T.S. Eliot's literary works and influence

T.S. Eliot: Still Modern Today

When he died in 1968, an article in Life Magazine proclaimed, "Our age beyond any doubt has been, and will continue to be, the Age of Eliot" (qtd. Brooker xiii). Although T.S. Eliot has been dead for over fifty years, this statement is still true in 2011, because in many ways, the basic issues and problems that formed the background for Eliot's works are still present in today's world, although the specific reasons and forms of those problems have evolved over the years. The period of Eliot's earliest artistic production, in particular, has many parallels to today. As with Eliot himself, young people coming of age today have strong familial and cultural traditions to which they are expected to conform, but which seem foreign to them. As during the writing and publication of Eliot's first major works (The Waste Land, 1922, and The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock, 1915), the world finds itself again confronted with changing economic and political conditions that bring most people's long-held perceptions into question. And two of the main themes addressed in The Waste Land, Prufrock, and "Portrait of a Lady" (1917), still confront people today: first, how does one find his way in an age of social and moral decay in which all human agency seems hopeless; and second, on a more personal level, how does one create and maintain meaningful personal relationships within a wider atmosphere of despair? A short example of each of these situations will reveal the parallels between Eliot's period and today.

Eliot was certainly aware of the weight of family obligation and tradition. His grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, set the tone and expectations for not only his own family's conduct, but he expressed his ideas about social and national matters equally clearly. Reflecting on the background and expectations set for him, T.S. Eliot wrote, "The standard of conduct was that which my grandfather had set; our moral judgments, our decisions between duty and self-indulgence, were taken as if, like Moses, he had brought down the tables of the Law, any deviation from which would be sinful" (qtd. Oser 28). Certainly one would expect young Thomas, as any young man coming to his maturity, to question and perhaps stray from these expectations. However, the world Thomas was encountering and seeing develop all around him in the 1910s was far different from his grandfather's world, just as the world today is far different from that of the 1970s and '80s. In both instances, changes in technology, in international relations, in the way people dealt with each other on so many levels, from the personal to the business or social to the international, mean that interactions in the later period would be virtually unrecognizable to someone from the earlier era. In Prufrock, Eliot displays the uncertainty of his times, agonizing, "Do I dare/Disturb the universe?" (ll. 45-6).