T. S. Eliot’s Poetics in Urban Alienation of Cityscape

Abstract

This essay attempts to redefine the value of Romantic solitude in William Wordsworth’ works, contrasting rural landscape and cityscape. Romantic solitude disappears in T. S. Eliot’s poems such as “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and The Waste Land in which “solitude” is replaced with modern urban alienation. A daytime rural landscape gives us not sadness but a spiritual pleasure by virtue of solitude while a nighttime cityscape makes us feel alienated from the environment; to the extent that Romantic solitude comes from nature, modern urban alienation is brought out by cityscape. This essay explores how landscape produces the solitude and cityscape leads us to the alienation in terms of Romantic and modern poetics, contrasting Eliot’s and William Wordsworth’s works. The former portrays the speaker as a wanderer in the streets of London or Paris and the latter lets the speaker observe and meditate on the landscape. Whether or not both poets succeed in describing alienation or solitude, they attempt to reflect their mind-scape with rural or urban environment. Modern urban people suffer from spiritual instability, showing us physical mobility. Modern citizens’ alienation reflects spiritually bereft individuals, who can feel only the sense of emptiness and ennui in the cityscape.