World War One fundamentally changed Europeans perspective on man. Before the war they believed that man was innately good, after it people were disenchanted with this vision of man. Both Thomas Sterns Eliot and William Butler Yeats keenly felt this disenchantment, and evinced it in their poetry. In addition to the war, Eliot and Yeats also saw the continuing turmoil in Europe, such as the Russian Revolution and the Irish Rebellions, as confirmation of their fear of man’s nature and expanded their disillusionment in “The Waste Land” and “The Second Coming.”
The poets shared more than a disbelief in the goodness of man’s nature, they also both had religious experiences that colored their thoughts. Eliot was an atheist at the start of his life, and converted to Christianity, coming to believe in it fervently. Eliot also toyed with Buddhism during one stage of his writing “The Wasteland” (Southam 132). Yeats, on the other hand, grew up a practicing Christian and by the time he wrote “The Second Coming” was forming his own personal philosophy founded on an accumulation of everything “[he] had read, thought, experienced, and written over many years” (Harrison. 1). His philosophy, therefore, included Christianity as a factor in his life, but not nearly as significant a factor as in Eliot’s life. Because of the importance of religion in both of their lives, Yeats and Eliot used many mythological and religious allusions in their poems. While both poets shared a disenchantment in the nature of man, their varying religions made them see different outcomes on mankind’s horizon. Eliot saw the future as redeemable, while Yeats believed it could onl…
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Works Cited
Harrison, John. “What rough beast? Yeats, Nietzsche and historical rhetoric in ‘The Second Coming.’
Electric Library
Leavis, F.R. “The Waste Land.” T.S. Eliot: a Collection of Critical Essays.ed.
HughKenner. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1962. 104-109 “Rudyard Kipling and William Butler
Yeats”
http://www.en.utexas.edu/~benjamin/316kfall/316unit4/studentprojects/ kiplingyeats/intro.html
Southam, B.C. A guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot. New York: Harcourt, Brace
The Conscience of Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Conscience of Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray
Much of the criticism regarding The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde has dealt with Dorian Gray’s relation to his own portrait (Raby 392). While some may argue that the portrait represents a reflection of Dorian Gray’s character, this is only a superficial analysis of the novel and Dorian’s character. While Dorian Gray’s true character never changes, it is his own perception of his character (his conscience) that is reflected in the changing face of his portrait. In essence Dorian’s picture becomes a mirror through which the “true Dorian” judges his own metamorphasis as the superficial “Lord Henry Dorian” attempts to embrace Lord Henry’s teachings. Dorian’s duality of character causes a constant internal struggle within him, ultimately culminating in his own suicide.
Initially, Lord Henry’s doctrine of “new Hedonism” contrasts sharply with Dorian’s youthful innocence and passions. These initial feelings are the reader’s first and clearest experience with the soon to be repressed “true Dorian.” The terminology, however, does not imply that Dorian has never been influenced before. This unblemished character simply represents Dorian’s self at the start of the novel, a state which he accepts as his own and is able to find peace in. From this first conversation, Dorian’s peace begins shatter when he learns of Lord Henry’s philosophy and its implications for his own life. Dorian is described as a “brainless, beautiful creature” (3), appropriate since all Dorian has at this stage in the novel is his own initial, untainted feelings. Thus this “pre-Henry” stage is the only time in the novel at which Dorian expresses his “true self” outwardly. This “brai…
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…he Picture of Dorian Gray: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Lawler, Donald L. (1988). 405-412.
Raby, Peter. Oscar Wilde. (1980): 164. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. DiMauro, Laurie. Vol. 41. Detroit: Gale, 1991. 392-397.
Spivey, Ted R. “Oscar Wilde and the Tragedy of Symbolism.” The Journey Beyond Tragedy. (1980): 57-71. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. DiMauro, Laurie. Vol. 41. Detroit: Gale, 1991. 501-502.
Summers, Claude J. “In Such Surrender There May Be Gain’: Oscar Wilde and the Beginnings of Gay Fiction.” Gay Fictions: Wilde to Stonewall, Studies in a Male Homosexual Literary Tradition. (1990): 29-61. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. DiMauro, Laurie. Vol. 41. Detroit: Gale, 1991. 398-401.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray: Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.