Nature Versus Degenerated Morals in The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land

Abstract

Eliot?s essays were a major factor in the revival of interest in the metaphysical poets. Eliot particularly praised the metaphysical poets? ability to show experience as both psychological and sensual, while at the same time infusing this portrayal with-in Eliot?s view?wit and uniqueness. Eliot essay ?The Metaphysical Poets?, along with giving new significance and attention to metaphysical poetry, introduced his now well-known definition of ?unified sensibility?, which is considered by some to mean the same things as the term ?metaphysical.? newlineWhile it would appear, then, that T. Stearns Eliot was using J. Alfred Prufrock as an alter ego to explore his own emotions, this is not the case. Superficial differences aside ? Eliot was a young man in 1909, while Prufrock is balding and probably middle?aged ? Eliot disdained poetry that focused on the poet himself. He wrote in his essay ?Tradition and the individual Talent? that the ?progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.? He crystallized his idea about how to achieve this extinction of personality in another essay, ?Hamlet and His Problesm?: ?The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ?objective correlative?; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events, which shall be the formula of that particular emotion.? Simply put, the objective correlative ? a tangible, concrete thing ? assumes the emotional significance in a work of art; Eliot largely does away with abstract emotional ruminations. newline