T.S. Eliot Poem Quotes and Analysis
Summary:
The note is a collection of quotes and analysis of T.S. Eliot’s poems ‘Preludes’, ‘Hollow Men’, and ‘Journey of the Magi’ and is great for structuring essays in response to Mod B questions in HSC internal and external assessment tasks. The note discusses the multifaceted, avant-garde nature of ‘Preludes,’ which establishes the intricacies of modern life in an urban metropolis. It also discusses the fragmented depiction of individuals lost in cyclical routines in the poem. The note analyzes ‘The Hollow Men’ and how Eliot challenges the materialistic concerns of the modern world and explores the way in which attempts to recover spirituality are futile in an increasingly faithless and unforgiving world. Finally, the note explores Eliot’s focus on the Magus’ spiritual awareness of Jesus’ significance against the backdrop of his concerns about unfulfilling modernism in the ‘Journey of the Magi.’
Excerpt:
T.S. Eliot Poem Quotes and Analysis
Mod B- quotes and analysis doc
Preludes I & II
Analysis:
Topic sentence: T.S Eliot’s multifaceted, avant-garde piece ‘Preludes’ establishes the intricacies of modern life confined in an urban metropolis, where hope offered by Unitarianism appears futile
| Quotes | Analysis |
| “The winter evening settles down” Image: |
ßThe lyrical tone and rhythm that characterises Prelude I’s idyllic opening, featuring personified iambic tetrameter |
| “smell of steaks in passageways” Image: |
the squalid, sibilant, olfactory image |
| “the burnt-out ends of smoky days” Image: |
evokes the grim and dire circumstances of industrialisation’s pollution |
|
“muddy feet” and “hands/ That are raising dingy shades”
Image: |
ßThis meaningless society which squalor fosters is further heightened in the reductive synecdochic descriptions |
|
“other masquerades/ That time resumes” Image: |
ß“Sordid” city symbolically depicted w “Q”
illuminates the complex ontological crisis modern individuals face as they are vacuously oppressed of their individuality and held accountable by the illusion of the clock |
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