T.S.

Eliots Linguistic Universe It is generally known that communication is essential for the exploitation and dissemination of knowledge, but how can we communicate with people around the world unless we learn their languages, or at least an international one? Nowadays, people tend to ignore foreign language learning due to the lack of time or interest, but there are some remarkable men who created works of art in the field of literature using their linguistic abilities. One of the most original and appreciated men of letters is T.S. Eliot, who understood the importance of knowing more languages and used it in the elaboration of some of the most spectacular literary works, one of these being The Waste Land. T.S. Eliot was one of the most special men of letters, his literary authority as a poet being seconded by his prestige as a critic, publicist and playwright. He managed to restore the intellectual dignity of English poetry, by forming a means of expression in poetry for the surface and depths of a representative modern mind. A precocious literary talent, Eliot began writing poetry while still a schoolboy, by the age of 22 having published several quite accomplished poems. In 1908 he passed through a literary transformation due to the reading of Arthur Symons' 'The Symbolist Movement in Literature' in which he discovered Rimbaud, Verlaine, Corbiere, but most of all, Jules Laforgue. Laforgue helped the poet to become himself, pointing 'the way to a young poet conscious of the desire for a new idiom' as Eliot affirmed. The suddenness and completeness of Eliot's transformation can be seen in 'Poems Written in Early Youth'; the first five printed in 'Harvard Advocate' between 1907 and 1909 are conventional late blooms of English Romanticism but after the discovery of Laforgue the subsequent poems get a new tone of ironic detachment. Because he grew up in the 1890's and 1900's, Eliot's first verses were naturally in the late romantic vein. The lyrics written before he discovered Laforgue e.g. 'A Graduation 1905' evoke the poetical effects of Gray, Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Arnold, Swinburne. His first volume of poetry, 'Prufrock and Other Observations', was published in 1917, most of the poems appearing first in the 'Poetry' magazine from Chicago. It represented the fruit of the modernization of Eliot's poetry with the following poems: 'Preludes', 'Portrait of a Lady', 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'. These poems reveal also a slight influence of Baudelaire but

also the profoundly formative experience of 'a romantic year' in Paris where he was influenced by the lectures of Henri Bergson. Besides poetry, he approached philosophy too; he wrote a doctoral thesis on 'Experience and the Objects of Knowledge in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley' which has been received as 'the work of an expert'. He studied Sanskrit some of the Upanishades, the Bhagavad-Gita and become involved in 'the mazes of Patanjali's metaphysics'. The second volume, 'Poems' was hand-printed by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the original Hogarth Press in Richmond, Surrey. 'Ara Vos Prec' (1920) is the third volume of poetry whose title comes from the 'Purgatorio', Canto XXVI, incorporating the contents of these two books with other poems, including 'Gerontion'. While he was an assistant editor to 'The Egoist' (1917-19) he contributed to it with some of the best critical works, including the famous essay on 'Traditional and Individual Talent' (whose aesthetic concern is related primarily to the individual work of art, the poem conceived as a made object, an organic thing in itself, whose concrete elements are true correlatives of the artist's imagination and experience with respect to that poem; the degree to which fusion and concentration of intellect, feeling, and experience were achieved was Eliot's criterion for judging the poem), and in 1922 he founded 'The Criterion', in the first number of which appeared 'The Waste Land', dedicated to Ezra Pound, 'il miglior fabbro'. In 1920, Eliot collected his best critical essays in a book entitled 'The Sacred Wood' which contained the major and often recurrent ideas of Eliot's career, setting the foundation of the New Criticism: 1) the integrity of poetry ('a poem has its own life in some sense'); 2) the need to cultivate awareness of literary tradition, of 'masters' who persist as 'living forces of inspiration and historical community; 3) the value of the unified sensibility, which he finds in Shakespeare and Dante, but not in Massinger and Milton, whose intellects are not 'immediately at the tips of the senses'; 4) the celebration of dramatic form, for its power to express social variety; 5) the kind of dramatic character which delights in seeing itself in dramatic light; 6) the music-hall artist as an inspiration for modern literary form, a figure for the potential recapturing of the organic ideal of the performer-artist integrated with a performer-audience; 7) the need for a framework stabilized habits of response, a 'culture' evident in the receptivity of the audience; 8) the

