LIDIA VIANU

T.S. Eliot - An Author for All Seasons

 COHERENCE  IN  FRAGMENTARINESS

Eliot's breathless poems have an air of fragmentariness. They seem to be made of pieces forcibly joined together. Transitions between one fragment and the other are violently abrupt. The poet's mind jumps from association to association, until the objects and lives described grow vague and fade unnoticed. The real stage of the poem becomes merged with the poet's mind. Eliot's poems replace reality by a mental landscape: a stream of consciousness wherein each thought is the story of one real object and all thoughts are gathered into one mood which gives coherence to the poem. Eliot's poetry is an indirect one. Its unity of mood can only be inferred from various narrative signs: several incidents which can be fused into an elliptical story, recurrent motifs that suggest a common narrative. As a rule, the voices in Eliot's poem are all supported by an implicit narrative scaffold, whose secrecy makes us reluctant to unveil it as well.

THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK

PORTRAIT OF A LADY

AUNT HELEN

HYSTERIA

LA FIGLIA CHE PIANGE

SWEENEY ERECT

LA LUNE DE MIEL

DANS LE RESTAURANT

THE WASTE LAND