![]() ![]() ![]() Modernist poets often embraced free verse, but Eliot had a more guarded view, believing that all good poetry had the ‘ghost’ of a metre behind the lines. Alfred Prufrock’ (1915), The Waste Land (1922), and ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925) assuring him a place in the ‘canon’ of modernist poetry. Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) is regarded as one of the most important and influential poets of the twentieth century, with poems like ‘The Love Song of J. ![]() Eliot’s poem shows a civilisation in decline, with the haunting image of falling towers followed by a list of major cities which were once capitals of great empires and civilisations: Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna … and now London. The best that can be summoned in this unheroic age, after four years of mechanised slaughter in France and Belgium, is a revived ‘Coriolanus’ – that Roman hero immortalised by Shakespeare – but even there, he is a ‘broken Coriolanus’ who is revived for but ‘a moment’. If Thackeray’s Vanity Fair was, famously, ‘a novel without a hero’, The Waste Land is a poem without a hero. It was his first major poem since The Waste Land, three years earlier, which had transformed him from one of the most important new poets writing in English into probably the most significant poet of his generation – indeed, one who many thought had given a voice to their generation through his eloquent depiction of post-war disillusionment and despair. Eliot published ‘The Hollow Men’ in 1925. ![]()
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