value of inheriting a literary form ('no man can invent a form, create a taste for it, and perfect it too'; 9) the ideal of impersonality ('the progress of an artist is a continual selfsacrifice, a continual extinction of personality').1 Moreover, in his early essays, Eliot is mostly concerned with his practical interest as a poet. Altough he once proclaimed himself a classicist (in his essay 'For Lancelot Andrewes' from 1928), his view of poetry derives from the nineteenth century, not from the seventeenth or eighteenth; it comes from Flaubert and Baudelaire and their French successors and from the more direct influence of Irving Babbitt and Santayana at Harvard and Ezra Pound and T.E. Hulme in London.2 The Flaubertian influence in his doctrine of impersonality comes out where he argues (as in his essay on tradition) that a poet's mind should remain 'inert' and 'neutral' towards his subject-matter, keeping a gulf between 'the man who suffers and the mind which creates'. Also, the influence of the French symbolist poets may be noticed from the musicality of his poetry, the sensibility they evoke, the use of mythological or literary parallels or allusions and many others. He admires in Baudelaire the power of bringing 'imagery of the sordid life of a great metropolis' to a pitch of the first intensity presenting it as it is, and yet making it represent something more than itself'; and in Dante he emphasizes the physical immediacy of the allegory 'Dante's is a visual imaginationin the sense that he lived in an age in which men still saw visions.'3 Further, Eliot believes that the true function of the poetry in poetic drama is to 'touch the border of those feelings which only music can express' thus preparing the audience for a religious insight that transcends the human action; this idea is opposed to Mallarme's belief who considered poetry a substitute for religion, while Eliot considers it an auxiliary to religion. 'Poems 1909-25' (1925) contained all the poems mentioned with the addition of 'The Hollow Men', completing thus the first phase of his poetic career. Eliot's early verse was characterized by the fact that it's so 'full of quotations' as the legendary old lady said of 'Hamlet' this issue representing also the distinctive note from his late verse. Most of the reminiscences in the early poems and 'The Waste Land' are used to express the contrast between the modern world and the ideal heroic world of
1 2

Sacvan Bercovitch, op. cit. p.109 Boris Ford, op. cit., p. 337 3 Boris Ford, op.cit., p.338

literature and arts, e.g. 'Sweeney among the Nightingales', sections of 'The Waste Land' as 'Game of Chess', Fire Sermon'. Thus, it may be noticed that Eliot's earlier works may appear almost as wholly dependant on his favourite literary resources. After 'The Hollow Men' he thought his poetry was over but his undertaking to contribute to the Faber Ariel Poems released the stream and led directly to 'Ash Wednesday'; 'Burnt Norton' appeared as lines and fragments of 'pure unapplied poetry' that come in the writing of the 'Murder in the Cathedral'. His second volume of criticism, 'Homage to John Dryden' was deeply admired for its critical method. The second phase of Eliot's poetry began when he was received into the Anglican Church (1927) and during the same year, he became a British subject. This phase was practically a religious one, emphasized by his experiments in poetic drama ('The Rock' and 'Murder in the Cathedral'). Eliot's interest in religion (mainly Christianity) may be observed also in the first phase ('Gerontion', Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service', 'The Hollow Men', 'Journey of the Magi'). The changed manner becomes obvious in 'Ash Wednesday' (1930), a poem in which the slight Shakespearean echoes are replaced gradually by those of Dante, taking on new power by the poet's conversion to Christian orthodoxy. Therefore, the atmosphere of the poems is no longer one of despair, as in 'The Hollow Men', but one of resignation to God's will. Looking back over the whole of his work, Eliot remarked that 'in its source, in its emotional springs, it comes from America.' His lectures at Harvard University in 1932 resulted in the influential volume 'The Uses of Poetry and the Uses of Criticism', and in 1934 he lectured at the University of Virginia, producing the study of orthodoxy and faith 'After Strange Gods, A Primer of Modern Heresy'. During this period spent in America, he conceived the subject of 'Burnt Norton', the first of the 'Quartets'. Also, in 1932, he wrote 'Sweeney Agonistes', a strange, fascinating play which mingles penitence with musical comedy. 'Murder in the Cathedral' (1935) is a poetic tragedy on the betrayal of Thomas a Beckett and has been successfully performed being a drama of impressive spiritual power. Eliot managed to dramatize domestic life in terms of his philosophy with the following experimental plays: 'The Family Reunion' (1939), 'The Cocktail Party' (received in 1950 the Tony Award for the Best Play'), The Confidential Clerk' (1953), 'The Elder Statesman' (1958).

