaged by this naïve war except the United States. The sudden transition from war to peace led to some problems. Some people lost their way to live after the war; some of them were despair and became spiritually empty. Immediately after the war, the　entered a period of industrial boom that was based on the progress of science and technology. But there were also potential problems---the　fell into a great depression soon.
Eliot, being an experienced and observant thinker, saw the world and people’s life clearly. He told us what the modern world and modern men were like with his own experiences in his critical poems. His poetry may be divided into two periods: the early period from 1915 to 1925, the later period from 1927 onward, 1927 being the year in which he became a British citizen and was received into the Church of England. In his early poems, Eliot expressed his personal feeling of disillusionment, including “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, which is also known as “Prufrock” (1915), “Portrait of a Lady” (1910), “Gerontion” (1919), The Waste Land (1922), and The Hollow Men (1925). In these poems, the readers can find the modern men as incapable as Prufrock in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, as hopeless as the little old man in “Gerontion”, and as empty as scarecrows in The Hollow Men.
Prufrock---the self-portrait of modern men in “Prufrock”
Brief introduction of this poem
Prufrock is a typical kind of modern men that Eliot described in the poem “Prufrock”. We will see his emotional conflicts and incapability to love from this poem. The speaker Prufrock is Eliot’s first self-portrait in a distorting mirror. He is a frustrated individual character in the poem, which reveals the spiritual crisis of modern intellectuals.
This poem captures the insanity, intensity and sheer length, width and breadth of human feelings. It is an examination of the tortured psyche of the prototypical modern man --- overeducated, eloquent but emotionally still. It develops a theme of frustration and emotional conflict.
Prufrock is the image of an ineffectual, sorrowful, tragic twentieth-century western man, possibly the modern intellectual. His tragic flaw is timidity; his “cures” is his idealism. Knowing everything, but unable to do nothing, he lives in an area of life and death, and is caught between the two worlds, he belongs to neither.
The epigraph to this poem is from Dante’s Inferno:“S’io credessi che mia risposta fosse/ A persona che mai tornasse al mondo, / Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. / Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo/ Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero, / Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo”. It describes Prufrock’s ideal listener: one who is as lost as the speaker and will never betray to the world the content of Prufrock’s present confessions. In the world Prufrock describes, though, no such sympathetic figure exists; he must be content with silent reflection.
The understanding of the name – J. Alfred Prufrock
The name of J. Alfred Prufrock is an ironic image. The name of Prufrock is that of a furniture dealer in St Louis while his initial “J” sounds tony and classy, giving one a sense of the upper class to which he belongs.　However, when we hear of the name, we cannot help laughing. “The muttering retreats (line5)/Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels (line6)/And sawdust restaurant with oyster-shells.(line7)” Judging from this description, actually, Prufrock lives in a seedy, raw world. It is a world where there is no social unity, and where there is elegance and beauty of a kind such as divorced from force and vitality. It is a trivial world of total emptiness. He is not rich, but he tries to dress well, giving the readers a sense of notable.
Prufrock consists of two words: prude and frock. According to Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary, prude refers to the person who behaves in an extremely or unnaturally proper manner, especially one who is too easily shocked by sexual matters. It just reflects that J. Alfred Prufrock is so overcautious, hesitant and also be afraid of failure. It is also the very reason why he gets such pain of psyche.　Eliot once said that: “When one wants to do something, if he considers too much that could only make him hesitant and dare not to move forward. Frock means the long loose gown with sleeves worn by monks. This word reflects Prufrock’s status in the society and it also implies that the emotional condition of a coward is the common phenomenon in the middle and upper class in modern society.
Puritanism and J. Alfred Prufrock
(ⅰ) Puritanism
Puritanism refers to the beliefs and practices characteristic of Puritans, while puritan refers to the person who is extremely strict in morals and who tends to regard pleasure as sinful.[10] Puritanism emphasizes strictness and austerity in conduct and religion. Most men held ideas in the mainstream of Calvinistic thought In addition to believing in the absolute sovereignty of God, the total depravity of man, and the complete dependence of human beings on divine grace for salvation, they stressed the importance of personal religious experience. These Puritans insisted that they, as God‘s elect, had the duty to direct national affairs according to God‘s will as revealed in the Bible. In the 19th century its influence was indirect, but it can still be seen at work stressing the importance of education in religious leadership and demanding that religious motivations be tested by applying them to practical situations.
