Masters Theses

Date of Award

6-1987

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Major

English

Major Professor

B. J. Leggett

Committee Members

John Zomchick, William Shurr

Abstract

This study explores the ways in which the personae of three early works by T. S. Eliot--"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Gerontion," and The Waste Land--exhibit the characteristics of an impersonal poet. An impersonal poet, as described in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," is one who cultivates a "consciousness of the past," continuously comparing and contrasting the present with the past; who subordinates individuality to tradition, surrendering and sacrificing self and extinguishing personality; and who separates the "mind which creates" from the "man who suffers," transmuting personal passions into a new and universal "art emotion."

All three personae possess the mind of an impersonal poet--that is, a mind that operates as a medium in which external emotion activates and combines with feelings, phrases, and images suspended in the mind to form new combinations. All three personae separate the man who suffers from the mind that creates, but the relationship between the two aspects differs for each persona. Prufrock stifles the creative mind and lapses into inaction and suffering. Gerontion, having already sacrificed self, personality, and passion, exists only as a "dull head," a "dry brain in a dry season." And within the persona of The Waste Land the man who suffers struggles against a distractingly creative mind to resurrect the self that has been sacrificed and buried.

Although the three personae emphasize different attributes of an impersonal poet, processing stimuli differently, they all progress in a similar pattern as they journey within themselves, exploring connections between mind and man and personality. Ultimately, all three sacrifice a sense of self in order to escape emotion, passion, and the conflicts of personality, lapsing into a state of ennui--an inability to act, a sense of life as a form of death, and an acceptance of suffering as a given that can be relieved only through death.

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