Message of hope in The Waste Land, Gerontion, and The Love Song by J. Alfred PrufrockThomas Stearns Eliot was not a revolutionary, but he revolutionized the way the Western world writes and reads poetry. Some of his works were as imagistic and incomprehensible as most of his free verse works, but his focus was always on the meaning of his language and the lessons he wished to teach with them. Eliot dated the modernist literary iconoclast Ezra Pound but was obsessed with the traditional works of Shakespeare and Dante. He was a man of his time but obsessed with the past. He was born in the United States, but later became a royal subject in England. In short, Eliot is as complete and utter a contradiction as any artist of his time, as is evident in his poetry, drama, and criticism. But the predominance of his contradictions implies two major themes in his poetry: history and faith. He was, in his life, a self-described “Anglo-Catholic,” but was raised as a Midwestern Unitarian in St. Louis. Eliot's biographer, Peter Ackroyd, describes the religion of Eliot's ancestors as "a faith [which] reside[s] in the Church, the city and the university since it is a faith primarily of social intent and concerned with the nature of moral obligations within the Church. a company. She places her trust in good works, in respect for authority and institutions of authority, in public service, in thrift and in success” (18). It is through Eliot's insistence on these "moral obligations" that his didactic poetry gives us insight into both his outwardly rejected faith and his inability to avoid its principles. He becomes, thanks to his greatest poetry, a teacher of what he is supposed not to believe. Eliot... middle of paper ...... In "The Waste Land", Eliot delivers an indictment against the self-serving, irresponsibility of modern society, but not without transmitting to us, in particular to the young people, a message of hope at the end of the Thames. And in “Ash Wednesday,” Eliot finally describes an example of the small, gracious images that God gives us as an oasis in the wastelands of modern culture. Eliot constantly returns, unconsciously, to his childhood responsibilities as a missionary in an ungodly world. It is only through careful and diligent reading of his poetry that we can understand his faithful message of hope. Works Cited Ackroyd, Peter. TS Eliot: A Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984. Kenner, Hugh. TS Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1962. Tate, Allen. TS Eliot: The man and his work. New York: Delacorte Press, 1966.