[Abstract] T.S. Eliot, a great American poet in the twentieth century, is a spokesman of the Imagist Movement. There are so many allusions and images in Eliot’s poems that the readers are often confused. He experienced two world wars. The time when he lived is a period of chaos, which provided him better chance to know the society and the people in great pain in that period. He goes deep into the nature of modern society. He is good at describing modern characters in his early poems. He emphasizes describing the rotten Western civilization and the decayed morals after the First World War before writing The Waste Land. In his early poems, he revealed the spiritual crisis in Western society. He also reveals the spiritual emptiness, conflicts and aimless life and despair of life of modern men. Prufrock is timid, hesitant, sensitive, anxious, lack of will and confidence; Gerontion, a little old man, hopeless, is on the verge of death; the hollow man is spiritually empty, tiny, and no one would care about his existence. The modern men that T.S. Eliot described in his early poems are hopeless and in serious illness. They are incurable. However, they might be the victims of the rotten western civilization. They are doomed to death. This paper will analyze the detailed behaviors of the characters in Eliot’s early poems and reveal the major image of modern men more clearly.
[Key Words] T.S. Eliot; hollow men; spiritual emptiness; modern men

【摘要】T.S.艾略特---20世纪美国著名的诗人，是意象派的代表人物之一。艾略特在他的诗歌中运用了很多典故和意象，这使读者不易理解他的作品。他经历了两次世界大战，早期他生活在混乱的年代，这样他就更有机会了解社会，了解生活在痛苦中的人们，他看清社会的本质。他擅长于描写现代人的形象，这特别体现在他的早期诗歌中。在《荒原》之前，艾略特着重描写第一次世界大战后西方文明的衰败和道德观念的沦落。在他的早期诗歌中，他反映了西方社会的精神危机，反映了现代人的精神空虚、内心矛盾、平庸生活以及对生活的绝望。普鲁弗洛克天生胆小、犹豫、敏感、焦虑、缺乏意志和信心；小老人毫无希望，已经无可救药，即将走向死亡；空心人精神空虚、渺小，没有人会在乎他的存在。艾略特在他早期诗歌中所反映的现代人的形象是无可救药的，也许可以说他们是西方文明衰败的受害者，他们最终是将走向死亡的。本文将详细分析艾略特早期诗歌中的人物行为，从而更清楚地看出现代人的形象。
【关键词】T.S.艾略特；空心人；精神空虚；现代人

1. Introduction
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), who is regarded as a great modern perceptive poet in the twentieth century, was born in a rich family in St. Louis, Missouri. He was the son of a successful, cultivated businessman. The excellent family environment provided a good condition for T.S. Eliot to be a well-known scholar. And he had chance to study at many pop universities and received an excellent education, especially in classic literature when he was young.
T.S. Eliot was intelligent when he was young. His father was a businessman and had no enough time to cultivate him, while his mother, who was once ambitious to be a Christian poet, gave him much influence on literature. Eliot studied first at Smith Academy in St. Louis, and then went to Harvard for both his undergraduate and graduate studies under the guidance of the famous scholars Irving Babbitt and George Santayana. Both of them influenced him a lot on his later writing. Later, he went to Paris and England. He was fascinated by the poetry of Jules La-Forgue and other recent French poets. After the First World War broke out, he left Germany to study Greek philosophy at Oxford on the Oxford philosopher F.H. Bradley, whose work gave him much help in mind. Eliot also cherished Dante’s works, which also influenced him a lot in his later writings.
In 1914, Eliot met Ezra Pond, the founder of the Imagist movement in poetry, who also put forward the slogan “make it new”. It was Ezra Pond who first found Eliot’s genius in poetry. Pond gave Eliot a lot of help and also gave the imagery effect on him. With the help of Ezra Pond, T.S. Eliot published his first poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in Chicago’s “Poetry” in 1915. And Eliot became world famous after publishing The Waste Land in 1922.
For the reason of various influences, Eliot’s poems appear complex and difficult to understand. Eliot used so many images and allusions in his poems that readers are often confused. Eliot showed us a clear-cut picture of the modern world and what the modern men look like. Besides he explores our mind and imaginations by his poems. He is a great poet in the 20th century.

2. The detailed features of modern men described in T.S. Eliot’s early poems
Eliot had experienced two world wars. In his eyes, the world was not as beautiful as the romantic poets described. The Western civilization had been rotten at that time. And the people were not as pure as they used to be. They began to worship money and became greedy. Many people became more practical in their eyes. Money or material abundant was the most important. People became materialized. At the same time, their spirit was becoming empty. They suffered from serious psychological illness.
With the rapid developme

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] 下一页