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

Surrealism is a dangerous word to use about the poet, playwright and critic T.S. Eliot, and sure with his first major work, "The neck Song of J. Alfred Prufrock ". Eliot wrote the poem, after all, eld earlier Andre Breton and his compatriots began defining and practicing " phantasmagoricism" fit. 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 defined the front line in philosophical and psychological terms. Moreover, Eliot would later show indifference, incomprehension and at propagation hostility toward surrealism and its precursor Dada. Eliots favourites among his French contemporaries werent surrealists, save were rather the figures of St. potty Perse and Paul Verlaine, among others. This does not mean Eliot had nothing in common with surrealist poetry, but the facts that both Eliot and the Surrealists owed much to Charles Baudelaires can perhaps best explain some(prenominal) similarity "strangely evocative explorations of the symbolic suggestions of objects and images." Its unusual, sometimes startling juxtapositions oft characterize surrealism, by which it tries to transcend logic and habitual thinking, to reveal deeper levels of significance and of unconscious associations. Although scholars might not classify Eliot as a Surrealist, the surreal landscape, defined as "an attempt to express the workings of the subconscious foreland 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 fundamental interaction of the images, and that meaning is enlarged by echoes, often heroic," of other writers. The juxtapositions mentioned earlier are evident even at the poems opening, which begins on a rather disconsolate note, with a nightmarish passage from Dantes Inferno. The main character, Guido de Montefeltro, confesses his sins to Dante, assuming that "none has of all time returned alive from this depth" this "depth" being Hell. As the ref has never experienced death and the passage through the Underworld, he must swan on his own imagination (and/or subconscious) to place a proper reference onto this cryptic opening. Images of a landscape of fire and brimstone survey to mind as do images of the two characters sharing a surprisingly casual conversation amid the chaos and the flame. The nightmarish theme continues as the reader explores the wet, cold and hostile streets of the city, a city which seems to many readers to be on the verge of reality, without ever crossing the line.