Year 12 IB Extended Essays 2018

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Research Question: In what way does T.S Eliot’s poetry reflect the complex and subtle mix of modernity and tradition, and how effective is this in creating images and conveying themes? Introduction Born in 1888, T.S Eliot was a leader of the modernist movement through his works produced as a poet, playwright, essayist, literary and social critic. Eliot is the precursor to post- modernism and it is widely accepted that his works were a revolutionary construct that experimented with new diction, versification and style which fostered the revitalisation of the poetic genre. The intriguing and complex paradox of Eliot is that he wrote about conservative and traditional ideas through the use of radical poetic techniques and styles. I will investigate Eliot’s poems through the research question: In what way does T.S Eliot’s poetry reflect the complex and subtle mix of modernity and tradition, and how effective is this in creating images and conveying themes? The poems that I will focus on are: Preludes, The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, The Journey of the Magi, The Hollow Men and The Waste Land. I will endeavour to explore the difficult construct of analysing Eliot’s traditionalist ideas conveyed through his use of modernist techniques and structure. The process for this will be individual and linked analysis of Eliot’s four poems, from the perspective of its thematic nostalgia for a surer, more certain, spiritual world conveyed paradoxically through dynamic, controversial and often radical techniques, and assessing to what degree this lead to success in creating images and conveying themes. Modernism emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and it pertains to the succession of advancements in artistic and literary culture that focused on the rejection of historical and conservative ideas through experimental forms. In society, it could be seen through the loss of spirituality, and the resulting secularisation within the Christian tradition, the consequent rise of materialism, the breakdown of the traditions of Western Civilisation, the loss of ritual, and the eroding of values. It was a time during which there was “rapid industrialisation, rapid social change and advances in the science and social sciences” throughout Europe and the Western World. (Kathleen Kuiper, 2018) As an artist, Eliot abandoned the traditions of the poetic culture for the new radical styles and genres that he pioneered. Tradition, in this instance, could be viewed as aspects which are more