Compare & contrast between Eliot and Yeats

Introduction:

W.B Yeats and T.S Eliot dominated the first half of the 20th century. In W.B. Yeats two generations of poetry met. He wrote his earlier poems under the influence of the romanticists, like Spenser, Shelley, Rossetti and particularly of the late Victorian romantic escapists. The second stage of Yeats’s poetry comprises his symbolic and mystical poems, like The Wandering of Oisin and The Wind among the Reeds. Yeats realized that poetry had to be adjusted to the changes of his time, and this he achieved in and individual way. Through Blake and Siedenborg he found a metaphysical approach. Some of the sources he employed magic and the like seemed unworthy, but the poetic results were of profound beauty. Apart from this philosophical change much else was happening. He was profoundly moved by the ‘troubles’ in Ireland, which resulted in the Easter rebellion, as is seen in poems such as ‘Easter 1916’.

He stands out as the greatest poetical figure of the first half of the twentieth century, of a stature beyond controversy. Out of fables and strange beliefs he made images to hold beauty together in a world where so much conspired for its destruction. In his verses he showed a dominant, even arrogant control of his medium, using simple phrases with a mastery that equaled that of Wordsworth. His later verse is seen at its best in The Wild Swans at Coole, Michael Robertes and the Dancer; The Tower; and The Winding Stair. T.S. Eliot was an American born British poet. He is essentially a modern poet who stands on a footing different from the Romantic and Victorian poets of the nineteenth century. T.S. Eliot both by verse and prose essays, made a revolution in the taste of his generation. His early poems in Prufrock were satiric, sometimes comic, always dramatic and impersonal, with an underlying disparagement of the so-called benefits of civilization. His first remarkable poem The love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock represents, indeed, a complete departure from the conventional poetry of the 19th century and even the poetry of the pre-war years of the twentieth and marks entirely a new beginning. The major influences in it were to be Donne, the later Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, and Laforgue, with Dante also frequently present. Eliot’s another celebrated work is The waste Land which is one of the significant poetic creations of modern times. It is a vivid expression of the poet’s nightmare vision of the hollow life of modern men and women. The poem represents symbolically the failure of modern civilization through the scenes of desolation and social emptiness. The influence of The Waste Land has been immense: no poet, in his own life-time, has seen erected such a verbal monument of criticism over his work. The meaning has complex references often half-concealed, which lead to commentary, yet the poem is best read without the notes for the effect made on the imagination. To sum up Eliot has a major influence on his generation and created a poetic revolution.

The Modern Era:

The modern era includes the early period, called the early modern period, which lasted from c. 1500 to around c. 1800 (most often 1815). Particular facets of early modernity include: The Renaissance, The Reformation and Counter Reformation.

The modern period has been a period of significant development in the fields of science, politics, warfare, and technology. It has also been an age of discovery and globalization. During this time, the European powers and later their colonies began a political, economic, and cultural colonization of the rest of the world.

By the late 19th and 20th centuries, modernist art, politics, science and culture has come to dominate not only Western Europe and North America, but almost every civilized area on the globe, including movements thought of as opposed to the west and globalization. The modern era is closely associated with the development of individualism, capitalism, urbanization and a belief in the possibilities of technological and political progress.  The brutal wars and other problems of this era, many of which come from the effects of rapid change, and the connected loss of strength of traditional religious and ethical norms, have led to many reactions against modern development. Optimism and belief in constant progress has been most recently criticized by postmodernism while the dominance of Western Europe and Anglo-America over other continents has been criticized by postcolonial theory.

One common conception of modernity is the condition of Western history since the mid-15th century, or roughly the European development of movable type and the printing press. In this context the "modern" society is said to develop over many periods, and to be influenced by important events that represent breaks in the continuity.

Modern Age in Literature (1900-1961):

The Modern Age in English Literature started from the beginning of the twentieth century, and it followed the Victorian Age. The most important characteristic of Modern Literature is that it is opposed to the general attitude to life and its problems adopted by the Victorian writers and the public, which may be termed ‘Victorian’. The young people during the first decade of the present century regarded the Victorian age as hypocritical, and the Victorian ideals as mean, superficial and stupid. This rebellious mood affected modern literature, which was directed by mental attitudes moral ideals and spiritual values diametrically opposed to those of the Victorians. Nothing was considered as certain; everything was questioned. In the field of literary technique also some fundamental changes took place. Standards of artistic workmanship and of aesthetic appreciations also underwent radical changes. What the Victorians had considered as honorable and beautiful, their children and grandchildren considered as mean and ugly. The Victorians accepted the Voice of Authority, and acknowledged the rule of the Expert in religion, in politics, in literature and family life. They had the innate desire to affirm and confirm rather than to reject or question the opinions of the experts in their respective fields. They showed readiness to accept their words at face value without critical examinations. This was their attitude to religion and science. They believed in the truths revealed in the Bible, and accepted the new scientific theories as propounded by Darwin and others. On the other hand, the twentieth century minds did not take anything for granted; they questioned everything.

Modernism (1901-1939/1945):

Modernism is notoriously difficult to define clearly because the term encompasses a variety of specific artistic and philosophical movements including symbolism, futurism, surrealism, expressionism, imagism, dada, and others. Modernism is not identical to modernity or modernization, though these terms' meanings overlap. Modernism is a recent period of Western or World Civilization; modernity or modernization is a historical process rather than a period. Modernization or modernity is ongoing since emergence of humanism and modern science in Classical Greece, or at least since the Renaissance. Modernization replaces or transforms traditions, collective identities, and past-orientations with revolutionary activities such as doubt, inquiry, individualism, and future-orientation. The simplest understanding of modern culture is in contrast with traditional cultures, which prevailed through most human history and prehistory and still survive today in family life, rural and religious communities, etc. Like the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and Romanticism, Modernism is a period or movement—an international movement in European, American, and World art, literature, and culture. Modernism occurs approximately 100 years after Romanticism (late 1700s - mid-1800s or later) and, more precisely, after the Realistic period in American literature and the Victorian / Edwardian periods in England. Modernism begins in the late 1800s or early 1900s--a convenient starting point is just before World War 1 (1914-18). Modernism continues till the mid-1900s (end of World War 2 in 1945) or even now, when it may be succeeded by Post-Modernism . . . (or maybe Post-Modernism or postmodernism is just more Modernism). Like other major cultural movements such as the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, or Romanticism, Modernism is both international and interdisciplinary.

Historic Dimensions of Modernism especially in literature:

Modernism begins in the late 1800s or early 1900s, climaxing in the 1910s-30s as writers and artists throughout Europe, the USA, and beyond create and publish an enormous number of revolutionary works that are still recognized as titanic and influential, even if, a century later, their application as models grows more limited.

The great decades of Modernism parallel profound world events, particularly the two World Wars (1914-18 & 1939-45) and the Great Depression (1929-1940?).

World War 1 is often seen as a starting event of Modernism. The devastation and disillusion of Western Civilization in the Great War certainly accelerated and deepened Modernist thinking. However, harbingers of Modernism may be seen in late fiction of Henry James and Joseph Conrad, poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, or Impressionist paintings by Manet or Monet. Political revolutions, upheavals, reforms, or sea-changes are contemporary with cultural Modernism: Russian Revolution (1917), Nazism & Fascism (1930s), USA New Deal (1930s), Chinese Revolution (1946-52).

Modernism may or may not end at mid-20th century, depending on definitions of postmodernism, but certainly the heroic age of Modernism has passed; the current cultural era may be, like Realism following Romanticism, both an extension of and exhaustion from a revolutionary period.

Major Modernist Writers:

      Yeats, William Butler (1865-1939)

      Eliot, Thomas Stearns (1888-1965)

      Bishop, Elizabeth (1911-1979)

      Conrad, Joseph (1857-1924)

      Doolittle, Hilda (1886-1961)

      Faulkner, William (1897-1962)

      Fitzgerald, F. Scott (1896-1940)

      Hemingway, Ernest (1899-1961)

      Hughes, Langston (1902-1967)

      James, Henry (1843-1916)

      Lawrence, D. H. (1885-1930)

      Lowell, Amy (1874-1925)

      Pound, Ezra (1885-1972)

      Shaw, George Bernard (1856-1950)

      Stevens, Wallace (1879-1955)

      Williams, Tennessee (1882-1941)

      Woolf, Virginia (1882-1941)

Characteristics of Modernism in Literature

Modernist writers proclaimed a new "subject matter" for literature and they felt that their new way of looking at life required a new form, a new way of writing. Writers of this period tend to pursue more experimental and usually more highly individualistic forms of writing. The sense of a changing world was stimulated by radical new developments, such as:

      new insights from the emerging fields of psychology and sociology

      anthropological studies of comparative religion

      new theories of electromagnetism and quantum physics

      a growing critique of British imperialism and the ideology of empire

      the growing force of doctrines of racial superiority in Germany

      the escalation of warfare to a global level

      shifting power structures, particularly as women enter the work force

      the emergence of a new "city consciousness"

      new information technologies such as radio and cinema

      the advent of mass democracy and the rise of mass communication

      fin-de-siècle ["end-of-the-century"] consciousness

Some other characteristics of Modern Poetry:

      Development of science and technology

      Rapid industrialization and urbanization

      Expression in trade, commerce and economic activities

      Lack of faith on religion and critical outlook towards life

      Spread of education and literature

      Rise and growth of middle-class

      Women empowerment

      Acute frustration and pessimism

      Experimental tendency in art and literature

      Dominance of various ‘isms’ like imagism, Dadaism, symbolism, realism etc.

      Complexity and obscurity in thought and expression

      Rejection of orthodoxy

      Psychological approach

      Over materialism and lack of spiritualism

Factors behind Modernism:

Notwithstanding it is usually said to have begun with the French Symbolist movement and it artificially ends with the Second World War, the beginning and ending of the modernist period are of course arbitrary. Poets like W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) and Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) started in a post-Romantic, Symbolist vein and modernized their poetic idiom after being affected by political and literary developments. Imagism proved radical and important, marking a new point of departure for poetry. Some consider 'it began in the works of Hardy and Pound, Eliot and Yeats, Williams and Stevens.[4] English language poets, like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Basil Bunting ('a born modernist'), Wallace Stevens and E.E. Cummings also went on to produce work after World War II.

