The reading list for Eliot and Jones follow:
-
“The Waste Land” (1922)
-
“Quartets” (1917)
-
“Preludes” (1917)
-
“Morning At the Window” (1917)
-
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917)
-
Preface to a Twenty
-
Volume Suicide Note
(1960)
-
The Dead Lecturer
(1964)
“Prelude,” ”Morning,” and “Prufrock” appear in
American Literature
of the Houghton Mifflin Literature Series, available in most high schools. A review section,
For Greater Appreciation
, provides excellent questions for class discussion.
Prerequisite for understanding the poems of Eliot and Jones is the study of the basic elements of the poem itself. The meanings of the following terms should be reviewed:
-
rhyme
-
rhythm (meter)
-
free verse
-
blank verse
-
figures of speech
-
____
simile
-
____
metaphor
-
____
personification
-
alliteration
-
consonance
-
assonance
-
imagery (image)
-
theme
-
verse
-
stanza
-
symbol
-
paradox
-
irony
Juniors and seniors have already been exposed to poetry, so the review need not be extensive. The teacher should make a crucial distinction between poetic image and metaphor. Gaston Bachelard in
The Poetics of Space
makes it clear that metaphor is a mere analogy for an object or idea. Image is far more profound. He states, “The reader of poems is asked to consider image not as an object and even less as the substitute for an object, but to seize its specific reality. For this, the act of the creative consciousness must be systematically associated with the most fleeting product of that consciousness, the poetic image” (p. xv). To Bachelard all images come from the universal soul; the poetic image transcends language. “It is always a little above the language of signification.” (p. xxiii)
The poetry of Eliot and Jones draws heavily on universal images of decay, sterility, and alienation. Eliot felt that “the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’ . . . a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that
particular
emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”
2
Students should look for examples of images that serve as objective correlatives in the poems of Eliot and Jones.