The Blindness or Disability in Eliot’s Old Men

Abstract

T. S. Eliot employs the old men characters or their disabilities, impersonalizing their values instead of their infirmity. In his poems, The Waste Land, “Journey of the Magi,” “A Song for Simeon,” the poet illustrates why the old men’s characters are described as the pre-personal or de-personal state even with their deteriorated sensory and cognitive ability. This essay attempts to evaluate the value of the old men’s sensual and physical infirmity in his poetry. The attempt formulates a zone in which both impersonal poetics and the value of disabilities overlap. It gives us an insight into some of the problematics central to interpretations of his poems, for instance, the issue of mythological, biblical, and Dantesque references. Eliot’s attempt is not to express his old men’s disabilities themselves but a creative power of dissociation of the personality.