The major three factors behind the modernism are given below-

      World War I (1914-1918): The outbreak of World War I represented a setback for the budding modernist movement for a number of reasons: firstly, writers like Aldington found themselves in active service; secondly, paper shortages and related factors meant that publication of new work became increasingly difficult; and, thirdly, public sentiment in time of war meant that war poets such as Wilfred Owen, who wrote more conventional verse, became increasingly popular. One poet who served in the war, the visual artist David Jones, later resisted this trend in his long experimental war poem "In Parenthesis", which was written directly out of his trench experiences but was not published until 1937. The war also tended to undermine the optimism of the Imagists. This was reflected in a number of major poems written in its aftermath. Pound's "Homage to Sextus Propertius" (1919) uses the loose translations and transformations of the Latin poet Propertius to ridicule war propaganda and the idea of empire. His "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (1921) represents his farewell to Imagism and lyric poetry in general. The writing of these poems coincided with Pound's decision to abandon London permanently. Sound poetry emerged in this period as a response to the war. For many Dadaists, including German writer Hugo Ball and New York poet and performer Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, sound poems were protestations against the sounds of war. As Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo write, “Born as the trench warfare intensified, phonetic poetry was the language of trauma, a new language to counter the noise of the cannons”. The Baroness’s poem “Klink-Hratzvenga (Death-wail)”, written in response to her husband’s suicide after the war’s end, was “a mourning song in nonsense sounds that transcended national boundaries”. Working from a confrontational feminist and artistic agenda, the Baroness asserted a distinctly female subjectivity in the post-WWI era. The most famous English-language modernist work arising out of this post-war disillusionment is T. S. Eliot's epic "The Waste Land" (1922)

      Russian Revolution / Communist Revolution (1919-1920): The Russian Revolution took place in 1917, during the final phase of World War I. It removed Russia from the war and brought about the transformation of the Russian Empire into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), replacing Russia’s traditional monarchy with the world’s first Communist state. The revolution happened in stages through two separate coups, one in February and one in October. The new government, led by Vladimir Lenin, would solidify its power only after three years of civil war, which ended in 1920. Although the events of the Russian Revolution happened abruptly, the causes may be traced back nearly a century.

      Great Depression / Financial Crisis (1930): The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression that took place during the 1930s. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations; however, in most countries it started in 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s. It was the longest, deepest, and most widespread depression of the 20th century. In the 21st century, the Great Depression is commonly used as an example of how far the world's economy can decline. The Great Depression has been the subject of much writing, as authors have sought to evaluate an era that caused financial as well as emotional trauma. Perhaps the most noteworthy and famous novel written on the subject is The Grapes of Wrath, published in 1939 and written by John Steinbeck, who was awarded both the Nobel Prize for literature and the Pulitzer Prize for the work. The novel focuses on a poor family of sharecroppers who are forced from their home as drought, economic hardship, and changes in the agricultural industry occur during the Great Depression. Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men is another important novella about a journey during the Great Depression. Additionally, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is set during the Great Depression. Margaret Atwood's Booker prize-winning The Blind Assassin is likewise set in the Great Depression, centering on a privileged socialite's love affair with a Marxist revolutionary. The era spurred the resurgence of social realism, practiced by many who started their writing careers on relief programs, especially the Federal Writers' Project in the U.S.

Biographical description of two major modern poets:

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) & t s eliot, were the major pioneer of the Modern Poetry. Yeats and Eliot are two chief modernist poet of the English Language. Both were Nobel Laureates. Both were critics of Literature and Culture expressing similar disquietude with Western civilization. Both, prompted by the Russian revolution perhaps, or the violence and horror of the First World War, pictured a Europe that was ailing, that was literally falling apart, devoid of the ontological sense of rational purpose that fuelled post-Enlightenment Europe and America(1). All these similar experience makes their poetry more valuable to compare and to contrast since their thoughts were similar yet one called himself Classicist (Eliot) who wrote objectively and the other considered himself "the last Romantic" (Yeats) because of his subjective writing and his interest in mysticism and the spiritual. For better understanding of these two poets it is necessary to mention some facts and backgrounds on them which influenced them to incorporate similar (to some extent) historical motif in their poetry.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939): William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms.

William Butler Yeats
Born	June 13, 1865, Sandymount, Republic of Ireland
Died	January 28, 1939, Menton, France
Influenced by	T. S. Eliot, John Keats, William Blake
Literary movement	Modernism
Notable works	Lake Isle of Innisfree, Adam's Curse, The Rose Tree etc.
Spouse	Georgiana Hyde-Lees (m. 1917–1939)
Children	Anne Yeats, Michael Yeats

William Butler Yeats was born on June 13, 1865, in Dublin, Ireland. He was the oldest of four children of John Butler Yeats. His father was a lawyer and a well-known portrait painter. His father added to William's formal schooling with lessons at home that gave him an enduring taste for the classics. John Yeats had a forceful personality. His personal philosophy was a blend of aestheticism (a belief that art and beauty are important for everything) and atheism (a belief that there is no God). William felt its influence much later as it showed up in his interest in magic and the occult (supernatural) sciences and in his highly original system of aesthetics (beauty). At the age of nineteen Yeats enrolled in the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin, intending to become a painter. In 1887 he became a literary correspondent for two American newspapers. Among his acquaintances at this time were his father's artist and writer friends, including William Morris (1834–1896), George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), and Oscar Wilde (1856–1900). Yeats was educated in London and in Dublin, but he spent his summers in the west of Ireland in the family's summer house at Connaught. The young Yeats was very much part of the fin de siècle in London; at the same time he was active in societies that attempted an Irish literary revival. His first volume of verse appeared in 1887, but in his earlier period his dramatic production outweighed his poetry both in bulk and in import. Together with Lady Gregory he founded the Irish Theatre, which was to become the Abbey Theatre, and served as its chief playwright until the movement was joined by John Synge. His plays usually treat Irish legends; they also reflect his fascination with mysticism and spiritualism. The Countess Cathleen (1892), The Land of Heart's Desire (1894), Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), The King's Threshold (1904), and Deirdre (1907) are among the best known. After 1910, Yeats's dramatic art took a sharp turn toward a highly poetical, static, and esoteric style. His later plays were written for small audiences; they experiment with masks, dance, and music, and were profoundly influenced by the Japanese Noh plays. Although a convinced patriot, Yeats deplored the hatred and the bigotry of the Nationalist movement, and his poetry is full of moving protests against it. He was appointed to the Irish Senate in 1922. Yeats is one of the few writers whose greatest works were written after the award of the Nobel Prize. Whereas he received the Prize chiefly for his dramatic works, his significance today rests on his lyric achievement. His poetry, especially the volumes The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower (1928), The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), and Last Poems and Plays (1940), made him one of the outstanding and most influential twentieth-century poets writing in English. His recurrent themes are the contrast of art and life, masks, cyclical theories of life (the symbol of the winding stairs), and the ideal of beauty and ceremony contrasting with the hubbub of modern life.

He died at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour, in Menton, France, on 28 January 1939. He was buried after a discreet and private funeral at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. Attempts had been made at Roquebrune to dissuade the family from proceeding with the removal of the remains to Ireland due to the uncertainty of their identity. His body had earlier been exhumed and transferred to the ossuary. Yeats and George had often discussed his death, and his express wish was that he be buried quickly in France with a minimum of fuss. According to George, "His actual words were 'If I die bury me up there [at Roquebrune] and then in a year's time when the newspapers have forgotten me, dig me up and plant me in Sligo." In September 1948, Yeats' body was moved to Drumcliff, County Sligo, on the Irish Naval Service corvette LÉ Macha. The person in charge of this operation for the Irish Government was Sean MacBride, son of Maud Gonne MacBride, and then Minister of External Affairs. His epitaph is taken from the last lines of "Under Ben Bulben", one of his final poems:

Cast a cold Eye

On Life, on Death.

Horseman, pass by!

Important friends of Yeats:

In 1889 Yeats met the woman who became the greatest single influence on his life and poetry, Maud Gonne. She was Yeats's first and deepest love. She admired his poetry but rejected his repeated offers of marriage, choosing instead to marry Major John MacBride. Gonne came to represent for Yeats the ideal of feminine beauty—she appears as Helen of Troy in several of his poems—but a beauty disfigured and wasted by what Yeats considered an unsuitable marriage and her involvement in a hopeless political cause, Irish independence.

Yeats became a founding member of literary clubs in London, England, and Dublin. During this period he became friends with the dramatist John Millington Synge (1871–1909). He was introduced to Synge in 1896, and later directed the Abbey Theatre in Dublin with him.

The American poet Ezra Pound (1885–1972) came to London for the specific purpose of meeting Yeats in 1909. Pound served as Yeats's secretary off and on between 1912 and 1916. Pound introduced Yeats to the Japanese No drama (a form of Japanese theater similar in many ways to Greek tragedy). Yeats's verse dramas (plays in the form of poetry) reflect the ceremonial formality and symbolism of No .

The death of Maud Gonne's husband seemed to offer promise that she might now accept Yeats's proposal of marriage. She turned him down in 1917. He proposed to her daughter, Iseult MacBride, only to be rejected by her too. That same year he married Miss George Hyde-Less.

Soon after their wedding, Yeats's new wife developed the power of automatic writing (writing as though coming from an outside source) and began to utter strange phrases in her sleep that she thought were dictated by spirits from another world. Yeats copied down these fragments and incorporated them into his occult aesthetic system, published as A Vision in 1925. A daughter, Anne Butler Yeats, was born in 1919, and a son, William Michael, two years later.

