ts eliot hsc sample essay

T.S. Eliot Exemplar Essay - Module B HSC English Advanced

The following essay was written by Fenna Kroon, Project's English Resourcer!

Fenna Kroon

94 in English Advanced

English Advanced Module B Exemplar Essay - T.S. Eliot

Module b essay question.

“When you engage with works of quality you often feel, and continue to feel, that your internal planes have shifted, and that things will never quite be the same again.”

To what extent does this statement resonate with your considered perspective of TS Eliot’s poetry？

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HSC English Exemplar Essay Response

Good literature has the power to take us as readers on a journey with the author. This is evident in TS Eliot’s modernist suit of poetry TS Eliot: Selected Poetry, particularly ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ (Love Song) (1915) as well as ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925). These texts and their use of literary devices provide readers with a glimpse into another perspective from a time long gone. As a result, our own views and internal planes are challenged and altered. This change is permanent, exposing readers to ideas beyond their own. Thus, these poems have shaped the views of countless individuals and will continue to do so to a large extent.

When confronted with literature that is challenging and engaging, the individual has no option but to ponder its central messages. In ‘Love Song’, Eliot establishes this through prolific use of the Flanuer, connoisseur of the streets and a lonely, observing wanderer. Created within a context of mass urbanisation and mechanisation, this figure walks through new streets and society that is continually changing. Personally, this poem was finished shortly after the death of Eliot’s close friend, Jean Verdenel in the Gallipoli campaign in 1915 and hence this poem encapsulates the futility of conflict as well as modern society. This is evident in the opening lines as the flaneur says “Let us go then you and I / as the evening is spread out against the sky / like a patient etherised on a table.” This stark and confronting juxtaposition mirrors that of the title where ‘love song’, with musical and romantic connotations, is juxtaposed with ‘J Alfred Prufrock’ as a proper noun. This consequently results in readers immediately feeling uncomfortable as their expectations for what to expect within traditional poetry are crushed. Exacerbated through repetition as he writes “There will be time, there will be time.”, Eliot comments on how his society has made him passive, procrastinating the search for meaning with temporary satisfactions. He further comments on British high society, questioning whether “Should I, after tea and cake and ices, have the strength to force this moment to its crisis?”. Here, Eliot and the flaneur are begging themselves to find the strength to create their own meaning in society. Thus, they reach out to the audience to change their ways，acting as a cautionary tale for the ambivalence the two experience. Finally, this is exemplified as Eliot writes “I have seen moments of my greatness flicker” and the visual connotation of achievements as flickering like a candle indicate how Eliot believes that a modernist society inhibits individuals from being their own person and finding meaning. As John Xiros Cooper so effectively summarised, “[modernist society] make us passively abject.” This highlights how Eliot’s context minimised his ability to find peace and understanding. Within a world of upheaval, the individual becomes lost. Reading this as a contemporary audience, it is impossible to ignore our own suffocating society of change. Consequently, this poem allows for readers to understand the futility of their attempts of finding the meaning of life and existence. This ultimately shifts their internal understanding irrevocably and unchangingly.

Further, the futility of life and religion leave readers with no guidance or advice in finding continuity. This is evident in Eliot’s The Hollow Men, which uses an extended metaphor of the river Styx (the purgatorial border between life and death) and intertextual references to establish the meaningless nature of a life without faith. After suffering a nervous breakdown and institutionalisation in 1921, this poem is a manifestation of this desolation and pain. Evident as he writes “This is the dead land. This is the cactus land.” the allusion to Dante’s Divine Comedies, a text discussing hell and purgatory, it becomes evident that the setting of the poem is one of indecision and judgement. This is further established through the epigraph alluding to Guy Fawkes, “A penny for the old guy”and to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as he writes “Mistah Kurtz - he dead”. Both these allusions discuss legacy and how you’re remembered once you die. Fawke’s death is celebrated by children to this day, with Mr Kurtz repenting on his deathbed, begging “What have I done?”. Consequently, Eliot’s inclusion of these two epigraphs at the beginning of his poem create lingering questions of what death means and what an unsatisfying life means. Hence, as he writes “We are the Hollow men. We are the stuffed men.”, the inclusive language of ‘we’ draws all readers into the discussion of whether they’ve lived a worthy life. Eliot links this to religious pursuits as he writes “Lips that should kiss / form prayers to broken stone”. This alludes to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, comparing their romance to the paradoxical nature of religion. Providing both a mechanism for damnation in Hell as well as eternal salvation，Eliot questions whether a religious life would in any form change his circumstance. Xiros Cooper effectively expands on this, arguing that “We are not surprised when it ends with a defeated stammer”. Essentially, Eliot’s consistent allusions to other texts and metaphors to being ‘hollow’ create a questioning persona surrounding life and religion and its influence on judgement. Consequently, readers are forced to go on this journey with Eliot as they engage with this poem, considering their own answers relating to life, death and purgatory. And, once these questions are in your head, they are impossible to get out.

