Eliot Next To Baudelaire Essay, Research Paper

Throughout The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot uses nature with negative undertones to convey to his reader the ideas and feelings he had about World War I. He uses the four elements to discuss the driving force of life which is rebirth. Eliot sates, “Under the brown fog of a winter dawn”(1860,ln.60), in which he is trying to show the reader a dark and dreary atmosphere. Eliot takes the element earth and says, “Breeding lilacs out of the dead land mixing memory and Desire”(1859,ln2-3), which is giving a feeling of negativity towards remembering the past. The poem really seems to take this theme and portray a dead land that lacks fertility or potency to sustain life. In contrast to Eliot, Charles Baudelaire uses positive and uplifting prose to deal with nature in the sonnet “Correspondence”. When he states,”Nature is a temple whose living colonnades Breathe forth a mystic speech in fitful sighs”(1186), he is basicallyy saying that nature’s pillars or the pillars of life provide something special or mystical. Unlike Eliot, he uses images of beauty that are sensual. He says,”Perfumes there are as sweet as the oboe’s sound Green as the prairies, fresh as a childs caress”(1187);Baudelaire wants the idea of nature and sexuality to dance through ones head in a very positive manner. Finally at the end of the poem he states,”Like myrrh,or musk,or amber,that excite The ecstasies of sense, the soul’s delight.”(1187)Once again the notion that the senses are in tune with nature can be seen in this quote, with visions of sexual overtones held throughout. Both authors use the idea of nature throughout the discussed works, but handle them in different tones. Eliot seem to find resolve in a darker and gloomier approach to nature and its relationship with life. One reason may be that Baudelaire did not see the fruits of the a Great War as Eliot witnessed, and had a much happier outllok on life at least comparatively.