Three women in Yeats’ life:

      Lady Gregory- Yeats’ patron

      Maud Gonne- Yeats’ beloved:

      Georgie Less- Yeats’ wife

Women play a significant role on his life and poetic development.

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965): Thomas Stearns Eliot was an American-born British essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic and "one of the twentieth century's major poets". He moved to England in 1914 at age 25, settling, working and marrying there.

T. S. Eliot
Eliot in 1934
Born	Thomas Stearns Eliot 26 September 1888 St. Louis, Missouri, United States
Died	4 January 1965 (aged 76) Kensington, London, England
Occupation	Poet, dramatist, literary critic, and editor
Nationality	US
Citizenship	American by birth; British from 1927
Education	AB in philosophy (Harvard, 1909) PhD (cand) in philosophy (Harvard, 1915–16)[1]
Alma mater	Harvard University
Period	1905–1965
Literary movement	Modernism
Notable works	The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915), The Waste Land (1922), Four Quartets(1944)
Notable awards	Nobel Prize in Literature (1948), Order of Merit (1948)
Spouse	Vivienne Haigh-Wood (m. 1915; sep. 1932). Esmé Valerie Fletcher (m. 1957–65)
Signature

Thomas Stearns "T.S." Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on September 26, 1888. He attended Smith Academy in St. Louis and then the Milton Academy in Massachusetts, as his family was originally from New England. Soon after the turn of the century, Eliot began seeing his poems and short stories in print, and writing would occupy him for the rest of his life. Eliot began courses at Harvard University in 1906, graduating three years later with a Bachelor of Arts degree. At Harvard, he was greatly influenced by professors renowned in poetry, philosophy and literary criticism, and the rest of his literary career would be shaped by all three. After graduating, Eliot served as a philosophy assistant at Harvard for a year, and then left for France and the Sorbonne to study philosophy. From 1911 to 1914, Eliot was back at Harvard, where he deepened his knowledge by reading Indian philosophy and studying Sanskrit. He finished his advanced degree at Harvard while in Europe, but due to the onset of World War I, he never went back to Harvard to take the final oral exam for his Ph.D. He soon married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and took a job in London, England, as a school teacher. Not long after, he became a bank clerk—a position he would hold until 1925. It was around this time that T.S. Eliot began a lifelong friendship with American poet Ezra Pound, who immediately recognized Eliot's poetic genius and worked to publish his work. The first poem of this period, and the first of Eliot's important works, was "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," which appeared in Poetry in 1915. His first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, followed in 1917, and the collection established Eliot as a leading poet of his day. While writing poetry and tending to his day job, Eliot was busy writing literary criticism and reviews, and his work in the criticism field would become as respected as his poetry. In 1919, Eliot published Poems, which contained "Gerontion." The poem was a blank-verse interior monologue, and it was unlike anything that had ever been written in the English language. As if that didn't garner enough attention, in 1922 Eliot saw the publication of "The Waste Land," a colossal and complex examination of postwar disillusionment. At the time he wrote the poem, Eliot's marriage was failing, and he and his wife were both experiencing "nervous disorders."

"The Waste Land" almost immediately developed a cult-like following from all literary corners, and it is often considered the most influential poetic work of the 20th century. The same year "The Waste Land" was published, Eliot founded what would become an influential literary journal called Criterion. The poet also edited the journal throughout the span of its publication (1922-1939). Two years later, Eliot left his bank post to join the publishing house Faber & Faber, where he would remain for the rest of his career, shepherding the writing of many young poets (He officially became a British citizen in 1927). Whatever else was afoot, Eliot continued to write, and his major later poems include "Ash Wednesday" (1930) and "Four Quartets" (1943). During this period he also wrote The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), After Strange Gods (1934) and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1940). For his vast influence—in poetry, criticism and drama—T.S. Eliot received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.

By 1932, Eliot had been contemplating a separation from his wife for some time. When Harvard offered him the professorship for the 1932–1933 academic year, he accepted and left Vivienne in England. Upon his return, he arranged for a formal separation from her, avoiding all but one meeting with her between his leaving for America in 1932 and her death in 1947. Vivienne was committed to the Northumberland House mental hospital, Stoke Newington, in 1938, and remained there until she died. Although Eliot was still legally her husband, he never visited her. From 1938 to 1957 Eliot's public companion was Mary Trevelyan of London University, who wanted to marry him and left a detailed memoir.  From 1946 to 1957, Eliot shared a flat with his friend John Davy Hayward, who collected and managed Eliot's papers, styling himself "Keeper of the Eliot Archive".^[44] Hayward also collected Eliot's pre-Prufrock verse, commercially published after Eliot's death as Poems Written in Early Youth. When Eliot and Hayward separated their household in 1957, Hayward retained his collection of Eliot's papers, which he bequeathed to King's College, Cambridge, in 1965. On 10 January 1957, at the age of 68, Eliot married Esmé Valerie Fletcher, who was 30. In contrast to his first marriage, Eliot knew Fletcher well, as she had been his secretary at Faber since August 1949. They kept their wedding secret; the ceremony was held in a church at 6:15 am with virtually no one in attendance other than his wife's parents. Eliot had no children with either of his wives. In the early 1960s, by then in failing health, Eliot worked as an editor for the Wesleyan University Press, seeking new poets in Europe for publication. After Eliot's death, Valerie dedicated her time to preserving his legacy, by editing and annotating The Letters of T. S. Eliot and a facsimile of the draft ofThe Waste Land.^[45] Valerie Eliot died on 9 November 2012 at her home in London.

Eliot died of emphysema at his home in Kensington in London, on 4 January 1965, and was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium. In accordance with his wishes, his ashes were taken to St Michael and All Angels' Church, East Coker, the village in Somerset from which his Eliot ancestors had emigrated to America. A wall plaque commemorates him with a quotation from his poem "East Coker", "In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning." In 1967, on the second anniversary of his death, Eliot was commemorated by the installation of a large stone in the floor of Poets' Cornerin London's Westminster Abbey. The stone, cut by designer Reynolds Stone, is inscribed with his life dates, his Order of Merit, and a quotation from his poem "Little Gidding", "the communication / of the dead is tongued with fire beyond / the language of the living." The house where he died, No. 3 Kensington Court Gardens, has had a blue plaque on it since 1986.

Compare & contrast between William Butler Yeats & Thomas Stearns Eliot as Modern poet:

Yeats and Eliot are two chief modernist poet of the English Language. Yeats and Eliot are two famous contemporary poets and it is believed that, Yeats is the seed of modernism where, Eliot is the tree of that seed. Eliot has a great influence on Yeats. Both have certain things in common. Both are intensely aware of man in history and of the soul in eternity. Both at times see history as an image of the soul writ large. Another important similarity of Yeats with other modern poets such as Eliot, Pound is that they lament for the past and tend to escape from present miserable condition toward an illusionary Eden. In this regard Yeats differs from Auden, who celebrates all disorder conditions of his time into his poetry. Both were Nobel Laureates and both of them were critics of Literature and Culture expressing similar disquietude with Western civilization. Also, both prompted by the Russian revolution perhaps, or the violence and horror of the First World War, pictured a Europe that was ailing, that was literally falling apart, devoid of the logical sense of rational purpose that fuelled post-Enlightenment Europe and America. All these similar experiences make their poetry more valuable to compare and to contrast since their thoughts were similar yet one called himself Classicist (Eliot) who wrote objectively and the other considered himself "the last Romantic” because of his subjective writing and his interest in mysticism and the spiritual. For better understanding of these two poets it is necessary to mention some facts and backgrounds on them which influenced them to incorporate similar (to some extent) historical motif in their poetry. Indeed, the themes of age, time, humanity, love, and psychology that present themselves in Yeats' and Eliot's poems are universal and affect every reader in one way or another. Yeats and Eliot utilize aspects of life that relate to the very core of who we are as human beings, and through these two writers' poetry, themes, and messages can we, the reader, begin to know a little more about ourselves and the whole of the human condition. Undoubtedly, two figures that loomed largest in twentieth-century poetry - W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot had such a pervasive influence that these two men also had to reckon with one another. William Butler Yeats and Thomas Stearns Eliot wrote poetry that defined the needs and desires of their era. They wrote of chaos and confusion and of a need for order; however the much unrelated underlying causes that they postulated for the problems of world make it clear that they described different issues with wholly different outcomes.

The following points describe the both compare & contrast:

Theme of crisis: W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot demonstrate the crisis of modern society in their poetry. Both poets were concerned about the disorderly and fragmented social condition of their time – a time of political turmoil, anarchy and chaos. They yearned for the more humane, cultured and promising times of the past, as their contemporary chaotic world endangered peace, happiness, and solidarity of its people. Their poetry presents a gallery of characters, whose ideological conflicts, cultural differences and racial discrimination revealed the crisis of modern society. Both poets deplored the fragmentation of modern society, which once had strong traditions, customs and values. For them, the absence of ethical and religious values gives rise to perennial anguish, disquiet and chaos. However, though both Yeats and Eliot handle the theme of crisis, the ramifications of their treatment are strikingly varied. This paper seeks to explore the theme of crisis as a split in society that they highlight in their poetry by bringing a contrast between some common binaries such as past/present; ideal/corrupt; colonized/colonizer; love/lust; fertility/infertility. The poets focus on the cyclical, linear, or even chaotic contemporary events that underlie the poetic vision of each. Yeats, who is considered a “ghost that haunted Modernism”, is the pioneer (Albright 63). But both were aware of the disorderly and fragmented social condition of their time – a time of political turmoil and anarchy, which their poetry investigated with exceptional discernment. However, though they expressed the theme of crisis or tension of modern society in their poetry, the delineation of the crisis in their poems varied. Each had distinctive characteristic. Being the most significant poets 62 writing in English during the first half of the 20th century, they explored the theme of crisis as a split in society through a variety of binary opposites. A close examination of the binary opposites reflected in their poetry brings to surface a split in the society.