Having considered Eliot’s suite as a whole，it is evident that his poetry impacts readers on a fundamental level because it discusses issues pertinent to everyone. This is particularly true for The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Hollow Men, discussing the dangers of a changing society and purgatory itself respectively. As a result, the reader’s understanding of themselves and their broader society is fundamentally and permanently altered.

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Hsc module b: band 6 notes on t.s. eliot’s poetry.

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Module B is also called a ‘critical study of literature’. Hence, it is important to:

1.   Make personal and intellectual connections with the text. You must try to have your own ideas about what the composer is trying to convey. For Eliot’s poetry, many students only focus on its bleak and depressing aspects, yet it is extremely important to also perceive its subtle allusions to hope and salvation, especially in later works.

2.   Understand textual integrity – that means you must look at the texts as a cohesive unit, or as a whole. Focus on the connections in the prescribed suite of poetry – the scrutinising “eyes”, the monotony of modern life, decadence of social values, etc.

3.   Take note of the context and structure of each poem – although this is not module A, understanding the context of each poem allows you to comprehend the significance and artistry of Eliot’s poems. For example, without knowing anything about Modernism, how is it possible to appreciate how well Eliot captures the lethargy and decay in his era?

Historical Context: The Early 1900s

Historically, Eliot’s poetry captures the turmoil of a generation transitioning from the Romantic era to the demoralised landscape of Modernism. Modernism became even more prominent after World War I, where the value of human life and civilisation was heavily questioned by the general public. This period in time was generally associated with subverting Victorian/Romantic ideals, secularity (deviance from religion), industrialism and technological advancement. In particular, technological advancements became synonymous to social upheaval for many in the late 1800s to early 1900s, for people feared their efficiency will change society too much for people to ever adjust to.

Literary Context:

History is often reflected in literature. During the Modernist era, composers became more experimental, often rebelling against well-established conventions to reflect reality more closely. Not only is this evident in the structure of Eliot’s poetry, it is also quite obvious in his titles (e.g. The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Preludes , Rhapsody on a Windy Night).

Personal Context

Traditionally, Eliot’s ‘early works’ include:

·      The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

·      Preludes

·      Rhapsody

And his ‘later’ works include:

·      The Hollow Men

·      Journey of the Magi

By ‘Journey of the Magi’, Eliot had become an Anglican, hence the heavy religious references.

There are many themes in Eliot’s poetry, but try to avoid ones that are too vague/overdone.

For example, instead of writing a paragraph on ‘uncertainty’, make it more nuanced and specific, e.g. uncertainty because of paradigmatic shifts. That way, not only have you shown your personal understanding of his poetry, your essay will also stand out against essays which demonstrate only a superficial understanding of the poems.

Some prominent, yet interesting points you could write about in your essay include:

·      Paradigmatic shifts and uncertainty

·      Loss of spirituality and secularity

·      Superficiality and materialism

·      Loss of purpose and search for meaning

·      Physical setting of the Modernist landscape reflecting psychological/internal uncertainty

·      Possibility of redemption

Want to know more about these ideas? JP English provides text specific booklets written by state rankers which outlines the key ideas of each poems to guide students into developing their own nuanced arguments. Furthermore, we provide exemplars from ex-students who have achieved state ranks or 95+ English HSC marks so that students know exactly what is needed to ace Module B.

Special Structural/Stylistic features of each poem

Here are some features of Eliot’s poetry that I found particularly unique and intriguing. Of course, there are so many others, but here are some of the main ones.

The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock

·      The title itself is extremely ironic. ‘Love Song’ suggests intimacy and connection and yet this is completely subverted by Prufrock’s pedantic, ambiguous narrative of isolation and disconnection.

·      The various intertextual allusions towards the end of the poem.

o   “I know the voices dying with a dying fall” is from Shakespeare’s  Twelfth Night

o   “ I am Lazarus, come from the dead” is a biblical allusion to Lazarus whom Christ raised from the dead.

o   Prufrock rejects the idea that he is Prince Hamlet, a character whose tragedy could arguably be said to have borne out of his indecision.

·      The idea of Prufrock as a flaneur, a wanderer amidst the modern landscape.

·      Again, the title is very ironic. T he cohesive lyricism of the Romantic preludes is completely subverted by Eliot’s very disturbing portrait of sordid Modernist imageries.

·      The pronouns shift from section to section, examining the society from different perspectives.

