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The IUP Journal of English Studies

Gothic Production in the Early Poems of T S Eliot

Article Details

Pub. Date	: Sep, 2019
Product Name	: The IUP Journal of English Studies
Product Type	: Article
Product Code	: IJES71909
Author Name	: Rajni Singh and Archana Verma
Availability	: YES
Subject/Domain	: Arts & Humanities
Download Format	: PDF Format
No. of Pages	: 10

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Abstract

There is something dangerous in T S Eliot’s poetry which is explosive, iconoclastic, violent, injurious, scary, and darkly optimistic, or one may even call it implicitly gothic. The dark elements in his poetry owe largely to the milieu, yet it moves from frame to frame, poem to poem, which perhaps showcases that there is something more to this panorama of the dreary that might have resulted out of his fascination for the past. In his creative works, the past, which appears in allusive form, is cherished as a container of the now lost ontological balance of being. The past in the poet has been analyzed from the vantage point of the writer’s urge for a tradition. But in this paper, an attempt has been made to demonstrate his use of memory and his production of the gothic in his early poems. Also, the paper intends to explicate how Eliot’s ghostly world that conjures up from his memory provides a useful lens for understanding the ways in which he represented the fears and anxieties of his time.

Introduction

Restoring the antiquity was entirely an eighteenth century phenomenon, and the Gothic antiquities were seen as a counterpart to the propriety of Classical antiquity (Sweet 2014, 15). Gradually, the idea of preserving the past also found expression in literature. It paved the way to the invention of the gothic genre. Horace Walpole, strongly associated with the Society of Antiquaries, is considered to be the progenitor of the gothic fiction. The literature of the period fed on gothic motifs and larger-than-life events, transporting a sense of threat or horror that emanated from uncertainty and the dark, unfamiliar, and dreadful spaces.