One of Yeats’s ways of portraying the crisis of modern society is the representation of the conflict between ideal political heroes and corrupt and opportunist political leaders. He praised heroes like O’ Leary, one of the guiding spirits of the Irish Renaissance, as “an embodiment of a romantic nationalism based on respect for artistic distinctiveness” as he believed that only “enlightened leadership and denigrating influential figures” can bring back peace and stability for a nation (Allison 190, 186). The ideological conflict between Maud Gonne and Lady Augusta Gregory, who are two important characters in the poetry of Yeats and who played a vital role in his life, has further intensified the crisis in his poetry. The crisis depicted in Yeats’ poetry has also been expressed by a contrast between the glorified past and the degraded present. Yeats observed that people suffered from agony and frustration. Everything was degenerating and people from every walk of life were sinking lower and lower in corruption. The values, norms and traditions of the past were gradually decaying: “Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty / Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave” (“A Bronze Head” 26-27), so Yeats urges his contemporaries and successors to hold onto the tradition of glorious work which the Indomitable Irish had upheld over the years.

The poet urges:

Irish poets, learn your trade,

Sing whatever is well made,

Scorn the sort now growing up

All out of shape from toe to top,

Their unremembering hearts and heads

Base-born products of base beds. (“Under Ben Bulben” V. 1-6)

The complexity of modern life creates crisis and this world is ‘full of weeping’. The theme of crisis through the oppositional binary between the noble past and the ignoble present is also revealed in the poem “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”. The poet opens the poem saying “Many ingenious lovely things are gone” (I. 1), a theme which he continues in subsequent stanzas. Yeats wrote this poem during the 1920s when the violent Anglo-Irish War had broken out. The poet’s lamentation over lost peace and lost hope is obvious when he writes:

Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare

Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery

Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,

To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;

The night can sweat with terror as before

We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,

And planned to bring the world under a rule,

Who are but weasels fighting in a hole? (I. 25-32)

The projection of anarchy of the modern world, the spiritual emptiness and the conflict between civilization and barbarism and between the modern world and the ancient world reveals the extent of the theme of crisis in the poetry of Yeats. In his poetry, he illustrates how mankind becomes a helpless victim of impersonal forces and how humanity is in constant crisis within the cyclic repetition of the phases of the Great Wheel, which Yeats expresses by the term ‘gyre’. In the beginning of “The Second Coming” the poet writes:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity. (1-8)

Eliot, the most influential poet of the modern age, seeks to express the fragile psychological state of humanity in the twentieth century. Modernist writers like Yeats intended to capture a world, which they perceive as fractured, alienated, and denigrated. Eliot too also saw society as fragmented and sterile, and imagined that culture was crumbling and disintegrating. In his poems, especially in The Waste Land, he spontaneously blends myths with present situations to show the disintegrated state of modern world. Eliot, indeed, pursues a poetic scheme of antinomies and contraries to develop his theme of crisis in society. Cleanth Brooks remarks: “The waste land is built on a major contrast – a device which is a favorite of Eliot’s and is to be found in many of his poems, particularly his later poems. The contrast is between two kinds of life and two kinds of death. Life devoid of meaning is death; sacrifice, even the sacrificial death, may be life giving, an awakening to life”. Eliot’s contrast between life and death demonstrates that the people of the Waste Land, losing their spiritual values and ethos, are fascinated with death rather than life. “Death is the ultimate meaning of the Waste Land, for a people to whom its explanation is only a myth, for whom sex is destructive rather than creative, and in whom the will to believe is frustrated by the fear of life” (Williamson 129). Both “The Burial of the Dead” and “Death by Water” sections of the poem refer specifically to the attractiveness of death. Death and rebirth for Eliot are integrally related to each other. In Eliot’s poetry, water symbolizes death, which is a contrast with the common concept of water – a symbol of resurrection or life. In his portrayal of modern society, due to the wastelanders’ lost-meaningful-contact with time-honored beliefs and traditional 71 values of purity and sanctity, everything of this material world, including water, leads them to death. They have corrupted the life symbol (water) and made it into something to be feared instead of valued. For example, the Phoenician sailor dies by drowning – “Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead” (313). Water certainly does not represent life to him. Since he does not have faith, water means death to him. He cannot live in it. He also states, “By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept...’’. The contrast between fertility and sterility serves to highlight modern disintegration, chaos and anarchy, reflecting a state of crisis. The sterility of modern civilization is obvious in lines such as the following:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief. (20-24)

The contrast between love and lust by which Eliot exposes the corruption of sex in modern society also depicts the theme of crisis. Sylvan scene depicts the change of Philomel, who was raped by King Tereus, husband of her sister Procne. Eliot states, “And still she cried, and still the world pursues”. The change of Philomela took place many centuries ago; yet it is still happening today. A second instance of sex, which is unendorsed by Christianity, occurs in the pub scene. The poem’s constant shifting from the present to the past and vice versa further underscores the theme of crisis. The ancient myths, classical legends, allusions to old literary masterpieces, landmarks in world history are all frequently juxtaposed in the context of contemporary events and personalities, casting a fresh and illuminating light on both the past and the present. Eliot was acutely aware of the conflicts, contradictions complexities and fragmentation taking place in his society. He offers a more general and much more complex contrast between the present and past by focusing on the symbol of the river Thames, where we see a depressing picture of the modern river in winter. In Eliot’s poem the Thames is filthy and its ‘nymphs’ have used it for their sordid and clandestine sexual encounters. By his use of myths, art of characterization, and description of the present situation of the world Eliot explores the theme of crisis as a split in society. His ideas are varied – “abstract and concrete, general and particular; and, like the musician’s phrases, they are arranged, not that they may tell us something, both that their effects in us may combine into a coherent whole of feeling and attitude and produce a peculiar liberation of the war” (Miller, Land 157).

Both of Yeats and Eliot explore the theme of crisis in their poetry by pointing out conflicts or contrasts between Nature / civilization; faery land / present world; past / present; antiquity / contemporaneity; sterility / fertility; body / spirit; life / death; fire / water; resurrection / death; hollow /stuffed; low society / high society; rich/ poor; bourgeois / proletariat; men / women; voice / silence; active / inactive; good / evil; reality / appearance; pure / corrupt; natural / unnatural; philosophy / myth; master / slave; dominance / subordination; power/ weak and so on. They deplore the fragmentation of modern society, which once had strong traditions, customs, values and the like. The poets are unhappy because the modern world is not conducive to equality, fraternity, and solidarity – values essential to foster a sense of well-being, wholesomeness and harmony in society.

Different Approach: Both, Yeats and Eliot invoke magic to produce an image in the mind of the speaker. The magic here is in the shapes traced by Ille. A participant in the dialogue, rather than a lamp or a lantern, throws these shapes. Ille's self-replaces Prufrock’s lantern. The dialogic nature of both passages, coupled with the references to magic projections, creates a bond between the two passages. While there is no direct lifting of lines or borrowing of phrases, it is as if Eliot's use of the magic lantern informs Yeats' use of the magic shapes. Yeats' use of "Prufrock" is not limited to this one poem. One can also see the world of "Prufrock" in "Easter, 1916." Although this poem was not collected until its appearance in Michael Robartes and the Dancer in 1923, Yeats dates it September 5, 1916, a little over a year from the publication of Eliot's first poem. Eliot's opening lines announced a new age for poetry:

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-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells (1-7)

Once again, there is a dialogue, involving the reader as one of the principals. It is the end of a day. Prufrock asks the reader to walk through the lonely city, watched overhead by a leaden sky. The city itself is neither beautiful nor inviting. It is, of course, a reflection on and of the speaker. The opening four lines of "Easter, 1916" seem to set the same depressing mood:

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses. (1-4)

Here also, the time of day is evening. The speaker of the poem addresses the reader in a type of confessional voice, as did Prufrock. The city, while not as lonely or deserted, is just as depressing. The color of grey is overt, not merely left to the imagination of the reader in the image of the etherised patient. It is very easy to see a kind of superimposition of Eliot's city on Yeats' city. The Eighteenth-century houses fit very nicely on the half-deserted streets. But more than the city, it is the mood of "Prufrock" that informs "Easter 1916." Both poems, both cities, are filled with ennui and decay, decadence and frustration. Other echoes of "Prufrock" are to be found in the first stanza of "Easter 1916." Prufrock participates in and is surrounded by meaningless conversations. The tedious argument of line 8 is followed by the women who talk of Michelangelo in lines 13 and 14. The hands that lift and drop a question on your plate in lines 29 and 30 fill the same time that a hundred indecisions, visions, and revisions take in lines 32 and 33. The women who talk of Michelangelo reappear in lines 35 and 36. Next, the conversation turns dark, for it begins to focus on Prufrock. "They" speak of him in lines 41 and 44. The time for decisions and revisions reappears in line 48. The voices that die with a dying fall enter in line 52. Line 56 introduces the eyes that speak so much, that fix Prufrock in a formulated phrase. Prufrock tries to join in the conversations in line 60, but all he can do is sputter about the meaninglessness of his existence. There is then a great gulf of silence for almost 20 lines, and the next utterance that Prufrock dreams on is the talk linking him with another, presumably the reader, in line 89. This is followed quickly by his reference to an overwhelming question in line 93. Can he speak as if he were Lazarus, or even Orpheus, in lines 94 and 95? But he is misunderstood in lines 97 and 98. Finally, in line 104, he arrives at the nub of his thoughts on communication and conversation. He points out the impossibility and therefore the meaninglessness of communication, because it is impossible for him to say just what he means. This line is the only non-parenthetical emphatic assertion in the entire poem. Again Prufrock is misunderstood in lines 108 through 110. The impossibility of verbal communication is reinforced in the mermaids, who do not speak, but sing to one another in line 124. Line 125 states that they do not include Prufrock in their musical communication. Finally, at line 131, Prufrock is drowned when he is waked by human voices, voices calling him back from the mermaid's undersea chambers. Yeats uses this concept of the meaningless conversation in the remainder of the first stanza of "Easter 1916." The speaker tells of conversations, both with those he deems below him and those he considers his equals:

I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn: (5-14)

This passage contains three conversations. In the first two, there is an emphasis on both politeness and meaninglessness. This characterizes the speaker's relationship with those who died in the Easter Rebellion. There is also an element of duplicity, for the speaker is already, even as he speaks, crafting a tale, removing his focus from the situation at hand. The final conversation at the club revolves not around the civility one would expect in such a setting, but around the laughter at another's expense. In fact, the people met on the grey street are reduced to jesters, placed there for the amusement of a few self-appointed nobles. At the club, there is complete immersion in the event, duplicitous as it is. We must question the veracity of the speaker here, for we must decide which conversation is actually meaningless.