Thus, Donald Heiney, in his work, 'Recent American Literature', examining Eliot's poetic work as a whole, described a number of dominant characteristics regarding it: the strong feeling for the literary and religious traditions for the past (reflected in the interest in myths and ancient religions but also in obscure literary allusions); the fascination with symbols, especially the mental ones which the psychiatrist and anthropologist Carl Jung calls archetypes (symbolic concepts common to all mankind which relate to problems of man's natural or social environment, being frequently concerned with fertility, fetishes, or man's erotic nature); the anti-democratic beliefs on intellectual grounds manifested in the little kinship he feels with the unlettered masses, holding that the important forces of society lie in the educated, the talented and the aristocratic; the original poetic technique, which evolved from the Imagists and Ezra Pound, being characterized in free verse, snatches of conversation, juxtaposition of ancient and modern, the fact that he writes for a small group of erudite readers. A 'Times Literary Supplement' review well summarized the character of his earlier poetry when it described it as having 'two marks of 'modernist' work, the liveliness that comes from topicality and the difficulty that comes from intellectual abstruseness.'4 The Waste Land 'The Waste Land' marks the beginning of a new period for Eliot as a poet, applying the 'mythical method' he admired in 'Ulysses'; though still influenced by Pound in matter of technique, he begins to develop a more personal religious and ethical system, marked by an increasing interest in the English metaphysical poets (Donne) and Oriental religions (Buddhism, Vedanta). Also, he demonstrates a fascination with anthropological mythology inspired by reading of Sir James Frazer's 'The Golden Bough' and Jessie L. Weston's 'From Ritual to Romance.' In these books, Eliot read of certain vegetation ceremonies, the rituals of fertility cults of very wide geographic distribution, dating back to 3000 BC, some of whose practices and symbols survive in the Tarot cards, represented in medieval romances and Christianity itself. It is practically a narrative of the birth, fruition, decay and death of nature (the cycle of seasons, the cycle of human fertility), the waste and regeneration of a land; this process of regeneration is represented by a king of
4

Donald Heiney, Recent American Literature, Barron's Educational Series, New York, 1958, p.482

semidivine origin (the Fisher King), who is the representative of life itself, being subject to the vicissitudes of declining sexual powers, death and rebirth. Thus, it represents the life principle periodically endangered, the fate of king, community and nature indistinguishable; the fate of king and land nevertheless subject to control in the ceremonies described by Frazer and Weston: a community empowered by itself to save itself.5 Sacvan Bercovitch asserts that, with the aid of Frazer and Weston, 'The Waste Land; reads as an ironic quest-romance, filtered through a modernist aesthetic of collage whose effect is to deny progression and change and to insist on a nightmare of temporal simultaneity. However, 'The Waste Land' should be perceived as a kind of painting in five panels, which must be grasped by the mind's eye all at once, as a spatial form, taken in as if the poem were a single complex image, not a work to be read through time, from beginning to end, but a work to be 'seen' in glance, becoming thus the literary equivalent of Cubism whose overall effect is the fracturing of the traditional literary unities of time, place, and continuing, binding representations of character. At a first reading, 'The Waste Land' might appear as a sequence of unrelated fragments, but gradually, the sequences will make sense and the passages will follow one from another in a logical order given by the connections established among them, especially if the basic narrative of the mentioned works, its rituals and its symbols are regarded as the main 'plan' for the poem. The theme of the poem might be the contrast between human universals and modern materialism and banality, which creates a 'waste land' revitalized only by return to religion and ethics. The epigraph (followed by a dedication to Ezra Pound, 'il miglior fabbro' is from 'Satyricon' of Petronius: 'With my own eyes I saw the Sybil suspended in a jar at Cumae, and when her followers said to her, Sybil, what do you want? She replied 'I want to die'. This epigraph is a relevation of what the poem is about: the lack of hope in a deserted world where the only salvation seems to be death. The poem is divided into five sections, the first of them, 'The Burial of the Dead' (an echo of the Anglican burial service) introducing the motif of the recurrence of life out of death and corruption (Donald Heiney). The first line of the poem, 'April is the cruelest month' is quite surprising because usually April is a lovely spring month, when flowers
5

