Rhapsody On A Windy Night

T. S. Eliot was a Modernist poet. Modernism was a major literary and cultural movement that began in the late 19th century. Among the precursors of Modernism were the 19th-century French Symbolist poets, who sought to represent truth through symbols rather than traditional Realism. As his career as a poet was getting started, Eliot was significantly influenced by these poets, who included Charles Baudelaire, Paul Valéry, Paul Verlaine, and especially Jules LaForgue. LaForgue’s influence can be seen not only in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” but also in Eliot’s poem from the same period, “Portrait of a Lady” (1915).

Modernism grew during the first two decades of the 20th century. The movement constituted a response to the rapid changes that had taken place in many spheres of life, including loss of faith in religion and development of new economic theories such as Marxism, which critiques the elite’s impact on the working class. Rapid industrialization and the growth of new technologies like radio and film were also changing society. The carnage of World War I (1914-18) also had an impact, eroding confidence in traditional Western culture, institutions, and values. Modernist poets such as Eliot and Ezra Pound created new poetic forms, subjects, and themes that gave expression to the changing cultural landscape. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) is considered one of the most significant Modernist poems.

According to Peter Ackroyd in his biography of Eliot, Modernist writers such as Pound, Eliot, James Joyce, and Wyndham Lewis were characterized by a pessimism (noted earlier by George Orwell) in which they “recognized not only the dissolution of public or social values but also the bankruptcy of private ones.” As a result:

[…] the ‘modernists’ thought to construct a new order out of literature and art. They attempted to create a body of work which was on its own terms self-sufficient, with its own order and tradition, capable of embodying and communicating its own values (Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot: A Life, Simon and Schuster, 1984, pp. 238-39).