What am I?
A short, introductory piece of music that precedes a larger or more complex work. It sets the mood, establishes the key, or warms up the instruments for the main performance.
A prelude
When one is at the forefront of new and experimental ideas and methods in art, music, or literature, they are?
Avant Garde
The poet who influenced TS Eliot's engagement with the flaneur.
Charles Baudelaire
How does counterpoint function in Eliot's poetry?
When a composer writes a piece of music using voices that follow different rhythms or pitches but ultimately come together harmonically, she/he uses counterpoint. (Eliot uses counterpoint to bring his poems to a final harmonic balance.)
Define Ennui:
a
When a person is lacking in mental or physical action or productivity, with relation to religious belief.
Spiritual Vacuity
Anything so weird it doesn't seem real, featuring wild and shifting images, or patterns that are continually moving and changing.
Phantasmagoric
The composer who explores avant garde strangeness and dreamlike dissonance and wildness in his ‘Rhapsodie’ for Saxophone and Piano.
Achille-Claude Debussy
How does bathos function in Eliot's poetry?
When he sudden, often comical transition from a serious, elevated, or emotional tone to something trivial, mundane, or silly.
Define melancholy:
A feeling of pensive sadness, typically with no obvious cause.
When a person wrestles with the big questions involving the meaning of life.
An Existential crisis
What is a system of thought that says that there are no principles or beliefs that have any meaning or can be true, most commonly pertaining to political and religious organisations.
Nihilism
A movement in the early-to-mid 20th-century which was born out of rapid industrialisation and the trauma ofWWI.
Modernism
How does dissonance function in Eliot's poetry?
Eliot presents a clash of discordant, fragmented, or paradoxical elements—to reflect the spiritual and psychological dislocation of the modern era. e.g. clashing poetic rhythms or mismatched imagery: Shape without form, shade without colour (to discribe a spiritual void in The Hollow Men)
Define the two meanings of the word masquerade:
Someone who pretends to be someone they are not they are masquerading as someone else.
When someone attends a social event or gathering wearing costumes and masks.
A grand and passionate free-flowing piece of music, featuring a range of highly contrasted moods, colour, and tonality.
A rhapsody
The part of philosophy that is about understanding existence, knowledge and the nature of the universe.
Metaphysical
The psychoanalyst whose theories on the subconscious, repressed desires, dream interpretation and irrationality influenced Eliot.
Sigmund Freud
How does faux naïve realism work in Eliot's poetry?
Eliot subverts the traditional, Romantic lyric with flat, conversational cadences and cynical observations of the metropolis. e.g. The winter evening settles down / With smell of steaks in passageways.
Define Quotidian:
Mundane routines and habits
What am I if my 'Headpiece (is) filled with straw' and have, 'Shape without form, shade without colour'?
The Hollow Men
A rhetorical device in which a speaker deliberately breaks off in the middle of a sentence and leaves it unfinished.
Aposiopesis
Which work provided T.S. Eliot with a structural and symbolic framework to express the spiritual emptiness of the modern world?
Dante's 'Inferno' (Eliot mapped the medieval underworld of Hades onto post-WWI Europe, utilising Dante’s imagery of Hell to European cities such as Paris and London.
How does objective correlative work in Eliot's poetry?
Eliot presents a set of objects, a specific situation, or a chain of events to evoke an organic emotion in the reader. e.g When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table..." the reader can feel Prufrock's sense of paralysis and vulnerabilty.
Define stream of consciousness:
A literary style in which a character's thoughts, feelings, and reactions are depicted in a continuous flow uninterrupted by conventional links and segues (creates psychological realism)