33
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Accepted
Did T.S. Eliot really plagiarize in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"?
Examples of allusions in the poem
In The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I edited by Christopher Ricks (Faber & Faber, 2015), Ricks has several notes for the lines "In the room the women come and ...
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21
votes
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Why did T.S. Eliot compare “waiting for death” with “a feather on the back of the hand"?
The couplet in question is:
My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a feather on the back of my hand.
And the poem describes Simeon, a biblical character. He is an elderly Jew who was ...
- 21k
14
votes
Significance of the Phoenician Sailor having pearls for eyes in The Waste Land
It's an allusion to Shakespeare's The Tempest, Act I, scene ii. Ariel sings to Ferdinand, in order to deceive him into thinking his father has been drowned in a shipwreck.
ARIEL sings
Full ...
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14
votes
Accepted
“Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.” Is this a genuine TS Eliot quote?
It is not a word-for-word match, but in his 1949 work The Cocktail Party, Eliot wrote:
Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want
to feel important.
The full text is ...
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11
votes
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Which Upanishad is TS Eliot referencing with "Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata." and why?
Looking at Swami Krishnananda's book on The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (emphasis mine):
This instruction, which was communicated to the Devas, Manushyās and
Asuras – gods, men and demons – by the ...
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9
votes
Accepted
Was T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" plagiarised?
TL;DR: No.
Summary
Eliot said that the source of the title, theme and imagery of ‘The Waste Land’ was the medieval legend of the Fisher King:
Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of ...
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8
votes
Accepted
What is the "heap of broken images" in The Waste Land?
To say anything definitive about The Waste Land is challenging; indeed, this work seems to evade interpretation with each new line and stanza. With many interpretations carry with them some merit, I ...
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7
votes
Which Upanishad is TS Eliot referencing with "Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata." and why?
To add to muru's excellent answer, taking on the "why" part of the question, this final part of Eliot's poem presents us with a world in ruins, not as much in substance as in spirit. The prevailing ...
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7
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Significance of the Phoenician Sailor having pearls for eyes in The Waste Land
Here is a quote from Xenophon, something said by the pilot's mate on a perfectly ordered Phoenician trading ship:
“There is no time left, you know,” he added, “when God makes a tempest in the great ...
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7
votes
Accepted
What is the relationship between Heart of Darkness and The Hollow Men?
There is an immediate and direct connection between the two. Toward the conclusion of Heart of Darkness the narrator, Marlow, describes Kurtz as "hollow to the core" (p72). By this, he means that Kutz ...
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7
votes
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Can the influence of the 1918 "Spanish flu" pandemic be seen in T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land"?
TL;DR: Several scholars have investigated the relationship between the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic on modernist writers including T. S. Eliot. Most such analysis has taken place in the past 25 years. ...
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6
votes
Identify the source of this quote by T.S. Eliot
The source of the quote is one of the last paragraphs in T. S. Eliot's essay "Religion & Literature", which was based on a lecture and published in the collection Essays Ancient and ...
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6
votes
What did Eliot mean when he said “I would suggest that none of the plays of Shakespeare has a meaning”?
The source of the quote is Eliot's Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca, an address to the Shakespeare Association in 1927 that was reprinted in the collection Selected Essays (1917-1932) (Faber and ...
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5
votes
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What are T. S. Eliot’s “Jellicle Cats” and “Pollicle Dogs”?
Catherine Milner, Arts Correspondent of the Telegraph, wrote in 2002:
According to Dr Faber, a retired physicist who is now 74 and lives in Cambridge, Eliot was "a very generous godfather and the ...
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5
votes
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What do the fourth tempter's words mean, from “Murder in the Cathedral”?
In interpreting these lines, it's important to bear in mind exactly what the Fourth Tempter is trying to do. All the Tempters are showing Thomas a false path -- a path that will lead to damnation. ...
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5
votes
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Understanding the first dialogue of Archbishop Thomas Becket involving antitheses
The crux of this verse is to understand the meaning of "suffering". It is crucial that we understand "suffering" means not the modern and more popular sense of "undergoing ...
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4
votes
What is the "heap of broken images" in The Waste Land?
From this source: (emphasis mine)
Adopting a prophetic tone of archaic allusion for much of the poem,
Eliot asks, “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/Out of
this stony rubbish? ...
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4
votes
Significance of the Phoenician Sailor having pearls for eyes in The Waste Land
My sense is it relates to the theme of "profit & loss", and commerce/banking, that is developed later in The Burial of the Dead:
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought ...
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4
votes
Which Upanishad is TS Eliot referencing with "Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata." and why?
As muru mentioned in his answer, the Upanishad Eliot is referencing is the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. Eliot added the following footnote:
“Datta, dayadhvam, damyata” (Give, sympathise, control). The ...
- 44k
4
votes
What is the "heap of broken images" in The Waste Land?
This is my first attempt at writing an answer, so I hope I have done it right in terms of links of attribution and format. If I have not, I hope someone will tell me, so I can benefit from ...
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4
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Why did T.S. Eliot make a statement that 'Coriolanus' was Shakespeare's masterpiece and that 'Hamlet' was an artistic failure?
In the essay ‘Hamlet and His Problems’, collected in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920), Eliot describes Hamlet as an artistic failure because Hamlet’s emotions and actions cannot ...
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4
votes
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Why does Dennis Brown say Hughes's Crow is "a sly parody of Eliot's later style"?
@DukeZhou correctly referred me to Eliot's Four Quartets. After reading it thoroughly, I think that the passage quoted on the question refers to the following lines of the last part of the third ...
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4
votes
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Did T. S. Eliot write crime novels under a pseudonym?
The most likely explanation is that Kleinstück got his facts wrong. As Paul Grimstead's article What Makes Great Detective Fiction, According to T. S. Eliot (The New Yorker, 02.02.2016) points out, ...
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4
votes
Accepted
What does T. S. Eliot mean by "This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper"?
While what a poet is trying to tell the reader will usually be a matter of dispute, B. C. Southam shines some light on these lines in A Student's Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot, pp. 217-8:
...
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4
votes
Why do all the lines of Burnt Norton seem unconnected?
I think my answer here should give you a pretty clear idea of what Burnt Norton is about.
Although some minor details (for that matter analytical tools as well) might be open to interpretation, the ...
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4
votes
Are the names J. Alfred Prufrock and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley completely arbitrary?
According to Christopher Ricks (Eliot, T. S. Inventions of the March Hare), in his drafts of the poem T. S. Eliot subtitled it Prufrock among the Women. And an article in the Kipling Journal of 1959, ...
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4
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Did T.S. Eliot really plagiarize in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"?
Plagiarism means unlawful theft of intellectual property in the context of writing. Modernism is heavily characterised by what is commonly referred to as allusiveness. When an author uses another ...
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3
votes
In T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land", how do the wind and the "pearls that were his eyes" connect to the central message of the poem?
The second part (“A Game of Chess”) of The Waste Land is a sequence of episodes in different styles, all concerned with seduction. (The title alludes to Thomas Middleton’s play A Game at Chess in ...
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