Page 395 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry

Notes He deals death to his victims and can crush them effortlessly. There is no ‘falsifying dream’ between
his hooked head and hooked feet. Even in his sleep he contemplates killing and the simultaneity of
his dream and achievement, denotes his unity with nature. The hawk sees himself as the apotheosis
of power and thinks he is ‘the self-styled ultimate heir of Creation’. He assumes that the whole creation
is made suitable for his adaptation. The world revolves at his bidding and all the other creatures are
only created for his prey’:

It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot
Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly-
I kill where I please because it is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads-
The allotment of death. (The Hawk Roosting, Lupercal,p.26)
There is no sophistry in his body and his manners mean simply tearing off heads. When he kills he
does not think. He is not subject to self-doubt or self deception unlike men who are victims of
dissociation and inner schisms within their personalities. When critics misunderstood ‘Hawk
Roosting’ as a glorification of totalitarianism and fascism, Ted Hughes remarked:
The poem of mine usually cited for violence is the one about ‘Hawk Roosting’, this drowsy hawk
sitting in a wood and talking to itself. That bird is accused of being a fascist….. the symbol of some
horrible totalitarian genocidal dictator. Actually what I had in mind was that in this hawk Nature is
thinking. Simply Nature. It’s not so simple may be because Nature is not no longer simple. I intended
some Creator like the Jehovah in Job but more feminine. When Christianity kicked the devil out of
job what they actually kicked out was Nature… and Nature became the devil.

31.3 T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land (Non-detailed): Introduction to the Author
and Text

31.3.1 Introduction to the Author

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis in 1888 to a family with prominent New England roots.
Eliot largely abandoned his Midwestern roots and chose to ally himself with both New and Old
England throughout his life. He attended Harvard as an undergraduate in 1906, was accepted into
the literary circles, and had a predilection for 16th- and 17th-century poetry, the Italian Renaissance
(particularly Dante), Eastern religion, and philosophy. Perhaps the greatest influences on him, however,
were 19th-century French Symbolists such as Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Stephene Mallarme,
and Eliot’s favorite, Jules Laforgue. Eliot took from them their sensual yet precise attention to symbolic
images, a feature that would be the hallmark of his brand of Modernism.
Eliot also earned a master’s degree from Harvard in 1910 before studying in Paris and Germany. He
settled in England in 1914 at the outbreak of World War I, studying at Oxford, teaching, and working
at a bank. In 1915 he married British writer Vivienne Haigh-Wood (they would divorce in 1933), a
woman prone to poor physical and mental health, and in November of 1921, Eliot had a nervous
breakdown.
By 1917 Eliot had already achieved great success with his first book of poems, Prufrock and Other
Observations (which included “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” a work begun in his days at
Harvard). Eliot’s reputation was bolstered by the admiration and aid of esteemed contemporary

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