How did Katherine Mansfield and T. S. Eliot exemplify modernist literature? How did Mansfield use influences from her life to fuel her writing? Same with Eliot?
Overview
T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) is frequently referred to as the father of modernism by readers. His use of myth to support and organize the fragmented contemporary experience, the collage-like juxtaposition of many voices, traditions, and discourses, and the emphasis on form as the bearer of meaning are all characteristics of high modernism. In the 1920s and 1930s, his periodical Criterion served as one of the key taste-makers, and his critical writing established the aesthetic parameters for the New Criticism.
The precocious “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), the influential “The Waste Land” (1922), and the later “Four Quartets” (1943), which Eliot considered his masterpiece, have made Eliot the leading figure of modernist poetry for both his peers and for contemporary readers.
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born to a prosperous Unitarian family with Massachusetts origins on September 26, 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri. Eliot mastered Greek, Latin, French, and German while attending Smith Academy from 1898 to 1905 and Harvard College from 1906 to 1909, improving his philological talents and becoming familiar with several philosophical systems.
Eliot developed an interest in French symbolist poetry while he was a student at Harvard. Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Laforgue particularly appealed to him. These poets would also have an impact on Ezra Pound.
