Discuss Eliot’s treatment of the theme of the modern city in Essay exam

Discuss Eliots treatment of the theme of the raw urban center inPreludes. Also think of to The do it cry of J. Alfred Prufrock if youwish.In both Preludes and The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock, themodern urban center is one of the main themes. Eliots fascination with themodern city could stem from the fact that he was an American, and sowhen he moved to England in 1915, the modern city was a part ofEngland of which he was in awe. Eliot was withal influenced by theFrench poet, Charles Baudelaire who explored the poetic possibilitiesof the more sordid aspects of the modern metropolis. I believe thatthis is what Eliot is doing in Preludes I believe he is exploring thepoetic possibilities of the city.In Preludes, Eliot begins the poem with The winter evening settlesdown / With smell of steaks in passageways / sextette oclock. Here, Eliothas personified the weather and made wide use of sibilance. By usesibilance, he makes the passageways seem eerie and mysterious. Eliot accor dingly continues with The burnt-out ends of smoky years / And now agusty shower wraps. These two lines suggest endings, as life isfirstly compared to a cigarette, where it burns away to nothing andthen the line And now a gusty shower wraps makes use of farcicalfallacy, as the turbulent day in the city is over, just alike(p) the gustyshower has finished. The last two lines of the stanza create theimpression of a city atmosphere which is dingy and dark And at the landmark of the driveway / A lonely cab horse steams and stamps. The cabhorse could reverberate people in the city, as many of them are lonely, andat the corner of the street suggests isolation and dinginess mixedwith a familiar city image.In the second stanza, El... ...mirroring the acidulated world which the city is. The worlds revolvesuggests that in cities people are living in their own differentworlds, cigaret masquerades, which is a theme also present in TheLove Song of J. Alfred Prufrock with the line To prepar e a face tomeet the faces that you meet.In Preludes and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Eliotilluminates the modern city in a very harsh light. Eliot seems tofocus on the negative points of the city such as its darkness, devastation and how threatening it can be. This could be due to thefact that Eliot was writing astir(predicate) these city themes after Darwinism,and just before World War One, when the city and civilisation wereseen as the things which would eventually destroy man. Eliotdiscusses the theme of the modern city truthfully and writes about itin the stark way in which he views it.