Sacvan Bercovitch, op. cit., p.117

are in bloom and the nature has its yearly renaissance; however, here April is cruel because it destroys the serene forgetfulness of winter (a suggestion of death) in order to create a new life, but in a hopeless world. The fact that 'summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee/With a shower of rain,' (Starnbergersee is a lake in Germany), may make a reference to the First World War, when Germany was defeated and the world seemed to be ready for a change. The line in German 'Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch' meaning 'I am not Russian at all, I am a German from Lithuania, represents probably the response that the narrator gives to a curious waiter while drinking the coffe, which emphasize the hatred that exists among peoples. The concept of 'rootlessness' or lack of stabilizing tradition is also suggested in the conversation between the possible waiter and the narrator. Further, the narrator appears to be Marie, whom Eliot admired deeply, considering her the greatest music-hall artist in England. The 'roots that clutch' and the branches which 'grow out of this stony rubbish' may suggest the desperate need of the human being to find something to rely on in the apocalyptic world. The death is omnipresent, the invocation of the 'son of man' seems useless; meanwhile the lack of water, which is a vital element, transforms the landscape into an apocalyptic desert: 'dead tree', 'dry stone', the 'cricket' which gives 'no relief' etc. The 'red rock' offers shadow in the waste land, but it seems to be something evil in it:'Come in under the shadow of this red rock),/And I will show you something different from either/Your shadow at morning striding behind you/Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;/I will show you fear in a handful of dust.' Appears a beautiful snatch of Wagner's 'Tristan und Isolde' but is followed by a bleaker line from the same opera: 'Empty and bare the sea': 'You gave me hyacinth first a year ago/ They called me the hyacinth girl/Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden/Your arms full and your hair wet, I could not/Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither/Living nor dead, and I knew nothing?Looking into the heart of light, the silence.' Here appear the complications set by consciousness, for the girl the event has faded to a fact no longer directly felt, she remembers it as others saw her; in the passionate moment all consciousness was suspended, now this is perceived as a kind of annihilation, so that against the remembered rapture there comes a sense of fear and

terror.6 Madame Sosostris, a vulgarized fortuneteller who is the only descendant of the wise necromancers (or Sybils) of the ancient world, predicts through the Tarot pack of cards, each of which bears a symbolic image. However, she is presented in an ironic manner: 'Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante/Has a bad cold, nevertheless/Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe'. The drowned Phoenician Sailor is the first card unfolded, followed by Belladonna (which may have a double meaning: a reference to DaVinci's painting 'Madonna of the rocks' or the famous toxic plant, used by women as to beautify them), the man with three staves (Eliot, in his note, helps his reader by identifying the man with three staves with the Fisher King himself), the Wheel, the oneeyed merchant and a blank card which she is forbidden to see (which might be a suggestion of the fact that the future is not always predictable). 'The Hanged Man' is a figure of a dead God, a Christ-like being who may be reborn but whom the fortune-teller does not find. The lack of confidence in human nature is suggested by the fact that the fortune-teller does not trust anyone to hand in her horoscope, preferring thus to take care of it herself. All these seem connected somehow to the 'unreal city', represented by London which is 'under the brown fog of a winter dawn', being similar thus, as Eliot's note specifies, to Baudelaire's 'fourmillante citte' but also similar to Dante's 'Inferno'. The crowd on London Bridge is formed from people who appear as just being awoken from death (which may represent again a symbol of the War, after which 'Each man fixed his eyes before their feet' which reveals their lack of hope in the future and their conformity with the general situation of despair.) The section ends with the ironic but morbid allusion to the superstition of planting corpses with crops to insure fertility and the 'Dog', seen as a positive entity connects the incident with the Egyptian Osiris myth concerning the resurrection of life. The last line is from Baudelaire's preface to the volume 'Les Fleurs du Mal' 'You!hypocrite lecteur!mon semblable!mon frere!' and probably wants to attract the attention of the reader that he is also one of the people awakened from death and that he should do something about this in order to surpass the state of numbness he is into. The second section presents a woman sitting on a 'Chair' like a 'burnished throne' which firstly may seem as it makes reference to Madonna, but furher 'the golden
6

