... voices, traditions, and discourses; and its focus on form as the carrier of meaning. His critical prose set the aesthetic standards for the New Criticism, and his journal  Criterion  was one of the primary arbiters of taste throughout the 1920's and 1930's. Eliot's wide-ranging but relatively small corpus of work, the precocious "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," " (1915), the seminal "The Waste Land" (1922), and the later "Four Quartets" (1943), which Eliot considered his masterpiece "has ... made him the primary figure of modernist poetry both for his peers and for subsequent...

• Word Count: 4134
• Approx Pages: 17
• Grade Level: High School

... readily definable and certainly not easily definable within conventional poetic resources. For these purposes the limits of expression in rhythm, the use of images and symbols, allusion and reference and word choice were extended: at the same time the limits of syntax as a resource for the expression of meaning were explored. Here is an example from the opening of T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, first published in 1915: Let us go then, you and I, When ... the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-de...

• Word Count: 10566
• Approx Pages: 42

... humanity's) decline to a trite and lifeless existence. The modern banality of civilisation is further presented as the speaker 'drank coffee, and talked for an hour'. The '[drinking] of coffee' is a menial act, suggesting the inanimate qualities of people in need of stimulus, whilst the indolent conversation which follows indicates the hollow existence of Western aristocratic society; a concept explored further in Eliot's 'The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock', as '[he has] measured out [his ... ] life in coffee spoons' implying a meticulously planned rationale, investi...

• Word Count: 1365
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: Undergraduate