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

Surrealism is a dangerous word to use about the poet, dramatist and critic T.S. Eliot, and certainly with his first major work, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock ". Eliot wrote the poem, after all, years before Andre Breton and his compatriots began defining and practicing "surrealism" proper(a). Andre Breton published his first "Manifesto of Surrealism" in 1924, septenary years after Eliots publication of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". It was this manifesto which defined the movement 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, but were rather the figures of St. John Perse and Paul Verlaine, among others. This does not mean Eliot had nothing in common with surrealist poetry, but the facts that two Eliot and the Surrealists owed much to Char les Baudelaires can perhaps best explain any similarity "strangely evocative explorations of the symbolic suggestions of objects and images." Its unusual, sometimes startling juxtapositions often characterize surrealism, by which it tries to transcend logic and habitual thinking, to reveal deeper levels of meaning and of unconscious associations. Although scholars might not classify Eliot as a Surrealist, the surreal beautify, defined as "an tone-beginning to express the workings of the subconscious mind 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 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 sombre note, with a nightmarish passage from Dantes Inferno. The main cha racter, Guido de Montefeltro, confesses his sins to Dante, assuming that "none has constantly returned alive from this depth" this "depth" being Hell. As the subscriber has never experienced death and the passage through the Underworld, he must rely on his own imagination (and/or subconscious) to place a proper reference onto this cryptic opening. Images of a landscape of fire and brimstone come to mind as do images of the two characters sharing a surprisingly passing(a) 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.