David A. Moody, op.cit., p.78

Cupidon' who 'peeped out', the other one which 'hid his eyes behind his wing' and the richness of the decorations inside the room makes a suggestion of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, or of Cleopatra, whose lusty passions were famous. The 'synthetic perfumes' that 'drown the sense in odours' are a suggestion of the artificial world in which these numb humans live. In a possible painting form this room is presented the change of Philomel to a nightingale but even though she 'filled the desert with inviolable voice', her song does not transmit anything to the 'dirty ears', suggesting thus a loss of mythical meaning in modern marriage. Philomel, in an ancient myth, violated by a king, avenged by her sister and transformed then into a nightingale, produces now only discordant sound for the modern ear, while the other historical women, Cleopatra and Dido to whom the poet makes reference in the previous verses are the target of the his ironies due to their sublime passions. The tragedy of non communication which affects this degenerated world is related in the verses 'Speak to me. Why do you never speak?' which also means that people do not share their feelings anymore with their fellows. The future is seen as a burden, marked by humans' deception and the of belief in it: 'What shall we do tomorrow? What shall we ever do?' Everything is settled after a strict schedule, emphasizing the mechanization og human life and the everyday monotony: 'The hot water at ten. And if it rains at four./And we shall play a game of chess./ Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.' This waiting may suggest the waiting for a Messiah who will save them from these mechanical activities, offering them a new hope and perhaps a new world. The game of chess which they are supposed to play is the title also of the section, inspired from Middleton's play 'Women beware Women', representing a highly intellectual game, where waiting in order to make the right move is essential. The conversation between the two women and the woman and the narrator is emphasizing the tragedy of dehumanization, in a world where a new life is only a burden and not a regeneration, and love has lost its spiritual value ('And if you don't give it to him, there's others will'); people seem much older than they are, 'so antique', due to their deserted life. The refrain 'HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME!' is the call of the English pubkeeper at closing time; further, this idiotic farewell of the patrons fade into the poignant song of Ophelia from 'Hamlet' suggesting the fact that sublimity is present but the vulgar

generation is too distracted to notice it. However, this repetition may represent also a signal of alarm for a need of a spiritual regeneration. The title of the third section, 'The Fire Sermon', recalls a famous Buddhistic discourse on lust and fornication in which Buddha asks his followers to give up earthly passions and earthly things. The section opens with the wind that 'crosses the brown land, unheard', being the symbol of the emptiness of this world, where regeneration does not seem possible; the fact that 'the nymphs are departed' is a suggestion of the total abandonment by every positive entity. There is an ironic nostalgia for the lost humanity represented by the river which 'bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers/Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends/Or other testimony of summer nights' unfolding thus an extremely desolating image, where only death is present: 'But at my back in a cold blast I hear/ The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear/.' The rats seem to be present all over the poem, being themselves a result of the degeneration of this world, but however, not even rats are how they used to be, adapting themselves to the world in which they live: 'A rat crept softly through the vegetation/ Dragging its slimly belly on the bank. Appears an allusion to the Fisher King, but to a hopeless one without worthy lands: 'While I was fishing in the dull canal/On a winter evening round behind the gashouse' (this suggests the sterility of the world he lives in, because usually water is a medium in which different beings live, but this time the canal is 'dull'). The result of the war makes its presence felt more and more: ' White bodies naked on the low damp ground/And bones cast in a little low garret'. Opening with a pastiche of Spenser's wedding song, the following stanzas soon contrasts this idyllic picture with the squalor of modern love ('Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring' accompanied by motor horns and associated with the horror of rats. Mr. Eugenides reminds of the Syrian merchants, who, according to Jessie J. Weston, brought the mysteries to Europe, but now they bring only sordid merchandise. The narrator transforms into Tiresias, the blind seer of Greek mythology who was the wisest of humans because he had been both human and man; thus he embodies the sexual tension which is the motif of the section.7 Tiresias might be the voice of the poem, having a multiple personality in space and time, because as Eliot asserts, he is the most important
7