The similarities between this world and Prufrock's are obvious. Both Prufrock's and this speaker's conversations hide more than they reveal about the self, and yet inform the reader about the speaker with words that are never spoken. Both poems contain laughter at another's expense. The heroes of the Rebellion are mocked just as Prufrock is mocked. Conversations which are constructed by the speaker are another shared device. While in actuality merely an internal monologue, Prufrock imagines his rejection at the hands of one whom he has misunderstood. Yeats' speaker produces an internal monologue as he imagines the story he will relate at his club.

This speaker must deal with the jesters who wear motley, while Prufrock calls himself "Almost, at times, the Fool". Prufrock's most important statement about communication is the fact that he cannot say just what he means. But this speaker will not say what he means, at least not in the street, to those he deems beneath him. The absolute vacuum of meaning behind not only words but also social conventions is a parallel theme. Prufrock's world is as void of meaning as his words. Both are decaying, taken over by fog and smoke and soot. The world of "Easter 1916" is filled with meaninglessness, where the only true intent that can be gleaned is the desire to ridicule another.

One final strain connects these two poems. Both offer an ironic, fragile image of hope. Prufrock hears the mermaids singing, and, even though they will not sing to him, he has been with them. But he is not alone in this endeavor. Not "He," but, "We have lingered in the chambers of the sea". Here is a sense of community once again, the same sense that starts off the poem. And this escape from the world of meaninglessness to the world of the mermaids offers one last glimmer of hope. It is indeed fragile, for human voices can awaken him from his reverie, and he will drown in a world filled with the impossibility of communication.

Ireland too may see one shard of hope. The meaninglessness of the world is changed. But what is born as a result of or in order to cause this change is the ironic "terrible beauty". There will be no escape to this beauty, no hiding from the ramifications of the Rebellion's actions. This is a beauty which may instill fear or awe. It will be a combination of opposites, a reversal of the meaning, but a movement toward meaning nonetheless. This fragile conjunction is the hope of the nation as well as its curse, for it can damn as well as inspire. Yeats' debt to Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is clear. This reversal of the standard critical perception of these two men ironically validates Yeats' cyclic view of history. Here, the present influences the past. But recognition of this debt not only vindicates Yeats, it indicts him. For eighteen years Yeats buried this borrowing, never acknowledging the fact that his poetry was informed by Eliot's images, mood, and concerns. The grand culmination of such secrecy was his "Introduction" to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Here he vilified Eliot, holding up for scorn not only his poetry but also his religious beliefs. The vigor with which he attacks Eliot is not justified by Eliot's printed critiques of Yeats, which took on a milder tone as his life progressed and actually ended in stunning admiration.

Images and Influences: Yeats' belief that the history of the world swings in cycles that cannot be changed by humankind was well known even during his lifetime. He used symbolism borrowed from many sources in "The Second Coming" as well as many of his other works to give color and vitality to his mythology. For example, many critics note that Yeats' poem "Leda and the Swan" documents the annunciation of Leda and the beginning of a new historical cycle, much as the annunciation of Mary began what Yeats viewed as the Christian cycle. Thus, although Yeats strongly disapproved of the Christian religion, he borrows from and incorporates a significant Christian belief as he refers to "Bethlehem" in "The Second Coming." However, it is obvious that, "To Yeats, the Second Coming grotesquely sketched in the poem is hardly the Christian Parousia, the celebration of the universal presence of the Savior coming on clouds of glory to judge the world" (Cervo). In a skillful effort to give emotional authority to his homemade mythology, Yeats borrows images from many religions and theories to convey his personal belief in the cycles of history. The theory of the "great memory" (28) postulated by Yeats is echoed in the theories of Jung regarding the collective unconscious: These images are "primordial" in so far as they are peculiar to the whole species, and if they ever "originated" their origin must have coincided at least with the beginning of the species" (Jung 78). Whatever their origin, Yeats asserts that these images are contained in a kind of psychic storehouse, the "Spiritus Mundi" (l.12) of "The Second Coming." However, it cannot be denied that certain images from Yeats' poem bear a striking resemblance to those of authors with which he was familiar, although Yeats use of the images often conveys a somewhat different theme than the original. For instance, as George Bornstein suggests, "Behind the poem lurks [Shelley's] "Ozymandias," with its picture of a monumental ruin in a desert" (202). However, while in "Ozymandias" the malevolent stone ruin is deteriorating into obscurity (Shelley), in "The Second Coming" the stone figure is ascendant, rising and coming into its power, an opposition that suggests the influence of Blake (Bornstein 202). In addition, the poetic depiction of a desert to indicate desolation is not an uncommon device. It is difficult to attribute this desert to any geographical location.

One of the difficulties in ascribing literary or philosophical inspirations and influences to the work of Eliot is that the poet was a literary collector. As F.W. Bateson remarks, "The magpie-instinct – not only for 'fragments of systems', but for all sorts of 'shining fragments' of imagery or phraseology – was unusually highly developed in him" (39). Eliot was in the habit of recording in his journals small snippets and pieces of the work of other authors along with his own occasional thoughts and then, sometimes years later, incorporating the fragment of material in one of his poems. Eliot sometimes transposed themes, at other times sentences or phrases, with inconsistent regard to the original author's purpose. Further complicating the situation, Eliot was a voracious reader and may have been subconsciously influenced by many authors. One of the earliest influences on Eliot's writing was the work of Charles Baudelaire. Eliot reveres him as an "artist exclusively for art's sake" (Selected 372), a personification of the anthem of the aesthetic movement. Another philosopher whose work may have affected Eliot for a time was Henri Bergson; Eliot attended one of his lectures at the College de France (Ackroyd). Ackroyd believes that the charismatic Bergson and his concepts of "real time" affected Eliot's writing of his famous early poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (Ackroyd). Another early and quite profound influence on the writing of Eliot was Dante. Although for a great writer, T.S. Eliot's production was quite limited, in 1929, he wrote an entire volume of Dante: "I have found no other poet than Dante to whom I could apply continually, for many purposes, and with much profit, during a familiarity of twenty years" (Dante). In his book, Eliot praises Dante for his "lucidity of style" and "clear 36 visual images" (Dante), and suggests that the poetry of Dante "can communicate before it is understood. While Yeats saw humankind as both the victim and the beneficiary of vast, impersonal historical cycles, T.S. Eliot had a different vision, no doubt caused in part by his upbringing. 

Postlude: Many educated people living during the era of Yeats and Eliot believed that the end of their world was at hand. Yeats saw humanity as both the victim and the beneficiary of a series of inescapable historical cycles. In Yeats' vision of the future, concrete changes manifested in the physical world would occur. Because of the force of an outside agency, the historical cycle of the gyres, Yeats believed that his civilization would end. Mankind could not affect this process. Yeats, although he deplored the misery and suffering that would occur because of the changes, embraced them because he, like Blake, felt that without the change there would be no progression. On the other hand, Eliot viewed the chaos as a direct result of humankind's lack of connection to God through the Anglican religion. Since this view implies freedom of choice, Eliot found that humanity held the ultimate responsibility for its own salvation or destruction. Eliot was a man in pain, confused about his national identity, his humanity, his masculinity and his relationship to the eternal. His poetry explores his internal conflicts, but it must be remembered that these conflicts were afflictions of the spirit. When Eliot speaks of the world whimpering or ending, he refers to what to him was most significant, his inner spiritual world. His cataclysms were emotional and spiritual.

Modern Man and Reality: Yeats is studied as a Romantic, nationalistic, mystic poet. But equally important is that Yeats is a Modernist as well as Symbolistic poet. Like Yeats, Eliot is also a representative Modernist. It is interesting that seen from this point of view, they have something in common: as a result, we should not treat them as completely different and separate poets. Certainly in cases of Eliot, many scholars have studied what modern man is in his poems, while they tend to overlook Yeats’s subject of Modernity in his poetry. Matthiessen classifies nature of life into good and evil. Surely Yeats and Eliot also seem to have speculated on life’s good and evil. For them both would like to present evil rather than good, which seems to have found expression in vainness or hopelessness. The situation they see now and here is confusing. Thus, their characters are not satisfied with the modern age. According to Morton, Yeats getting old was interested in modern man or his life. As he grew old Yeats became more interested in reality than before. Many scholars have long neglected this fact. What the old Yeats and Eliot share is their common interest in modern life, although the latter’s imagery of the characters in the poetry is pessimistic, hopeless, and negative attitudes to life. Eliot’s depiction of life:

Now I am, an old man in a dry month,

Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.

I was neither at the hot gates

Nor fought in the warm rain

Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,

Bitten by flies, fought.

This is a prelude to The Waste Land, showing Eliot summarize the condition of Modern world, which is the waste land. The character, Gerontion, means at once a little old man and a man representing Modern man, as the old man in Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium.” Eliot’s old man here has no identity: he is either incompetent or aimless. Herbert’s analysis is “the speaker’s voice is that of another shrinker from life, a life not fully lived” (20). Almost all of Eliot’s poems show this characteristic: most of the speakers wonder, hesitate, being undecided. Like Yeats’s, Eliot’s Modern man neither knows what to do nor what is right or wrong. As “Gerontion conveys the rootlessness and disintegration of a modern mind” (Ronbis), Eliot concentrates on Modern man or age. Yeats depicts man’s life in “The Wheel”:

Through winter-time we call on spring,

And through the spring on summer call,

And when abounding hedges ring

Declare that winter’s best of all;

And after that there’s nothing good

Because the spring-time has not come

Nor but its longing for the tomb.