Rhapsody on a Windy Night

·      Again, Eliot appropriates the episodic, free-flowing structure of Romantic Rhapsodies while inspiring the portrait of a fractured and denigrated world.

·      There’s also quite an evident struggle between nature (the feeble, voiceless moon) and humanity (the narrating streetlamp).

·      The recurring time motifs, “Twelve o’clock”, “Half past one”, “Half past two”, etc places emphasis on the regularity and indifference of time.

The Hollow Man

·      The various intertextual allusions in this poem:

o   It begins with an allusion to Joseph Conrad’s ‘Mistah Kurtz’, a sinister imperialist.

o   The epigram, ‘a penny for the Guy’, refers to the Gunpowder Plot and Guy Fawkes

o   “The twilight kingdom” is an allusion to Dante’s hell

o   “Here we go around the prickly pear” is an allusion to the nursery rhyme/children’s song “Here we go ‘round the mulberry bush”.

·      This is somewhat debatable, but it could be said that this poem depicts a world where religious entities and cosmic powers are apathetic to human suffering.

Journey of the Magi

·      Eliot’s recent conversion to Anglicanism inspired his intertextual reflection on traditional ideals of Christianity through appropriating the “Three Wise Men” in seeking Jesus.

·      The hedonistic materialism of “summer palaces on slopes” is quite evident in the early stanzas

·      In this poem, the search for meaning is both a spiritual and literal journey.

·      Read scholar articles – for Eliot, there are so many excellent articles out there. They help you articulate your ideas and inspire you to view the text from a different perspective. Just go on Google Scholar and type ‘Eliot poetry’. There are so many resources there!

·      Practice! – the only way to get better is through practice. Not only does JP English provide you with ample exercises, but they also provide weekly feedback so you can improve.

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HSC Advanced English Module B: T.S. Eliot Sample Essay and Essay Analysis

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Description.

This is a three-part resource for students undertaking the NSW HSC Advanced English Module B: Critical Study of a Text.

1. A generic essay plan shows students how to compose an essay suitable for Stage 6, progressing them from the simpler PEEL/TEAL models of Stage 4 and 5.

2. A sample essay for the prescribed text, the poetry of T.S. Eliot, answers the 2019 HSC question: People are half-alive, hungry for any form of spiritual experience.

To what extent does this align with your understanding of T.S. Eliot’s poetry?

3. There is also a second copy of the essay, marked up to show how it follows the plan, and with five short questions which require students to engage critically with the essay and its form.

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TS Eliot Essay

This is an example of a high range response of a TS Eliot essay. As a critical study, the respondent must assess his work as a whole and be aware of the broader contextual impact of the work. This response is for the 2013 English HSC.

Explore how time and place are used in Eliot’s poetry to shape the reader’s understanding of modernity.

In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO of the poems set for study.

T.S. Eliot’s poetry examines how individuals in modernity are trapped by materialistic values, limiting their experiential perspectives to particular times and places. In a world riddled with uncertainty in the wake of vast ideological and political changes spurred on by the scientific enlightenment and subsequent industrial hegemony of Western imperial nations, the poet’s work often contrasts traditional metaphysical ideals with the vacuum of modern nihilism.  Whereas Eliot’s first professionally published poem The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock TLSJAP (June 1915) philosophically wrestles in uncertainty with the relentless power of this new world, his later work The Hollow Men THM (November 1925) succinctly critiques the limitations of a solely modernistic value system.

Even in Eliot’s earliest work, his reverence for past wisdom and curiosity for non-physical places are evident.  The infinitely internal and publicly shy poet begins TLSJAP by intertextually invoking Dante in its original latin format, inviting the audience into a version of hell through the eyes of a poet in the Late Middle Ages. Dante’s protagonist believes that if someone were able to escape hell, “this flame would keep still without moving any further.” However, as the protagonist and all who hear him are trapped in the allegory of “those undergrounds” or for a figurative interpretation, the hell of one’s own mind; he is able to “answer you” (himself), “without fear of infamy” as the poet would be unable to suffer rejection or ridicule from within the confines of his own psyche. It is in this way that Eliot is able to express both his interpersonal sense of isolation where he does not “dare” to disturb other people in a social setting as well as the dread and confusion that develops from symbolically daring to “disturb the universe” through existential inquiry. By reading his poetry, the audience is invited into a realm that both emphasises the physical constraints of modern materialistic reality where literally and figuratively, “in a minute there is time”, whilst simultaneously using the wisdom of the ancients to query the “hundred indecisions … hundred visions and revisions” that transcend individual experience and instead serves as a reminder of the many facets of existence where the universe paradoxically has “time to murder and create” across time and space .

