Men and women in T.S. Eliot's early poetry

Sammanfattning: The theme of men and women is conspicuous in T. S. Eliot's early poetry. It constitutes the subject of this study, which is an investigation of the symbolic images, metaphors and similes associated with this theme. When a man/woman relationship is referred to, the relevant imagery is often taken from historical or mythical narratives, suggesting an element of universal applicability. Painful feelings and experiences are couched in this indirectly expressive idiom. Contacts between man and woman in these early poems always result in suffering; women are repeatedly abandoned and men left alone with feelings of insufficiency. Pain is shared equally by the two sexes. The sexual undertone in the early "Love Song" runs through Eliot's poetry between 1910 and 1925, gaining greater emphasis in The Waste Land and The Hollow Men . The agony and distress associated with sexual matters play a vital role in his early poems, a circumstance which has not always been fully recognized. Erotic concerns and preoccupations fill the lives of the main "characters" in this poetry, men and women alike. However, experiences of this kind are unsettling, and any attempt at a dialogue between the sexes is bound to fail. In each of the four collections, the theme of relationships between men and women indicates a step further downwards into isolation. There is an afflicting want of any feelings of love and tenderness - only a mechanized sexuality is left, stripped of all its generative force and with sterility and impotence as the consistent, final result.