As suggested in the title, it deals with the flow of Life. The poem was written in 1921 and published in 1922. Robson comments on this poem: “after 1916 Yeats has become increasingly aware of the confusion and incoherence of modern life,” which helps us recognize he was also much interested in contemporary life. Curiously this poem sounds identical to Eliot’s The Waste Land, which was also published in the same year, 1922. Judging from this fact, both poets must have thought about their time in the same way. This poem depicts the passage of time with an image. The speaker’s mind (or inner wish) is now seeking for something new, but after all, that is only loneliness. It is interesting that this theme, loneliness, is the theme of much of Eliot’s work. Like Eliot, Yeats is not satisfied with the age he is in. Thus, what the speaker feels now is only longing for “the tomb; it is like Eliot’s “An atmosphere of Juliet’s tomb”, “The worlds revolve like ancient women/ Gathering fuel in vacant lots” or “We are the hollow man/ We are the stuffed men”. This poetic phrase represents vainness, or the emptiness of life. Like Eliot, Yeats describes modern age as life’s vanity or meaninglessness, or spiritual instability, which are the characteristics in Eliot’s The Waste Land, “a watershed in the poetic life of the century” :

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

In both Yeats and Eliot, they both present life’s hopelessness and vanity in their poems, employing seasonal images to deliver the barrenness of modern life: Yeats uses the images of winter, spring, and summer; Eliot uses those of April, spring, and winter. For both Yeats and Eliot recognize that there can be no significance to life, and hence no tragedy in the account of man’s conflicts and his inevitable final defeat by death, unless it is fully realized that there is no such thing as good unless there is also evil, or evil unless there is good; that until this double nature of life is understood by a man, he is doomed to waver between a groundless, optimistic hopefulness and an equally chaotic, pointless despair. Whereas Yeats employs “desolation of reality,” Eliot uses “dryness, bareness. Spiritual stability” in “Tenants of the house/ Thought of a dry brain in a dry season”. Also, Yeats focuses on barren civilization; Eliot mainly on the wonder of modern man without differentiating high and low class. Unterecker suggests that “in Yeats’s The King of the Great Clock Tower, Purgatory, “Meru”, reality is the key word”. Considering this point more carefully, Yeats is absorbed in reality, not merely in imagination or romantic ideas writing poetry. He sees the world itself with more realistic views. Surely, Eliot is not different. Eliot is equal to Yeats in terms of the scope of the subject matter. Yeats and Eliot both see modern man or age as aimless, vainless, purposeless. As Dyson says, some of Yeats’s poems that deal with Modern man or age are not as long as The Waste Land or Four Quartets, but Yeats’s poems belong to the major oeuvre on Modern man or age. Both poets draw modern man in vivid and realistic ways, probably thinking and feeling almost in the same way, who lived in the same age. Eliot and Yeats see life as vacant, barren, meaningless, as in Yeats’s poems, “The Wheel”, “The Pilgrim,” “The Old Stone Cross,” “Meru” and again as in Eliot’s “Gerontion” and The Waste Land as well. They both depend on precise images to represent Modern life.

Literary critic: William Butler Yeats's literary criticism derived from his impulse to examine and promote the kind of art he believed in, and to repudiate art founded upon what he believed were false aesthetic and philosophical principles. It shows how relentless Yeats was in his attacks upon Irish propaganda and upon what he believed was decadent in English literary tradition. His practical criticism clearly reveals the nature of his errors as a critic, but it reveals also the strengths of a dedicated man struggling towards a poetic. Yeats's theoretical criticism is significant for its insistence upon the importance of the poetic impulse to art, for its insistence upon the autonomy of art enhanced by, but not ultimately dependent upon, biographical and historical considerations, and for its promotion of heroic and visionary art in an unheroic and materialistic age. It shows also Yeats's unending endeavor to determine how Mask, mythology, and symbol could best be used to bring art into meaningful relation with life. -- Yeats's criticism reveals not only his aesthetic principles but his 'life-values' as well. It exposes his prejudices and caprices; but more important, it emphasizes what was essential to him: faith in heroic man, in aristocratic traditions, and in the educative image which great art provided. Ultimately Yeats's literary criticism records his attempts at getting his own thoughts in order, and its greatest value lies in the kind of poetry it helped him to write.

Eliot made significant contributions to the field of literary criticism; strongly influencing the school of New Criticism. Eliot is also remembered for his contribution to the field of literary criticism which he attributed to his habit of avid reading and working on artistic values. Though he never himself accepted the honor, he is ranked as the most famous and influential literary critic of the 20th century. His best known critical essay Tradition and the individual talent emphasize the need of understanding of art in a way that is related to the previous piece of art. According to some, Eliot's talent as a literary critic can be found in his poems such as The Waste Land and Four Quarters. In 1939, Eliot wrote a book of light verse, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. Eliot's prodigious output of critical works include The Sacred Wood (1920); For Lancelot Andrewes (1928); Selected Essays, 1917–32 (1932); The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933); After Strange Gods (1934); Elizabethan Essays (1934); Essays Ancient and Modern (1936); and Notes towards a Definition of Culture (1948).

Romanticism: Yeats poetry began by echoing Shelly and Spenser and the Pre-Raphaelites and Black remained a dominant influence throughout his poetic career. All the characteristic features and flavor of romantic poetry are present in most of Yeats early poems. the tendency to escape too far off lands of romance or to nature is present in Yeats poetry. Characters from folklore, imagined wanderings with lovely phantoms and occasionally a Keatsian richness of the sensuous are all there in his early poems. A very important ingredient of Yeats romanticism is his use of symbols. He has sometimes been hailed as the English speaking representative of the French symbolist school. The Irish mythology is almost as rich in great stories and figures as the mythology. It was upon this store that if drew for symbols.

Eliot himself said, “I am Romantic in thought, Classical in expression and Anglican in religion.” In many of his critical writings, T.S .Eliot claims to be a votary of classicism. This claim notwithstanding, there are strains of romanticism in his poetry as well as in his essays. The present study is directed to highlight this ambivalence with reference to Eliot's critical essays as well as his poetry. The terms 'classicism' and 'romanticism' are too frequently used in the study of literature. There is also a tradition to classify certain periods in the history of English literature as Classical or Romantic. This classification is misleading because no period or poet can claim to be wholly in the tradition of classicism or romanticism. They are two different tendencies which are simultaneously traceable in the writings of an artist, though not in equal proportion. Eliot's leanings towards romanticism are manifest in all his poems, especially in Four Quartets.

Symbolism: W.B. Yeats is considered as the founder of symbolic school of poetry. His symbols are derived from occult studies which included a fascination for fairies, astrology, automatic writing and prophetic dreams. Yeats was a symbolist and he was a symbolist from the beginning of his career to the end. Yeats’ use of symbols is another modern trait in his poetry which is complex and rich. He is the chief representative of the Symbolist Movement. He draws his symbols from Irish folklore and mythology, philosophy, metaphysics, occult, magic, paintings and drawings. Several allusions are compressed into a single symbol. His symbols are all pervasive key symbols. His key-symbols shed light on his previous poems and “illuminates their sense”. ‘The Rose’, ‘Swan’ and ‘Helen’ are his key-symbols. Symbols give ‘dumb things voices, and bodiless things bodies’ in Yeats’ poetry.

The term symbolism is derived from a Greek verb: ‘Symbollein’, means ‘to put together.’ A symbol means, a mark, token or sign. It means representation of some hidden things through a sign or mark that is called a symbol. When an unseen thing or idea is expressed through seen, we use a symbol. The symbolism is the presentation of objects, moods and ideas through the medium of symbols. Yeats was much influenced by French writers but his symbolism was based on the poetry of Blake, Shelley and Rossetti. He had been called as the greatest poet. According to him, symbol gives voice to the dumb things; it gives body to the bodiless things. He was against personal symbols. Yeats was an heir of the French. No doubt, Yeats was influenced by the French symbolists, but he was a symbolist-poet before he had heard of the French. Yeats himself declares:

I’ve no speech but Symbols

The Pagan speech I made

Amid the dream of youth.

Yeats’ Rose, Tower, Lily, Moon and Sun found in profound work. But Rose is one of the greatest and complex symbols of Yeats. His early symbols were simple, and traditional. His Innisfree symbolizes a country where one can live peacefully. In Rose of Peace, Yeats used the Rose as the earthly love or physical beauty. He often used Rose as a symbol of peace and beauty. Tower is also one of the greatest symbols of Yeats. It is a symbol of spiritual worship. In A Prayer for My Daughter, the Tower symbolizes the dark future for mankind. In another poem, he compares the Swan with a solitary soul. The Second Coming is a famous poem of Yeats and also remarkable for using symbols. Yeats says:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre,

The Falcon cannot hear the falconer:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

The blood–dimmed tide is loosed

Some particular modes of the consciousness of the poet are personified and Irish name is given to them. Such as Aedh, ‘Hauranam’, and ‘Robert’ are used as a symbol of poet’s own pain, love and suffering. His poems shows that now, impersonal scenes are used for personal qualities by the poet. In Sailing to Byzantium, Byzantium becomes the symbol of perfection, free of the cycle of birth, generation and death, free from time for it is a world or art and ideal existence.

Yeats was affected in magic and his poetry has deep natural feelings. In his Essays on Magic, he writes:

“I’ve a great memory and great mind in it.”

In his symbols, his effect plays a very remarkable role in his technique of producing symbols, that’s why his symbols are both practical and magical.