At the turn of the nineteenth century the “madman who lit a lantern” screeching “Whither is God?” had left a deep existential void for Western thinkers in modernity. Eliot wrestles with Nietzsche’s assessment of the encroaching societal nihilism in TLSJAP by positing: “But as if a magic lantern threw nerves in patterns on a screen”. The simplicity of the simile and Eliot’s recurring motif of lamp light symbolises humanity’s limited capacity for creation in “the chambers of the [sublime] sea”, where the folly of modern man’s hubris is alluded to with “Prince Hamlet” and the rise of Western materialism serving as the precursor “to swell progress” symbolically in the modern world. Ultimately this merely serves as a temporary respite for what the “worshippers of the machine” choose to forget,  as “human voices” are the only one’s viewed as rational enough to “wake us” in a time where man is the master and creator of all until “we drown”, the finality of death being inevitable to a 20th Century intellectual mind. Modernity serves as a stage for examining the absurdity of existence with a self conscious protagonist who is ironically concerned with whether he will “part” his hair or wear his “trousers rolled” whilst simultaneously grappling with metaphysical questions like having “squeezed a universe into a ball” of consciousness. J. Hillis Miller interprets as an “opaque sphere” of subjectivity where each “Lazarus” (human) who has been brought into existence in their own “impenetrable” bubble of experience and understanding, is stuck in the timeless angst of their own mind as their impending death looms.

As a critic, Eliot’s THM draws inspiration from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, to the poet, the value placed on materialism in the modern world is viewed as hollow, much like an ivory tusk that has been removed by Kurtz as he parades around as a god before his untimely demise. Eliot parodies the shortsightedness of modern man by referring to him as someone with a “Headpiece filled with straw”, an allusion to “pagan rituals” according to Grover Smith. Once more through literary fragmentation the poet slips into and out of his own context to explore the subjectivity of meaning from a relativistic perspective; to the poet, the “quiet and meaningless” voices of men are paralleled with “wind in dry grass” and “rats’ feet” which to a 20th Century modernist would have no inherent purpose. The symbolic “cactus land” that modern man inhabits and “At five o’clock in the morning” in futility goes “round the prickly pear”, a parody on the “divine” tree which places the nihilistic thinker in a position that resembles Sisyphus with his rock. The solitude of city life is apparent as the poet wonders whether it is “like this” in “death’s other kingdom” where the machine men are “walking alone”, babies “trembling with tenderness” in a “hollow valley” that only values  “stone images” which glorify the materialistic might of the Western world.

It would be a disservice to assess THM without reflecting on Eliot’s most well known work The Waste Land; a poem that critiques the modern notion of progress without consideration, a time and place that lacks “roots” to “clutch” onto the “stony rubbish” that has been constructed by the “Son of man”. Again, the poet considers past wisdom that to the modern individual is “more distant” than a “fading star” as the “twilight kingdom” of death is treated with little regard in modernity, a time where materialists are “Sightless, unless / The eyes reappear”, a primitive “hope” for a species of “empty men” who have destroyed themselves with war. As if in a game of hide and seek, Eliot seeks the places where the symbolic “Shadow” of meaning resides. By placing the audience’s mind in “deliberate disguises” like “crowskin”, Eliot emphasises through pathetic fallacy man’s connection to the “voices” that are apparent to the poet “Between the conception / And the creation”, the metaphysical place being the “Kingdom” of the “multifoliate rose”, infinite time and potential.

Eliot grips his audience in a place that knows no time, the infinitely creative mind; he does this as he earnestly considers the events and thinking of his personal context and the wisdom that has illuminated the modern mind as the cult of progress developed and devalued the knowledge that came before. By seeking knowledge in the angst of his own mind as well as that of contemporary thinkers who had influenced global events, the poet is able to look beyond the veil of time and space in order to appreciate the sublime. He empathises with modernity, a time which whimpers into nothingness as the bombs fall and the business men circle in their suits but reminds the respondent to consider their own roots when seeking meaning.

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Prepared Essay On T.S Eliot Poetry

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T.S Eliot prepared essay for HSC

T.S Eliot’s modernist poetry (….-….) explores universal ideas relating to early 20th century world, a time essentially marked by rapid industrial and technological progression. Thesis statement. His visual depictions of a decrepit, sterile, and decaying world are a common motif throughout his poetry, together with his portrayal of the human psyche of individuals living mundane existences, within fractured, industrialised, urban cities. It is through this that Eliot successfully presents society as desolate and barren, with his criticism toward modernity suggesting the lack of humanity, spirituality and meaning apparent within these urban societies. The textual integrity of Eliot’s poetry lies in his ability to convey the feelings and experiences of individuals in the modernist era, thus emphasising his extensive knowledge on the intricacies of humanity in an everchanging world at the turn of the century.

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