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There is no abstract available for this thesis.

There is no abstract available for this thesis.

This thesis consists of a theoretical discussion of persona as a poetic device and includes an analysis of the structural relationship between the personae, the speakers, of T.S, Eliot's poetry and various other poetic elements such as language, point of view, tone, figurative devices, irony, rhythm, etc. In addition, this thesis considers those characteristics which are common to all Eliotan personae.The following poems are analyzed from the perspective of persona: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, “Gerontion,” The Hollow Man, “Journey of the Magi, “A Song for Simeon," "Marina," the monologues of The Waste Land, "Portrait of a Lady," "Preludes," "Rhapsody on a Windy Night," "A Cooking Egg," "Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service," "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar," "Animula, "Sweeney Erect," and "Sweeney Among the Nightingales."

The present study investigates the grammatical and lexical aspects of Little Gidding in the perspective of the Firth-Halliday model and Halliday's functional theory of language. The primary purpose of the study is to bridge the gap between linguistic analysis and literary criticism; the secondary purpose is to evaluate the usefulness of the model as a stylistic tool. The Firth-Halliday model recognizes three scales and four categories in the description of the grammar of English. The three scales are rank (the hierarchical ordering of grammatical units from the most inclusive to the non-inclusive), delicacy (the scale of increasing detail of analysis); and exponence (the scale of exemplification). The four categories are unit, structure, class and system. Unit accounts for those stretches of language of varying extent or size which carry, recurrently, meaningful patterns. Structure is concerned with the nature of these patterns themselves. The category class arranges items in the language according to the way they operate in patterns, and the category, system accounts for those limited groups of possibilities from which choices are made at certain places in the patterns. In lexis, this model proposes two categories: collocation (the relation between one lexical item and the other with which it is associated), and lexical set (the grouping of items having the same range of collocations). The functional theory of language, on the other hand, can be broken down into three categories. The first is ideational (a function serving the expression of content); the second is interpersonal (language playing a communicative role); the third is textual (the function which establishes the relation between the text and the context). The practical analysis of Little Gidding is carried out with the above theoretical framework in the spirit of a linguist, while the selection of prominent features largely depends on the sensitivity and intuition of a literary critic. The grammar in the poem is analysed from sentence rank to word rank at the primary degree of delicacy, while the lexis is studied according to the notion of collocation and lexical set. From the grammatical study some prominent features in the poem emerge: first, the effect of balance at sentence, group and word rank; second, the preponderance of nominal groups; third, the deverbalization of the verbal groups. Two more features come to light as a result of the lexical study: the collocation, of the abstract item with the concrete and the element of polarity. Viewed from the general functions of language, the delay of the subject element in the clause structure and the abundance of adjuncts and complements are indicative of the poet's consciousness of the ideational component, while Eliot's shift of the pronoun you to we fulfils the interpersonal function. Textual function, however, is mainly achieved through the repetition of lexical items and the recurrence of the same lexical sets. Concerning the Firth-Halliday model, two problems merit consideration. They are the concept of rank and the lack of distinction between the function of a finite verb and a non-finite verb in a dependent clause. Yet the model's insistence that language should be described sytematically at all ranks does offer an auxiliary tool to practical criticism. In addition, its designation of all dependent clauses in traditional grammar as rankshifted clauses operating at group rank is an important step towards the functional relationship in the structure of language. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

T. S. Eliot's concern with the philosophy of time is evidenced from his earliest poetry. It is part of the development of his whole philosophy of life: his engagement with reality, his concept of consciousness, the function of history and myth in his life, and his concept of "something beyond", a harmony for which he is striving. Although Eliot was a serious student of philosophy, his poetry is not philosophical in the sense that he is recording already formulated ideas. The poetry, is itself part of the process, the working out and realization of his philosophy. Eliot's concept of time includes two streams which exist simultaneously, and which intersect at significant moments. These are time temporal, in which man must live his life in the changing phenomenal world, and the Timeless, noumenal world which he encounters in these significant moments. He may live in phenomenal time in either of two ways, without hope or purpose, so that he is "time-ridden", or he can live in time teleologically, striving for the understanding of the design into which he must fit in order to achieve the harmony of the still point at the intersection of time and the Timeless. The harmony toward which he is striving in his dialectic struggle in time is complete wholeness of personality and spiritual transcendence. Eliot's philosophy of time and consciousness develops in three stages. In The Waste Land period, in which man is time-ridden and unconscious, he is unable to confront time and create his own being by reconciling his present with his past or "other". In Ash Wednesday he sees his other for the first time through the Lady, the "anima" or primordial image of his own unconscious. She brings him hope and energy, and plunges him into the dialectic struggle in teleological time. Marina and the childhood memories of his "Landscape" poems give more "hints and guesses" and images for moments of "partial ecstasy". In Four Quartets he reconciles all the oppositions in his life and poetry to achieve the harmony of the transcendent still point. Eliot's medium for the progress through time and the development of consciousness is a series of protagonists through which the poet casts off masks of the self, surrendering himself as he is at the moment to something more valuable. Parallel to the poet's struggle in time to achieve the spiritual harmony of the Absolute, is his struggle in poetry to get the better of words. The conflict with words, his "raid on the inarticulate", is his struggle in time to find new ways to express changing concepts and, ultimately to present in poetry those "frontiers of consciousness beyond which words fail though meanings exist". The techniques which he uses to achieve these aims are the continuity and growing significance of his images, his symbolism and his "mythical method", the contrasting of the sterility of contemporary life with the living myth of earlier times. Finally, I believe that Eliot's achievement in Four Quartets is not necessarily the expression of Christian dogma, but that his striving in time for the harmony of the Absolute of the Timeless, and its realization in poetry, is an artistic creation which is his own private myth. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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This thesis traces the relationship between the First World War, constructions of masculinity, and the life and poetry of T.S. Eliot. Central to this relationship is a study of homoeroticism, which the author characterizes as different from homosexuality but not exclusive of it, in late 19th and early 20th century poetic traditions. The argument begins by establishing a critical framework that draws on contemporary paradigms of Modernist literary gender studies but also seeks to revise them by shifting the focus to issues surrounding masculinity. With this framework in place, the thesis goes on to discuss the tradition of male homoeroticism in artistic movements preceding World War I, including Symbolism, Uranianism, and Aestheticism, then moves on to an examination of the war itself, its effect on soldiers' notions of masculinity, and the intensification of the homoerotic element in the poetry composed by soldier poets. I then reexamine the relationship between Eliot's poems, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land, arguing that both are significantly inflected by the changing masculine consciousness of the war era and that both are largely personal in nature despite their author's insistence on the impersonality of poetry. An explication follows of Prufrock and Eliot's other verse written between 1914 and c.1920, focusing on passages that suggest the homoerotic. The bridge between this and the section on The Waste Land is a commentary on the relationship of Eliot and his friend Jean Verdenal, a Frenchman who was killed in the war, and the import of this friendship to Eliot's work. The possibility of their homosexual involvement is entertained but not insisted upon, the point being reemphasized that homoeroticism, not homosexuality, has the more meaningful impact on the masculine artistic consciousness. All of these ideas culminate in the Waste Land chapter, which highlights passages of the poem dealing with a range of human possibilities for intimacy-male and female, sexual and non-sexual. The study concludes that the poem ought to be read as a representation of an embattled masculine consciousness drawn to the homoerotic but uncomfortable with changing 20th century sexual mores. / Graduation date: 2001