Symbolism implies an image with a host of associations, but Eliot makes it represent Virgin Mary, the Christian Church and divine grace. Coriolanus stands for a proud and selfish man. Eliot makes it a representation of the lost leader and isolation and spiritual loneliness. In Eliot’s poetry, water symbolizes both life and death. Eliot’s characters wait for water to quench their thirst, watch rivers overflow their banks, cry for rain to quench the dry earth, and pass by fetid pools of standing water. Although water has the regenerative possibility of restoring life and fertility, it can also lead to drowning and death, as in the case of Phlebas the sailor from The Waste Land. Like most modernist writers, Eliot was interested in the divide between high and low culture, which he symbolized using music. He believed that high culture, including art, opera, and drama, was in decline while popular culture was on the rise. In The Waste Land, Eliot blended high culture with low culture by juxtaposing lyrics from an opera by Richard Wagner with songs from pubs, American ragtime, and Australian troops.

Use of Imagery: Unlike most writers with his level of difficulty, T. S. Eliot makes copious use of imagery throughout his work.  In many cases, over half of a poem, such as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” will consist of imagery delivered in various forms for various reasons.  Eliot shows impressive variety in the implementation and style of his imagery, but several patterns emerge on closer examination. Especially in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Eliot prefers metonymy over other methods of employing imagery.  He often refers to a person or idea via an associated one or a component part, or even a list of such things, to offer an idea of the obliqueness of the thought processes of his narrators:

And I have known the arms already, known them all--

Arms that are braceleted and white and bare

(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)

Is it perfume from a dress

That makes me so digress?

Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.

Eliot’s images, similarly, are all linked by his pervasive themes of hopelessness, desolation (particularly in an urban context), and failure, as evidenced in this selection from “East Coker”:

The whole earth is our hospital

Endowed by the ruined millionaire,

Wherein, if we do well, we shall

Die of the absolute paternal care

That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

In this case, he delivers the comparison between the entire world and a hospital via a simile, and continues the comparison with the accompanying metaphors, beginning with “Wherein…”  Characteristic of him, and likely surprising to the reader, is the demonizing of the hospital, which he contends is only a means of repression of the human spirit. Overall, Eliot is one of the more prolific originators of imagery in poetry, and makes impressive use of such details within his work to convey ideas and themes even where they are unexpected.  He delivers his images in a variety of methods and with as many different results—metonymy, simile, and metaphor being his preferred methods and desolation and hopelessness his preferred themes. Yeats also uses many images. Yeats’ poetry is also enriched with imagery. he uses the imagery of Irish landscape, park, natural beauty etc. and he also uses images from Irish mythology.

Mysticism: The young William Butler Yeats was introduced to the study and practice of the occult while in art college in Dublin - his instant fascination with the occult, metaphysics and paranormal activities was to remain with him throughout his life. His passion for mysticism and the occult sciences was displayed through his poetry and writings. He studied poetry in his youth, and from an early age, he was adreamer and visionary, fascinated by folklore, ballad and the superstitions of theIrish Peasantry. The Gaelic legends, the Cuchulainn saga and the tales of theFianna, etc. which he had become so familiar with, helped him to create a system or pattern which could give unity and lucidity to his beliefs. This system which he developed in his prose work A Vision is a curious mixture of the elements of magic, mysticism, mythology and philosophy. These topics feature in the first phase of his work which lasted roughly until the turn of the century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and his slowly paced and lyrical poems were inspired by works of Edmund Spenser and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as the lyricism of the Pre-Raphaelite poets. From 1900, Yeats’ poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with spiritual and physical masks, as well as with cynical theories of life. Over the years Yeats adopted many different ideological positions, including, in the words of the critic Michael Valdez Moses, “those of radical nationalist, classical liberal, reactionary conservative and millenarian nihilist.” A note of mysticism runs throughout Yeats’ poetry and the world of his poetry becomes the world of a mystic vision in which the gods and fairies of the Celtic mythology live again. He was convinced of the realities of the fairy and other supernatural beings and regarded them as a necessary link in the chain of beings. In a letter to O’Leary in 1892, Yeats wrote: “If I had not made magic my constant study, I could not have written a word of my Black Book, nor could the ‘Countess Cathleen’ ever have come to exist. The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.”

During his Harvard days, Eliot made a self-directed study of the lives of saints and mystics, and became well acquainted with Evelyn Underhill’s 1911 book Mysticism: A Study of the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness, and with William Ralph Inge’s 1905 book Studies of the English Mystics.  I have already written about Underhill’s influence, but I hadn’t read Inge’s work until earlier this week.  He takes a much more objective approach to the subject.  The lasting influence of true mysticism is apparent in Eliot’s ultimate poetic statement, Four Quartets, which repeatedly references the works of St. John of the Cross and Dame Julian of Norwich.  As Eliot scholar Jewel Spears Brooker has pointed out, the poet adopted Julian as a “significant spiritual mentor,” and incorporated her mystic visions into East Coker, when he speaks of God as the still point of the turning world, and in Little Gidding, when he quotes her soothing message from Christ as a final summation:

All shall be well, and

All manner of thing shall be well

Occultism & Spiritualism: Reincarnation, the belief in phases and cycles of life were very important topics to the Occult in the early 20th century, and with Yeats and his wife Georgie‟s involvement with theOccult, these beliefs were held in very high esteem and they shine through clearly in his poetry. While we are aware of Yeats‟ immersion in Occultism - for example, when Georgie submitted herself to the Instructors (spirits) in order to engage in automatic script, regardless of the fact that the Order of the Golden Dawn completely forbade this method of giving oneself to the spirit realms completely, putting membership at risk for something that was obviously held in high  personal esteem - we can examine how Occult mythology and practise would have consolidated his belief in the cyclical nature of life and reincarnation. This essay will attempt to analyse these influences in reference to his poetry, making references to imagery and other significant factors. The Occult maintained a wide variety of beliefs relevant to spirituality, humanity,  personality and reincarnation. Some of these stemmed from the principle idea of phases of life classified by the „Great Wheel‟, which symbolised different natural forms of expression and parts of a whole. It provides clearer visualisations of the phases than the cones or gyres mentioned in Yeats‟ poem The Second Coming, which deals with his imagery and methods of thinking. This was significant in the 20thC and through Yeats‟ poetry for A Vision

 as his poetry  became less Romantic and more commentative on the political state of Ireland. The Second Coming(1919) brought attention to many different issues through the use of violent imagery, as was Yeats‟ forte in poetry. This poem used symbolism and imagery to embody occult mysticism and brough t focus to the “gyres”.

The Second Coming

“When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand; A shap

e with lion body and the head of a man.”

This description forces the reader to visualise a birth, if a violent one, of a creature from “a waste of desert sand”, and forces us to question whether this birth is symbolic of a conception of a new form of poetry for Yeats, becoming commentary on his environment in Ireland during the 20thC, as established by his interest in Occult mythology, However, while the gyre was represented in The Second Coming as singular, Yeats preferred to use the double-gyre, which supplies a form of symbiotic dualism: as one gyre‟s progression ceases, another commences at the point of termination. This spiritual imagery helps to support Yeats‟ interest the passage of time, the possibility of new births in the self and the evolution of the individual suggested by the circular development portrayed gyrical form. There is a rejection of religious principles evident in the imagery and symbolism of The Second Coming , which would likely have been seen as  unwanted or sinful by the Church.

Among the body of criticism on T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, critics such as Cleo McNelly Kearns and Alireza Farahbakhsh have recently interpreted the poet’s “intolerable wrestle / With words and meanings” (EC II) in light of deconstructionist theory. Although the poetry does recognize the difficulty of speaking about spiritual experience, it does not embrace the resulting linguistic miscommunication. In fact, the poems resist such a move, identifying the spiritual danger of such miscommunication; instead, they seek to overcome these difficulties and accurately communicate spiritual experience – an aim achieved in the context of biblical prophecy. Louis Martz argues that the Quartets are, in fact, not prophetic; however, he defines prophecy in terms of its social interests, rather than in terms of the interest in the human-divine relationship that characterizes both biblical tradition and Eliot’s poetry. I want to argue that reading the Quartets in the context of biblical prophecy, filtered through mystical tradition, explains their ability to transcend linguistic difficulty and explore spiritual experience in human language. In biblical tradition, the prophets overcome linguistic difficulty through a direct encounter with God, which purifies language of error and equips them to speak of divine reality. In Eliot’s Quartets, the poetry undergoes a similar purifying experience meant to replace linguistic error with a meaningful exploration of spiritual experience. For the Quartets, linguistic purification is accomplished by means of the mystical via negativa. Appropriating images associated with the via negativa, the poetry denies language tied to direct perception of spiritual reality and adopts instead a language that conveys such experience through unfamiliar words and images. In that language, the poetry is purified of its errors and made capable of exploring the human relationship with God. A poetry identified with the Incarnation, this solution communicates in human language the reality of spiritual experience. In this communication, the poetry at last explores spiritual experience in a way freed of miscommunication and meaningful for the audience, thereby fulfilling its prophetic aims.

Use of Myths: The time during Yeats lived saw the end of the Romantic era of literature and the dawn of Modernism and different fields of art were going through transformation due to worldwide phenomena that included the two world wars. Yeats’ poetry is neither modernist nor romantic, but both. He writes about the tranquility of the country which takes him away from the mechanical ethics of the modern era. His poems see him retreating into nature to escape the changing world. However, at the same time he uses imagery and elements which make his work modernist. He uses symbolism, juxtaposition, allusions and myths to create the modernist effect in his poetry. He uses mythical images to represent the decaying society and moral values which became prevalent after the wars. His poems No Second Troy, The Second Coming and Leda and the Swan very well depict his usage of myths to emphasize the combined effect of modernism and imagination. Yeats’ ideas were very unconventional because of the way he used mythology in his poetry and switched between past and present. He narrated epic texts in compressed yet aesthetic poems. He put in the original motifs and images but presented in a newer light to relate them to ongoing circumstances or certain other points in history. By doing so, he retold the epics and questioned them at the same time. Through this intermingling, he blurred the lines between myths and reality and thus, No Second Troy, The Second Coming and Leda and the Swan stand as reasons his deliberate attempts to go back to the epics but not using them like the neoclassicists did. Yeats's use of myth and folklore looks at how, in order to justify his view of Irish independence movement and the value of Irish history, he created his own form of elegiac poetry. Such form explains his poetry, re-created the ancient forms of Irish epic myths based upon old folkloric poems and created a new self-enclosed schema of mythology within the framework of his own individual vision. Also Yeats's use of myth which is an anticipation of modernism is frequently perceived as an attempt to escape from history, to avoid confronting the realities of modern life and from mass culture through to democracy.

