SURREALISM AND T.S. ELIOT :: essays research papers

Surrealism is a wild word to use about the poet, playwright and critic T.S. Eliot, and certainly with his head start major work, "The Love vocal of J. Alfred Prufrock ". Eliot wrote the poem, later all, years before Andre Breton and his compatriots began define and practicing "surrealism" proper. Andre Breton published his first "Manifesto of Surrealism" in 1924, seven years after Eliots publication of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". It was this manifesto which specify the movement in philosophical and psychological terms. Moreover, Eliot would later show indifference, incomprehension and at times abhorrence toward surrealism and its precursor Dada. Eliots favourites among his French contemporaries werent surrealists, but were rather the figures of St. John Perse and capital of Minnesota Verlaine, among others. This does not mean Eliot had nothing in common with surrealist poetry, but the facts that both(prenominal) Eliot and the Surrea lists owed much to Charles Baudelaires can perhaps best explain any semblance "strangely evocative explorations of the symbolic suggestions of objects and images." Its unusual, sometimes startling juxtapositions often think of surrealism, by which it tries to transcend logic and habitual thinking, to reveal deeper levels of meat and of unconscious(p) associations. Although scholars might not classify Eliot as a Surrealist, the surreal landscape, defined as "an attempt to express the workings of the subconscious question by images without order, as in a dream " is exemplified in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.""Prufrock presents a symbolic landscape where the meaning emerges from the mutual interaction of the images, and that meaning is enlarged by echoes, often heroic," of other writers. The juxtapositions mentioned earlier are manifest even at the poems opening, which begins on a rather sombre note, with a nightmarish passage from Dantes Inferno. The main character, Guido de Montefeltro, confesses his sins to Dante, assuming that "none has ever returned awake(p) from this depth" this "depth" being Hell. As the reader has never go through death and the passage through the Underworld, he must rely on his own imagination (and/or subconscious) to place a proper informant onto this cryptic opening. Images of a landscape of fire and brimstone come to mind as do images of the two characters sharing a surprisingly passing(a) conversation amid the chaos and the flame. The nightmarish theme continues as the reader explores the wet, frigidness and hostile streets of the city, a city which seems to many readers to be on the wand of reality, without ever crossing the line.