44 Most Important Brief Questions of T S Eliot
1. Where is the name ‘Prufrock’ derived?
Ans. a firm of furniture dealers in St.Louis.
2. In what way is the title of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” ironic?
Ans. The title of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” expresses that the poem should be a love song expressed by the lover (Prufrock) to his beloved but in reality, there is no expression of love in the poem.
3. What kind of poem is “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”?
Ans. Interior monologue.
4. What is an epigraph?
Ans. An epigraph means a quotation or motto at the beginning of a book or its part or a poem.
5. Where is the epigraph to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock taken?
Ans. From Dante’s Inferno, Canto XXVII, 61-66.
6. Who is Prufrock?
Ans. The protagonist of the poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
7. What is the theme of the poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock?
Ans. The boredom, the ennui, the frustration, the neurosis, and the indecisiveness of the protagonist, who represents a modern man.
8. What does the poet mean by “sawdust restaurants”?
Ans. Cheap and dirty restaurants.
9. What is the overwhelming question as Prufrock thinks?
Ans. About his marriage proposal.
10. Who is John the Baptist?
Ans. A prophet who was beheaded by order of King Herod.
11. How does Prufrock visualize death?
Ans. The eternal Footman coming near him and mocking at his cowardice.
12. What kind of man is Prufrock?
Ans. Prufrock is a neurotic man.
13. Who is Hamlet?
Ans. Prince of Denmark and the hero of one of the greatest tragedies of Shakespeare.
14. How is Prufrock awakened from his romantic reverie to the realities of life?
Ans. When Prufrock listens to the human voices around him, he is awakened from his romantic daydreaming to the realities of life which is full of frustration and despair.
15. What is the significance of the title ‘The Waste Land”?
Ans. The title represents a spiritual wasteland, laid waste by the sexual sins of the modern man
16. Where from the epigraph of the poem taken?
Ans. The epigraph of The Waste Land has been taken from Satyricon, a satire composed by the Roman satirist, Petronius Arbiter in the first century AD.
17. What is the theme of the first section The Burial of the Dead’?
Ans. The spiritual and emotional sterility of the modern world.
18. Who is the hyacinth girl?
Ans. A young and beautiful lady of the present age, who has now been forgotten by her lover.
19. What is Starnbergersee?
Ans. A lake resort situated near Munich in West Germany.
20. What is Hofgarten?
Ans. A public park in Munich: ‘Royal Garden’.
21. Who is Marie?
Ans. A countess
22. What does the phrase, ‘A heap of broken images’ mean?
Ans. doctrines or faiths which have been shattered by materialism.
23. What is Tristan and Isolde’?
Ans. The name of a German music drama in which a young man sings of his absent sweetheart.
24. Who is Tiresias?
Ans. A seer of Thebes during the time of King Oedipus and he is a blind prophet.
25. Who is ‘Belladonna”?
Ans. In Italian, ‘Belladonna’ refers to a beautiful lady but in English a deadly flower.
26. Who is the Lady of the Rocks?
Ans. The painting of the Virgin Mary by Leonardo De Vinci, called Madonna of the Rocks.
27. Who is the lady of situations? / Who is Madame Sosostris?
Ans. A fortune-teller
28. What is the significance of the subtitle ‘A Game of Chess’?
Ans. The Subtitle expresses sexual perversities in the modern world.
29. Who is Lil?
Ans. a poor woman who looks antique at the age of only thirty-one. She expresses the sterility of life at a lower level of society.
30. Who is Albert?
Ans. Albert is Lil’s husband,
31. Who is Mr. Eugenides?
Ans. One-eyed merchant of the Tarot Pack.
32. What is the “hermit-thrush”?
Ans. A bird that sings in lonely places.
33. Who is Coriolanus?
Ans. The Roman General, the hero of Shakespeare’s Roman tragedy of that name.
34. What is the significance of the word “Shantih”?
Ans. “Shantih” is a Sanskrit word, it signifies peace.
35. How does The Waste Land end?
Ans. After the stern commands, “Give, Sympathies, and Control”, Eliot utters Shantih (peace) thrice more in the tone of a promise than a gift which the receivers may feel sure of.
36. What does Eliot mean by “unreal city’?
Ans. By ‘unreal city’, Eliot means London that is cut off from both natural and spiritual sources of life.
37. What is the last line of the poem “The Waste Land”?
Ans. “Shanatih Shantih Shantih”
38. Who is Michelangelo?
Ans. A great Italian sculptor, painter, and poet of the early sixteenth century.
39. What does the blindness of one eye of the merchant symbolize?
Ans. The eye of religion is blind.
40. What is the significance of the subtitle ‘The Fire Sermon?
Ans. The subtitle ‘The Fire Sermon’ expresses Lord Buddha’s great sermon to his disciples against the fires of anger, lust, and malice, the temptations that consume human beings. Fire
has been used here as a consuming and purifying symbol.
41. What does ‘interior monologue’ refer to?
Ans. An interior monologue means the presentation to the reader of the flow of a character’s inner emotional experience through his single speech.
42. Who is the Phoenician Sailor’?
Ans. The “drowned Phoenician Sailor” is Adonis, God of fertility.
43. What is ‘Ganga”?
Ans. Ganga is the original Sanskrit word for the Ganges.
44. What do you mean by “Murmur of maternal lamentation”?
Ans. The expression, “murmur of maternal lamentation” means cries of mothers lamenting the loss of their children during the Russian Revolution of 1917.