Eliot has used both pagan and Christian myths. From Egypt, he borrowed of the fertility ritual myth. T.S. Eliot's use of allusion is crucial to the structure and themes of his early poetry. It may be viewed as a compulsion, evident in even the earliest poems, rather than just affectation or elitism. His allusions often involve the reversal or re-ordering of constructions of gender in other literature, especially in other literary treatments of myth. Eliot's "classical" anti-Romanticism may be understood according to this dual concern with myth and gender, in that his poetry simultaneously derives from and attacks a perceived "feminized" Romantic tradition, one which focuses on female characters and which fetishizes, particularly, a sympathetic portrayal of femmes fatales of classical myth, such as Circe, Lamia and Venus. Eliot is thus subverting, or "correcting", what are themselves often subversive genderings of myth. Another aspect of myth that of the quest, is set in opposition to the predatory female by Eliot. A number of early poems place flâneur figures in the role of questers in a context of constraining feminine influence. These questers attempt, via mysticism, to escape from or blur gender and sexuality, or may be ensnared by such things in fertility rituals. A sadomasochistic motivation towards martyrdom is present in poems between 1911 and 1920. With its dual characteristics of disguise and exposure, Eliotic allusion to ritual and myth is itself a ritual (of literary re-enactment) based on a myth (of literature), namely Eliot's "Tradition". Allusive reconfiguration being a two-way process, Eliot's poetry is often implicitly subverted or "corrected" by its own allusions. Thus we are offered more complex representations of gender than may first appear; female characters may be viewed as sympathetic as well as predatory, male ones as being constructed often from representations of femininity rather than masculinity. The poems themselves demonstrate intense awareness of this fluctuation of gender, which appears in earlier poems as a threat, but in The Waste Land as the potential for a rapprochement between genders. This poem comprises multiple layers of re-enactments and reconfigurations of gender-in-myth, centring upon Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. The Waste Land's treatment of myth should not be seen as merely reflecting a passing interest in anthropology, but as the culmination of concerns with myth and gender dating back to the earliest poetry. The complex interrelation of the two aspects leaves it unclear whether Eliot's allusive compulsion derives principally from a concern with mythologies of literature or from a concern with mythologies of gender.

Style: Yeats is generally considered one of the twentieth century's key English language poets. He was a Symbolist poet, in that he used allusive imagery and symbolic structures throughout his career. Yeats chose words and assembled them so that, in addition to a particular meaning, they suggest other abstract thoughts that may seem more significant and resonant. His use of symbols is usually something physical that is both itself and a suggestion of other, perhaps immaterial, timeless qualities. Unlike other modernists who experimented with free verse, Yeats was a master of the traditional forms.The impact of modernism on his work can be seen in the increasing abandonment of the more conventionally poetic diction of his early work in favour of the more austere language and more direct approach to his themes that increasingly characterises the poetry and plays of his middle period, comprising the volumes In the Seven Woods, Responsibilities and The Green Helmet. His later poetry and plays are written in a more personal vein, and the works written in the last twenty years of his life include mention of his son and daughter, as well as meditations on the experience of growing old. In his poem, "The Circus Animals' Desertion", he describes the inspiration for these late works:

Now that my ladder's gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

During the entire first decade of the 20^th century Yeats was extremely active in the management of the Abbey Theatre company, choosing plays, hiring and firing actors and managers, and arranging tours for the company. At this time he also wrote ten plays, and the simple, direct style of dialogue required for the stage became an important consideration in his poems as well. He abandoned the heavily elaborated style of The Wind among the Reeds in favor of conversational rhythms and radically simpler diction. This transformation in his poetic style can be traced in his first three collections of the 20th century: In the Seven Woods (1903), The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910), and Responsibilities (1914). Several poems in those collections use style as their subject. For example, in "A Coat," written in 1912, Yeats derided his 1890s poetic style, saying that he had once adorned his poems with a coat "covered with embroideries / Out of old mythologies." The poem concludes with a brash announcement: "There's more enterprise / In walking naked." This departure from a conventional 19th-century manner disappointed his contemporary readers, who preferred the pleasant musicality of such familiar poems as "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," which he wrote in 1890. Simplification was only the first of several major stylistic changes.

T. S. Eliot has a definite style which can be easily quantified, despite the difficulty of reading and interpreting his work.  His sentences tend to be long and oblique, extending a metaphor or a philosophical reflection over the course of a verse or even more. The Literary Style of T.S. Eliot A writer’s interpretation of the world strictly influences his literary performance. T.S. Eliot literary style was exceedingly melancholy because the era that he was living in was filled with anguish and depression. His works of literature vary from his use of traditional dramatic structure to mythical method. Eliot's diction also shows a high level of erudition, and he makes no attempt to lower it to reach a wider audience.  He is particularly fond of using phrases and verses quoted from works in languages other than English--many verses in "The Waste Land" are in German, for example, while the opening verses of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" are the original Latin version of verses from Dante's Inferno:

S'io credessi che mia risposta fosse

a persona che mai tomasse al mundo,

questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.

Ma per cio che giammai di questo fondo

non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,

senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.

He chooses his words carefully, especially when he has a particular auditory effect in mind--"remaining a perpetual possiblity / only in a world of speculation."  The flow of prose is of paramount importance in Eliot's prose because the length of his works would otherwise make them extremely clumsy, and he goes through a great deal of effort to maintain this flow even between verses.  Where necessary, he breaks this flow with terminal sentences that are meant to remain with the reader longer than the rest--"Thus, in your mind." As with most poets, Eliot makes liberal use of short metaphors and similes, particularly metaphors, in his work, when he avoids his more characteristic extended metaphors.  "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is a prime example; in this selection, the protagonist Prufrock is comparing his life and his recent experiences to a number of less than complementary ideas:

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

Eliot's metaphors tend to serve as particularly poignant images.  Though they are not often delivered in the form of epigrams, they serve the same function--to quickly and effectively crystallize and perpetuate the idea that Eliot is discussing in the piece.  When they are delivered so, it is most often at the conclusion of a poem--the conclusion of "Prufrock" is just such a verse:

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Overall, T. S. Eliot's style is lengthy and laden with literary devices of one sort or another.  He uses his knowledge of literature and of the English language expertly to develop poetry with an amazing flow despite its length and use of elevated diction, and his figurative language has a profound effect on the reader no matter its nature or significance.

I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

-"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Nobel Prize in Literature: W.B. Yeats and T.S Eliot’s lives have quite a lot in common: both authors were born in the second half of the 19th century and reached to be very outstanding figures of 20th century English poetry; in fact, as mentioned above, both of them were awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature at some point of their careers. Their poems share some inherent characteristics for they have been written during the same time period. And so it is. However, there exist two key facts that make Yeats and Eliot’s poems somewhat different: the influence that their respective homelands had on them and the relationship they built up with the literary movements of the moment.

Conclusion:

Undoubtedly, two figures loom largest in twentieth-century poetry - W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot. As fathers, respectively, of the Irish Renaissance and of Modernism, every modern or contemporary poet must address them, even if only to reject their theories and practices. So pervasive was their influence that these two men also had to reckon with one another. Eliot confesses a debt to Yeats, and yet he knows that he has moved beyond the man. Eliot does not use the words of last year or next year but speaks the language of the present. Yeats, at least here, speaks the language of the past. In a linear conception of history, the past necessarily influences the present, and the present moves beyond the past. Yeats' cyclic view of history is ironically appropriate in this context, for this paper will show how the present may influence the past in Eliot's and Yeats' works. The gyres of history, whether upward or downward spirals, do have levels of overlapping contingencies.  It is in just such a contingency that these two men found themselves. The bulk of scholarship pertaining to the influence of these men upon one another has concentrated upon Yeats' influence on Eliot. However, points of correlation also reverse this apparently one-sided influence, where Eliot's poetry undeniably affects Yeats' work. Perhaps this unadmitted borrowing on Yeats' part colored his public attitude toward Eliot's poetry. Eliot was a man in pain, confused about his national identity, his humanity, his masculinity and his relationship to the eternal. His poetry explores his internal conflicts, but it must be remembered that these conflicts were afflictions of the spirit. When Eliot speaks of the world whimpering or ending, he refers to what to him was most significant, his inner spiritual world. His cataclysms were emotional and spiritual. The absolute need for accuracy in scholarship does not need to be re-established in this paper. William Butler Yeats and Thomas Stearns Eliot wrote poetry that defined the needs and desires of their era. They wrote of chaos and confusion and of a need for order; however the very dissimilar underlying causes that they postulated for the problems of world make it clear that they described different issues with wholly different outcomes. Therefore, I believe that the two distinct types of poetry should be not be classified as the same literary genre. Humanity has recorded many different versions of apocalypse, from the antiquarian 'lifting of the veil' to the Catholic Jesus in judgment of all souls in the end times. The two diverse points of view in these poems provide evidence for my contention that it may be time to re-examine the definition and the broad application of the term "apocalyptic poetry."

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      Sen, Dr. S. W. B. Yeats, Selected Poems, Friend’s Book Corner, New Edition 2013

      Shahane, Vasant, A. T. S. Eliot, Selected Poems, Selection From Norton Anthology, Book World, New Dilhi, India