T.S.Eliot의 詩와 그 主題問題 : 「Prufrock 戀歌」「荒蕪地」를 中心으로 Chiefly on "Prufrock" and "The Waste Land" = T.S.ELIOT AND ITS SUBJECT MATTER

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The English poetry in the latter half of the 19th century devoted itself chiefly to the task of teaching the people. The poet, then, pretended to be the teachers of the people and the prophets, and the poet's true worth was to be tested by 'what he means as thinker'. In Tennyson's poetry, for example, Yeats can see only 'descriptions… of the moral law for the sake of the moral law'. The poems, then, were crusted with current opinion, which to a later age will seem merely the product of self-deception.
By the 1890's the literary world was split into two extremes. On the one hand, such poets as Kipling continued to write the public poems to teach the people 'Truth', but their poems taught nothing the audience did hot know. On the other hand, such poets as Wilde not only rejected the poet's role as a teacher or a prophet, but also wrote poems concerned only with 'Beauty' which only the Artist call truly perceive, and into which the audience could not be brought.
One of the principal problems for twentieth-century poets has been to bring these extremes into a new wholeness. This problem was perfected partially by W. B. Yeats and the Imagists such as Hulme and Pound, and finally by T. S. Eliot.
To T. S. Eliot, the poet's function is not to instruct, nor is it simply to delight; it is not to state 'Truth' only, not to create 'Beauty'. This attitude of Eliot is closely related with the subject-matter of poetry. The subject-matter of T. S. Eliot is neither the poet's intellectual or physical experience- 'Truth' - which will be clouded by public opinion or individual judgements, not the personal mystical philosophy- 'Beauty' - which can't be brought into the world of men, but the state of feeling which lies deeper below the levels of consciousness. This part of our being is surely there, but we can't find the words for it. If we can find the best words or the least wrong words, then, it expresses itself into a poem. This is not the voice of 'opinion', but that of the poet's 'soul'.
'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrok' is the expression of the state of mind of Prufrock, loitering in the evening along the region of death and life. Prufrock is obssessed sometimes with the sense of abyss or hell, sometimes with boredom of life 'measured with coffee spoons', sometimes with indifference or resignation, and at other times with profound self-disgust or self-apology. You will be at first puzzled by the abruption, disorder or obscurity of this poem, but you'll be surprised to find in the end that Prufrock is the very your 'self'.
In 'The waste Land' the world in which Prufrock inhaibits is realistically or horribly expressed. The world we live in is like that 'Waste Land' of 'Fisher King', which was cursed and barren because of the King's sexual barrenness, The world in which 'desires' are burining and burning, the world whose towers (of the church) are upside down in the air, the cities of Europe which are cracking and falling-these slates of our world we are always feeling in our soul, not in our brain or thought, but they always elude the formation in our words.
But T. S. Eliot has found the words, has created the new poetic form into which these states of feeling place themselves into a poem. There are many fragmental voices and quotations in Eliot's poetry, especially in the Waste Land, which are different in language and centuries. We can hear the echoes of Dante, Shakespeare, Budha, Christ, Hindu saints and many others. Our historical sense or literary culture is enough if only we can understand these fragments. And then these fragmental, but essential voices, together with various images, symbols and the juxtaposition of contraries (such as water and fire), unite themselves into a certain being, the poem itself.
Eloit did not write poems deliberately to deliver something to the audience, but he brooded the 'floating feelings', which is obscure to the poet himself, but common to all of us, to incubate anything else but poetry
By Eliot the tradition of English poetry, which was split into two extremes, has again been united into a new wholeness and acquired life.