Poems & Content
This poem's speaker invites the listener on a walk through "half-deserted streets," building up to an "overwhelming question" he never quite asks.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
"Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table" - the opening lines of which poem?
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
This psychological state, the inability to act or decide, is most associated with Prufrock's repeated refrain, "Do I dare?"
paralysis / indecision
Eliot wrote "Prufrock," "Preludes" and "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" in the years leading up to and during this global conflict, whose devastation deepened his sense of civilisation in collapse.
World War I
Eliot compares the evening sky to "a patient etherised upon a table"- what poetic device is this?
Simile
This poem unfolds across four fragmented movements; evening, morning, afternoon and a final direct address, cataloguing the grime and monotony of urban life.
Preludes
"The worlds revolve like ancient women / Gathering fuel in vacant lots" - the closing image of which poem?
Preludes
"Preludes" and "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" both depict the modern city as a site of this condition, through imagery of grime, decay and disconnected lives.
spiritual emptiness / urban decay
Eliot's early city poems reflect widespread anxiety about this process; the rapid growth of industrial cities and the resulting sense of anonymity, grime and disconnection in modern life.
urbanisation / industrial modernity
The repeated line "In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo" in "Prufrock" is an example of this technique.
Refrain/repetition
This poem structures a solitary midnight walk home around the chimes of a clock striking each hour, with each street lamp acting almost as a character provoking an unsettling memory.
What is "Rhapsody on a Windy Night
"His soul stretched tight across the skies / That fade behind a city block" - an early image comparing the moon to a fraying consciousness, from which poem?
Rhapsody on a Windy Night
"Journey of the Magi" explores this theme through the Magus's realisation that spiritual rebirth demands the death of an old self and old certainties.
spiritual death and rebirth (the difficulty and cost of faith/conversion)
In 1927, the same year he wrote "Journey of the Magi," Eliot converted to this branch of Christianity and became a British subject, seeking spiritual certainty amid the disillusionment of the age.
Anglicanism (he was confirmed in the Church of England in 1927)
Rather than following one continuous narrative, poems like "Preludes" and "The Hollow Men" are built from disconnected images, voices and moments stitched together without clear transitions, mirroring the disorder of the modern world they depict.
Fragmentation
Narrated by one of the three wise men long after the event, this poem recalls a difficult winter journey to witness a birth the speaker later realises meant the death of his old life.
Journey of the Magi
"were we led all that way for / Birth or Death?" - this anguished question, conflating a holy birth with the death of an old self, appears in which poem?
Journey of the Magi
"The Hollow Men" is preoccupied with this idea; the gap between what people intend and what they actually do, described as "the Shadow" that falls "between the motion / And the act."
the failure/gap between intention and action (spiritual inertia)
In the early 1920s, strain from his troubled first marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, along with overwork and exhaustion, led Eliot to suffer this kind of health crisis.
Nervous breakdown
This is the technique of embedding references to other texts, such as a Lancelot Andrewes sermon and the Bible in "Journey of the Magi," or Dante's *Inferno* in the epigraph to "Prufrock."
Allusion/intertextuality
Spoken collectively by empty, straw-filled figures gathered on the "beach of the tumid river," this poem is structured in five parts building toward its famous final image.
The Hollow Men
"This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper" - the closing lines of which poem?
The Hollow Men
Across the selection, Eliot repeatedly stages a failure of this between individuals, whether romantic ("Prufrock"), social ("Preludes") or spiritual ("The Hollow Men").
isolation / the failure of communication and connection
T.S. Eliot was born in 1888 in this American city, before emigrating to England, where he later became a British citizen.
St. Louis, Missouri
"Journey of the Magi" and "Prufrock" are both delivered in this poetic form, in which a single speaker addresses a silent listener, revealing their psychology through their own words.
Dramatic monologue