The Blues as a way to sing the alienation of the industrial world: T. S.

Eliot
Many people called our century: age of anxiety, but maybe it's better call it age of the Blues,
because of the melancholic music genre born in near the 1900 in the Mississippi's Delta.
First of all, the Blues is a way of being, and then maybe is a kind of music.
Nowadays, the blues music is one of the most common on the world, and this is because all humans
are starting to experiment the same melancholy and alienation that weighed down the hearts of the
Mississippi's black.
In the same period there was a particular modernist American poet who was trying to denounce the
same things: Thomas Stearns Eliot.
Indeed, a sense of alienation and aloofness pervades the works of Eliot, sensations that are common
in the Europeans that lived the gap between the two world wars.
He analyzed the lost of identity caused by the industrialization of the English society, pointing out
how this makes life futile and empty.
The Eliot's most famous work is The Waste Land, a short poem divided into five section: The
Burial of the Dead, A Game of Chess, The Fire Sermon, Death by Water and What the
Thunder Said.
The style of the writer is highly innovative: he writes different fragments, using various poetic
styles, such as blank verse, the ode, the quatrain and the free verse, trying to reproduce the chaotic
variety of the modern society.
Whereas in previous poetry the readers were guided to an interpretation of the text by the author, in
his works there is the space for an active participation of the public.
On this purpose, Eliot used the technique of the objective correlative, that is the attempt at
communicating philosophical reflection and feelings by means of a simile, a description or a
monologue by a character in order to provide a vision of the world or a feeling of the lyrical I.
For example, in the text The Fire Sermon, the object correlative of the squalid emotionless
modern society is the scene of the loveless seduction of a typist by her lover.
Fragment from The Fire Sermon
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the suns last rays,
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest
I too awaited the expected guest.

He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,

A small house agents clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Bestows one final patronising kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . .
She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:
Well now thats done: and Im glad its over.
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.
This is a fragment of the third part of the Waste Land, where the poet describes the destruction of
the human relationships, In the firsts lines, Eliot paints an impersonal scene, which can be the scene
of the everyday life of a typical woman. She has just finished work and, tired, the typist moves
towards home.
At this point, the speaker of the poem changes to the figure of the prophet Tiresias, a character from
Greek myth who was changed from a man to a woman by Hera, Zeus's wife. Tiresias, then, knows
how to live life as a man as well as a woman. So he (or she) is the ideal prophet when it comes to
what is wrong with modern relationships.
After the presentation of Tiresias, there is another flash into the life of the typist, who eats alone
from a can, after having cleaned her breakfast, in a sort of monotonous way of being. The word
teatime gives us an indication about the register of the situation: It suggest a popular context, in
deed teatime is used by the working class to describe the dinner.
Then Eliot gives us a description of the apartment: there are clothes spread all on the room, even in
the

davenport, as to state another time the low class condition of the woman.
In the next verses there are a changing of scene and Tiresias, that knows what is going to happen,
can't do more than watch.
A young man arrives, described as carbuncular, which isn't only related to his physical aspect but
also with his essence and with his behavior.
In fact, this man isn't a successful one; he's one of the low on whom assurance sits, but who has a
brash conduct, like he's a Bradford millionaire. Then ,when the typist is bored and tired, he feels
that time is propitious, and starts to seduce her, with such bad success.
Actually, the caresses are unreproved, if undesired, and he takes advantages of her (his vanity
requires no response), he assaults without needing any encouragement or response, and delighting
in the indifference of the woman.
The emotionless scene described emphasized the loss of values of the modern society, where even
the concept of pleasure is distorted; in deed, even if the man, throw the sexual act, reached a
vacuum sense of assertiveness, the typist, left alone, is glad that it's over and puts a record on the
gramophone, unconcerned by the act that ended.