Donald Heiney, op.cit., p. 489

characrer in the poem, uniting all the rest: all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias; what Tiresias sees in fact is the substance of the poem. Tiresias, being in modern London, views the sordid meeting of a typist and a clerk in a tenement bedroom. Modern love has lost its significance and its beauty, becoming no more important than the playing of a phonograph record, and he, Tiresias, realizes that in this world he can connect 'nothing with nothing'. The typist represents the symbol of the modern woman, together with Lil and the histerical woman, whose nerves are 'bad' whose life is generally automatized, being caught in a groove from which she cannot escape due to her complete empotional detachment from her own situation. The section ends with the song of the three Thames Daughters (inspired by the Rhine Maidens of 'Die Gotterdammerung'), who relate their dishonoring, and with a final echo of the Buddhistic sermon which is connected with a representative of Christianity, Saint Augustine. The short fourth section, 'Death by Water', parallels the drowning of the Phoenician sailor of 'The Burial of the Dead' with the previously established archetype of death and subsequent resurrection. He fulfills the prediction of Madame Sosostris 'fear death by water', but with an ironical sense; here water appears again as an element bringing death. The section has also a moralizing character, but again slightly ironical: 'O you who turn the wheel and look to windward/Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you". It is recalled also the futility of life: 'He passed the stages of his ages and youth/Entering the whirlpool.' 'The final section, 'What the Thunder Said' begins on a note of hopelessness 'he who was living' (after presenting the biblical episode spent in the Gethsemane garden by Christ and his apostles). This 'He' might be represented either by Christ, but as He is dead, the contemporary man is also dead spiritually: 'We who were living are now dying/With a little patience. The rock, suggesting spiritual sterility is contrasted to the universal symbol of the beginning of life: water which appear in this last section as a positive element.) The 'falling towers' of the cities of the Near East and Europe are mentioned; the civilization which began in Greece and the Holy Land is toppling. The cock-crow, heard as Christ is seized by soldiers recalling the story of the Passion; rain, symbol of recurring life, hence appears. The poem turns to the Hindu myth of the thunder from the Upanishades, the protagonist becoming now the Fisher king himself, who

wanders what he might do against this waste land. The results of his thinking are three quotations: the first is from Dante 'Then sprang he back into the fire that refines them'; the second is from the anonymous 'Vigil of Venus' 'When shall I become as the swallow?'(Eliot's note connects this with Procne, in the Greek myth changed to a swallow to escape her suffering); finally the third quotation is from a sonnet of Gerard de Nerval 'The Prince of Acquitaine at the fallen tower' and it refers to the poet whose life is ruined but who proposes a new life. Recalling the Upanishades, the Fisher King finds out what is needed in order to have set his lands in order: giving (Datta), sympathy (Dayadhvam) and control (Damyata), which are suggested by the syllable 'DA' uttered by the thunder (imagined as a heavenly voice) that is the source of those three great disciplines of Hindu thought. 'To give' refers to the surrender of oneself to another, being the opposite of desire; it is 'an act that requires an awful daring in an age of prudence' 8. Sympathy for others will allow the people to leave the prison of their consciousness that might be guilty for the creation of the waste land and the control of the basic instincts will allow humans to achieve a harmony with the Divinity. The poem then ends with a Sanskrit benediction, the word 'shantih' being equivalent to 'the Peace that Passes all understanding' which brings a hope that the Fisher King will be able to set his lands in order. Therefore, the erudition that Eliot proves in all of his work is definitely acquired through language learning, which also facilitates his understanding of the different cultures he refers to in the text of the poem.

Christopher Beach ed., op. cit., p. 99

Bibliography
1.Beach, Christopher ed., The Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2003 2.Beck, Hamilton ed., An Anthology of American Literature and Culture, Cartier, Chisinau, 1999 3.Bercovitch, Sacvan ed., The Cambridge History of American Literature , vol. V, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2003 4.Bradley, Scully ed., The American Tradition in Literature, W.W. Norton and Company, Manhattan, 1967. 5.Heiney, Donald, Recent American Literature, Barron's Educational Series, New York, 1958. 6.Kalaidjian, Walter ed., The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2006 7.Moody, A. David, Thomas Stearns Eliot:poet, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1994. 8.Philips, Siobhan, The Poetics of the Everyday: Creative Repetition in Modern American Verse, Columbia University Press, New York, 2010. 9.Eliot, T.S., Collected Poems, Faber&Faber, London, 1989. 10.www.poets.org/tseli