The Modernist Literature

Department Of English

Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji

Bhavnagar University

Name: Bhatt Vidhi Rajeshkumar

Roll No.: 04

SEM: 03

Year: 2012-13

Subject: The Modernist Literature

Assignment Topic: Eliot’s view of life

Submitted To: Dr. Dilip Barad

Eliot’s View of Life

Introduction: - Eliot once said that, “a great poet in writing himself writes his age”, and to none is this remark more applicable than to Eliot himself. His Waste Land has been called the epic of the modern age presenting as it does a panorama of the futility and anarchy that is contemporary civilization. Eliot’s poetry cannot be understood without and understanding of his age.

The atmosphere of perplexity, confusion and anxiety has been further accentuated by the long strides forward that the study of psychology has taken since the times Freud. Freud emphasized the power of unconsciousness to affect conduct. Intellectual conventions, he pointed out, were rationalizations of emotional needs. Human beings are not so rational as they are supposed to be: their conduct is not guided and controlled by the conscious, rather it is at the mercy of forces lying buried deep within the unconscious.

Eliot’s Views of Life

1.      The note of anxiety: Its root cause:-

The note of anxiety is the most common characteristic of modern age, as self-complacency was that of the Victorian age. The atmosphere is changed with a spirit of depression, gloom, frustration and foreboding. Various reasons are assigned for the tragic pessimism of the age. It is pointed out that it results from social crisis as economic depression, unemployment, political upheavals, rapid increase of population overcrowding, shortages of necessities of life, sexual inhibitions and frustrations and recurrence of destructive wars, posing the possibility of total annihilation of mankind. However, the real causes of this mood of frustration and disillusionment lie much deeper. There is confusion of intellectual matters; there is a breakdown of ideals and values, and absence of sustaining faith.

2.      T.S.Eliot’s plea for a religious basis of life:-

 T.S.Eliot’s also plea for a reinstatement of religious views of life. He probes into the basis cause of the modern age malaise and concludes that there is not escape from the nemesis of a purely materialistic civilization except in a return of the life of faith and the fundamental religious basis of life. Anxiety and disillusionment have always been there in every age, and the remedy has always been a restoration of faith. Because of his insight into the nature of things, he is able to relate contemporary experiences to the universal experiences of man. Eliot’s poetry is not a mere rendering of contemporary disillusionment.

“It has relevance not merely to the modern, peculiar, human situation, but also to the universal human predicament”.

-          A.G.George

3.      Extension view of life:-

T. S. Eliot is one of those great figures of the age who have realized the seriousness of this inner or spiritual crisis, and whose works offer a view of life, a philosophical or religious synthesis to the agonized soul of tortured humanity. Eliot’s views of life is, first, frankly existentialist. “Extentialism is a philosophy of crisis” and its most powerful modern advocate is soren Kierkegaard. Existentialism considers human life in relation to its unavoidable destiny, sickness, suffering, misfortune and death. Existentialists are aware of crisis, but they view the difficulties of today not as the result of some peculiar vicious economic or social environment, but inherent in the very nature of human life.

                This is Eliot’s view of the human predicament. It is for this reason that Eliot’s poetry abounds in the imagery of sickness, disease and death, thus conveying a sense that human life is basically diseased and disorganized.

                The Waste Land, is imbued through and through with the fear of death. This realization that: Tragedy is at the heart of life” expresses itself as the sense of disillusionment in Eliot’s poetry, especially Waste Land.

4.      The Religious Note:-

Eliot’s view of life is first, essential, and secondly; it is religious. Eliot was always religious, and it would be wrong to suppose that he became religious only after his confirmation as a member of the Anglo-Catholic Church. This religious strain appears even in the earliest poems; he takes themes of a secular nature and satirizes man’s materialism and his lack of concern about spiritual problems.

5.      Faith in the Supernatural: Rejection of Humanism and Liberalism:-

The word ‘religion’ signifies for Eliot a particular kind of attitude towards life which is opposed to the secular. He uses the word to denote an attitude of passionate concern for man’s spiritual destiny. The religious man need not be a Christian, he may even be an atheist, but he is religious if he gives earnest and sincere thought to religious matters. It is this concern with matters spiritual, as contrasted with the worldly and the secular and not the adherence to any dogma that makes a man truly religious. Secondly, religion for Eliot implies a faith in “the primacy of the supernatural over the natural life”. In this lies the essence of his religious attitude. It is this concern with the supernatural which makes Eliot rejects both humanism and liberalism. Liberalism implies a faith in human nature; it implies that human beings are basically good and rational and if permitted to exercise their powers freely they would progress continuously. Now the essential rationality of man is rejected by Eliot, for it is challenged by the psychologists themselves who point out that the rational in man is controlled by the irrational feeling, intuition and inspiration are surer and better guides to action.

6.      Rejection of Human Goodness and Evaluation:-

As regards the inherent goodness of man, it is also rejected by rejected, for if man is basically good, we cannot sufficiently account for the presences of evil and suffering in the world. He rejects the idea of continuous progress ultimately leading to perfectibility, because history does not bear it out.

Man today is still as selfish, aggressive and brutal as the man in the cave. Hence the destructive wars and the doom of annihilation hanging over human head.

We have already above Eliot’s pre-occupation with death. Man lives in constant fear of death, death is his ultimate, destiny, and the greatest longing of the human soul is for immortality. Therefore, the goal towards which man progresses must be some spiritual goal. Man must be concerned not with his secular salvation, but with his secular salvation, but with his he must feel, “the primacy of the supernatural over the natural”, i.e. of the spiritual over the secular. The salvation of the human soul means an approach to immortality, a progress towards God, the supernatural; true religion implies not any dogma or creed but a reorientation of life in relation to the supernatural. 

7.      Faith in Tradition:-

Such a religious progress, such salvation, can be brought about, not through absolute freedom which the liberals desire for men, but through a life within the frame-work of tradition and orthodoxy. Eliot feels an urgent need for the acceptance of tradition, which is in reality a recognition of the real value of institutions, customs etc.

Eliot advocated doctorial ideologies like communism and fascism. He rather condemned them as shifting the human personality. He recognized, that modern democratic institutions have degenerated, and so advanced a new concept of democracy “a democracy limited by heredity right”

8.      Man’s Imperfection

The human soul craves immortality, and immortality implies an approach towards the supernal. But man can never approach him, for man is finite. Eliot rejects the romantic and utopian notions of the perfectibility of man.

‘Humanity’ is the highest of Christian virtues, for it implies recognition of one’s imperfection and finitude against the perfection and infinitude of the supernal. ‘Pride’ is the worst of sins, for it implies an effort to equate oneself with the divine.

9.      His view of time:-

One more aspect of Eliot’s philosophy, i.e. his view of ‘time’ and ‘eternity’ remains to be considered. ‘Time’ and the relation of ‘time’ to human destiny is one of the recurring themes of Eliot’s play and poetry, and the four quartets are concerned exclusively with the concepts of ‘Time’ and ‘Eternity’ and their relationship.

Reality is one, but ‘Time’ as popularly envisaged is the division of reality into existent and non-existent parts.

10.  His concept of eternity:-

Further light is thrown on Eliot’s concept of time by his concept of eternity. Eternity includes ‘Time’, but it is also above and beyond time. It somehow transcends time. Eternity is used in at least three senses: (i) an unending extent of time, (ii) that which is entirely time less and (iii) that which includes time but somehow also transcends time. Eliot uses Eternity in the third sense.

Time can be conquered only through time, for it is in the moment that the eternal reveals itself, and thus the moment is made eternal.