FRAGMENTATION, ANXIETY AND MOURNING: T.S. ELIOT’S WASTE LAND, THE HOLLOW MEN AND EZRA POUND’S HUGH SELWYN MAUBERLY AS MODERN ANGLO-AMERICAN ELEGIES (original) (raw)

2014, The Subcarpathian Studies in English Language, Literature and Culture. Volume 2: Literature and Culture, Edited by Małgorzata Martynuska, Barbara Niedziela & Elżbieta Rokosz-Piejko, ISBN 978-83-7996-063-7

The aim of the paper is to scrutinize T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land, The Hollow Men and Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberly with reference to elegiac conventions. The author is going to examine how and to what extent these modernist poems mirror the elements of elegy as genre, is departures and inheritances. The paper is going to prove that Wasteland, The Hollow Men and Hugh Selwyn Mauberly reflect traditional and modern dimensions and features of elegies, both their thematic and structural components and that these two modernists, though questioning elegiac conventions, do not disprove the existence of the conventions of the genre. Moreover, the author of the article will analyse a modernist structure of the three poems, the authors’ linguistic and stylistic experimentation as well as the poets’ juxtaposing tradition and modernity, past and present, ancient and contemporary world, ancient art and culture versus modern commercialism and materialism. Finally, it will be shown how Eliot and Pound, while seemingly spring from the classical elegies, attempt to repress or disguise them, since the poets favour impersonality over emotion, “masculine” irony over “effeminate” sorrow and grief. Notwithstanding this, the article will prove that elegy constitutes one of the most important genres embedded in their texts.