(ⅱ) J. Alfred Prufrock—the victim of Puritanism
Prufrock is a victim of the Puritanism. The Prufrocks are the people who　Eliot is familiar with. On one hand, these kinds of people are timid and sensitive intellectuals in western society. They might come from the upper class. They are well dressed and self-conscious, longing for love; on the other hand, they are afraid of that absurdity would spoil their fame. This is the typical case of the people who have always been born-shortcoming troubled by stirring desire and hope. He is trapped by Puritanism. Though he is longing for love, he dares not to speak it out. It is the belief in Puritanism that Prufrock thinks the sexual relationship between male and female is sin. The over depression of themselves leads them to disorder in spirit, and at last they suffer from serious mental illness. Prufrock is an archetype of modern western people.
Puritanism makes him depressed and hesitate to move forward. On one side, as a believer of Puritanism, just like the characters described in Henry James’ novels, Prufrock is eager to gain experience, which is reflected in puritan culture. He cherishes the illusion of romantic love, dreaming of getting a gentle lover. However, he cannot put his mind into action till the end. On the other side, Prufrock is a person who also has certain life experiences. He knows something about the upper class in Boston: “And I have known all already, known them all---”(line49) in spite of this, he does take further action to long for his ideal lover. “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”(line51) reflects Prufrock’s detest and his feeling of uneasiness towards the genteel society and the boring life. He also tries his best to escape from it, but his attempt is in vain.
The features of the modern image reflected in this poem
(ⅰ)Timidity--- the very root of Prufrock’s pain leading to his hesitation
To Prufrock, his pain is caused by love and his own timidity. Traditionally, the love song is based on the convincing arguments, complaining about the cruelty and indifference of the lovers, expressing the very pain between the lovers. As usual, when a man wants to pursue a woman, he often tries to persuade her with his vigorous speech, and persuades his lover to cherish the time and to enjoy the happy time with him for the time is so limited and waits for no one.[11] In traditional love poems, though the heroes in the poems may be extremely miserable and also complain about it all the time, he is often confident and never gives up. However, in　Eliot’s poem “Prufrock” the case is completely opposite. J. Alfred Prufrock is timid, shy and lack of confidence. He is a failure figure, a tragic character with certain odd personality. When he faces the pain, he neither outcries loudly to the common people nor tears sadly. However, he prefers to hinder his pain, his desire in his deep heart. This seems to be his merit, but this is just his very reason he fails in the end. He is so depressed that he cannot control his own feeling any more.
In his interior monologue, “Let us go then, you and I, (line1) /When the evening is spread out against the sky (line2)”, Prufrock divides himself into a you and an I---a public outward personality and a thinking, inert sensitive self. The dissociation is continually ascribed to the failure of nerve, an essential timidity. Prufrock does not dare to make his visit to his lover, just as the speaker in The Waste Land fails to address the hyacinth girl and the hollow Men are transfixed by eyes they dare not meet in dreams. Here Prufrock fails to confront his selfhood from the beginning. As soon as the readers hear what Prufrock speaks at the beginning, they can see what kind of person Prufrock belongs to obviously.
The image of evening does not give us a quiet and free mode. Instead, it is “like a patient etherized upon a table” (line3). Here the evening is changed into an unconscious, lifeless patient. It implies the essence of the modern life. In this environment, Prufrock is in dilemma and trapped into conflicts. Prufrock needs contact with common people, and hopes he can do the things he ought to do, expressing his true feeling to his lover. However, Prufrock is afraid to contact with opposite sex. He knows he is longing for her. However, he is afraid of refusal, his inner thoughts and fears won’t allow him to risk the seeking of actual love, so he does nothing to contact with her further.
Generally speaking, when a man is going to see his sweetheart, he will be very excited. He would just go on even if he failed at last instead of leaving regrets for the reason of hesitation. However, Prufrock is completely opposite to the traditional man who is longing for his lover. At the beginning of the poem, Prufrock is planning to visit his girlfriend, but till the end of the poem, Prufrock does not make any real closer contact with her. All the actions and behaviors happen on the way to his girlfriend’s home or we can also say that Prufrock does not move any way at all. He just stands in a place, thinking in his inner mind and this way is too long and too curve for him. It is the portrait of Prufrock’s innermost being. Of course, for Prufrock’s very shortcomings, it is impossible for him to succeed in the end. Prufrock is hesitant like the prince Hamlet in Shakespeare’s famous work Hamlet. He is dest