엘리엇의 전쟁시

Abstract

Eliot didn’t participate in the war, though he lived in the milieu of the wars. Eliot moved to London in 1915 and stayed there till he went to heaven in 1965. Eliot lived though the two World Wars in London and tried to serve a military service in vain. The war-concerned experience he had was only the service of firewatcher during the Second World War.BR We can imagine that the First World War might change his lifelong career. Because of the war, he could not cross the Atlantic and failed to take the oral defense of his doctorial thesis. But his personal experience of the war didn’t find way into his poetry as expected. That’s because he himself practiced his impersonal theory of poetry and objective correlative theory in his poetry. In his early poems such as The Waste Land and Coriolan, he shows the idea that the wars are the same in essence regardless of the times. In later poems such as “East Coker” and “Little Gidding,” his personal experiences of the wars were expressed symbolically and suggestively.BR The war symbols are combined with the suggestion of religions and salvation. In “the Dry Salvages,” Eliot dimly suggests the war in Indian myth and advises to do the duty even one is a soldier. Eliot seems to realize that the wars are the same regardless of the times and places in the fact that they are just a process or a trial human beings have to suffer to attain salvation. The specific wars, therefore, become generalized in his poems.