‘Eliot’s earlier poetry is characterized by sexual, spiritual and artistic despair’

‘Eliot’s earlier poetry is characterized by sexual, spiritual and artistic despair’

Despair is the complete loss or absence of hope which usually entails a feeling of futility; writing on despair must therefore express a negative view of the future. While Eliot does write with an air of negativity in The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, Gerontion and The Wasteland, these feelings are usually focused on the past and the present – to see the future readers must take inference from his words. Sexual, spiritual and artistic despair do not characterize these three early poems by Eliot; instead, it is more a sense of melancholy – a deep pensive sadness. Eliot was surrounded by similar feelings as he wrote his earlier poems in Europe during and shortly after the First World War, as society was recoiling from its effects. Further, through Modernism, the art world was also reflecting on all art that had come before it and trying to create something completely new to match the new, industrialized, world. Eliot struggles to escape the past completely and, through references to previous works, actually lends some focus to it. Melancholy plays a much greater part than despair in his earlier poems as a result of this.
Discussion of the future in some form is essential to a poem for it to convey a sense of despair – an emotion that relies on the absence of hope, something based in the future. References to the future differ between the poems – perhaps as a result of the ages of the speaker. Prufrock, being a middle aged man, talks seemingly in balance between the past and the future – the latter is mentioned through the repetition of ‘there will be time’; Gerontion, an elderly man, focuses solely on the past and the present – perhaps daring not to look towards the future because of the death that it holds; the varied treatment of the future in The Wasteland seems to be a result of the fractured voices it holds – one such voice uses it to draw upon their feeling of uncertainty towards the future in part two with the rhetoric of ‘What shall we do tomorrow? /...

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