T.S Eliot's Poetic Voice Isabella Hoogenhout 12th Grade

Emotionally charged and deeply intellectual literature acts as the voice of an empathic society, reeked by disturbing uncertainty and consumed by an anxious paralysis. T.S Eliot’s confronting suite of poetry forces a reconciliation with the futility of the modern world, a masterful quality that allows his nihilistic works to endure within our anxious post-9/11 zeitgeist. In a 1951 speech Eliot recognized the immensely powerful nature of the poetic voice, as it has the ability to communicate the “secret feelings” and the “despair of a generation”. The intense anxiety of Eliot’s disjointed society resulted in an earthly ‘purgatory’ of isolation and disparity. Eliot’s nihilistic perception of modernism provided a voice for paralyzed society, rejected by the infertility of the decaying urban landscape.

Alienation from a superficial world embeds a sense of meaningless isolation within a social consciousness. Eliot voices his permeating social anxiety through Prufrock, in the ironically named ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. The poem, despite the misleading title, is not in fact a love song typical of idyllic romanticism. Rather, ‘Love Song’ is an agonizing examination into the modernist psyche, as Prufrock embodies the...