1.5 Thomas Stearns Eliot

Eliot, Thomas Stearns (1888-1965), American-born English poet, literary critic, dramatist, a leader of the modernist movement in poetry and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, who is best known for his poem The Waste Land (1922), one of the most widely discussed literary works of the early 20th century. Eliot’s plays, which rely on a colloquial use of unrhymed verse, attempted to revive poetic drama for the contemporary audience. His methods of literary analysis have been a major influence on English and American critical writing.

With the publication in 1922 of his poem The Waste Land, Eliot won an international reputation. The Waste Land expresses with great power the disillusionment and disgust of the period after World War I. In a series of vignettes, loosely linked by the legend of the search for the Grail, it portrays a sterile world of panicky fears and barren lusts, and of human beings waiting for some sign or promise of redemption (искупление). The poem's style is highly complex, erudite, and allusive, and the poet provided notes and references to explain the work's many quotations and allusions. Eliot expresses the hopelessness and confusion of purpose of life in the secularized city, the decay of urbs aeterna (the “eternal city”). This is the ultimate theme of The Waste Land, concretized by the poem's constant rhetorical shifts and its juxtapositions of contrasting styles. But The Waste Land is not a simple contrast of the heroic past with the degraded present; it is rather a timeless, simultaneous awareness of moral grandeur and moral evil. The poem's original manuscript of about 800 lines was cut down to 433 at the suggestion of Ezra Pound. The Waste Land is not Eliot's greatest poem, though it is his most famous.

2. The 20th –century drama: George Bernard Shaw

Shaw, George Bernard (1856-1950), Irish-born writer, considered the most significant British dramatist since Shakespeare. In addition to being a prolific playwright (he wrote 50 stage plays), he was also the most keen pamphleteer since the Irish-born satirist Jonathan Swift and the most readable music critic and best theater critic of his generation. He was also one of literature’s great letter writers.

A dreamer and mystic inwardly shy and quietly generous, Shaw was at the same time the antithesis of a romantic; he was ruthless as a social critic and disrespectful of institutions. Even his most serious works for the stage have a comic texture; his plays are full of epigrams and lively dialogue.

Shaw was born on July 26, 1856, in Dublin. Leading by no means an easy life, by the mid-1880s Shaw discovered the writings of Karl Marx and turned to socialist polemics and critical journalism. He also became a firm (and lifelong) believer in vegetarianism, a wonderful `orator, and a playwright. He was the force behind the newly founded (1884) Fabian Society, a middle-class socialist group that aimed at the transformation of English government and society.

Shaw’s first play, Widowers’ Houses (produced 1892), combined Ibsenite devices and aims with a mocking of the romantic conventions that were still being exploited in the English theater. It was eventually published in his Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898). These first seven works for the stage (the others were Candida, The Philanderer, Arms and the Man, The Man of Destiny, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, and You Never Can Tell) received brief runs at best or no productions at all. Mrs. Warren’s Profession was banned by the censor as obscene. One of his Three Plays for Puritans (The Devil’s Disciple, Caesar and Cleopatra, and Captain Brassbound’s Conversion), published in 1901, achieved a slightly better success. Shaw’s Man and Superman (1903), transformed the Don Juan legend into a play, and play-within-a-play. Although on the surface it was a comedy of manners about love and money, its action gave Shaw the opportunity to explore the intellectual climate of the new century in a series of discussions. It established Shaw’s popular reputation in London as playwright and wise man.

Shaw’s comic masterpiece and a comedy of manners, Pygmalion (1914; many years later popular also as a film and as the basis for the musical comedy My Fair Lady), was claimed by its author to be a didactic play about phonetics; it is, rather, about love and class and the exploitation of one human being by another.

Shaw’s next major play, Heartbreak House (1919), exposing the spiritual bankruptcy of his generation, was pessimistic. The intellectual watershed of World War I (1914-1918) caused the difference.

For Saint Joan (1923), Shaw received the 1925 Nobel Prize in literature. In Shaw’s hands Joan of Arc became a combination of practical mystic, heretical saint, and inspired genius.

Shaw continued to write into his 90s. His last plays, beginning with The Apple Cart (1929), turned, as Europe plunged into new crises, to the problem of how people might best govern themselves and release their potential. These were themes he had handled before, but he now approached them with a tragicomic and nonrealistic extravagance that owed more to the ancient Greek comedies of Aristophanes than to Ibsen. Shaw died in his country home at Ayot St. Lawrence on November 2, 1950.

Although he founded no "school" of playwrights like himself, by forging a drama combining moral passion and intellectual conflict, reviving the older comedy of manners, and experimenting with symbolic farce, Shaw helped to reshape the stage of his time. His bold, critical intelligence and sharp pen, touching on contemporary issues, helped form the thought of his own and later generations.

LECTURE 9