参考答案： Essay Questions1、T,S.Eliot is a great modernist poet. In poetry, Eliot, with Ezra Pound, replaced the logical exposition of thoughts with collages of fragmentary images and complex allusions.Eliot had a long poetic career, which was generally divided into two periods. Eliot had explored in his early poetry various aspects of decay of culture in the modern Western world, expressing a sense of the disintegration of life. The more important works of this period are Prufrock, Gerontion, The Waste Land and Hollow Men. TheLove Song of J.Alfred Prufrock was written with a faultless ear for rhythm and in striking images. Eliot traced the continuous flow of the protagonist’s sense, thoughts, feelings, and memories in stream-of-consciousness style, suggesting a confession of the speaker’s incapability of facing love and life in a sterile modern world. As Eliot’s most important single poem, The Waste Land has been regarded as a landmark and a model of the 20th century English poetry, comparable to Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads. With bold innovation in versification and style, the poem not only presents a panorama of physical disorder and spiritual desolation in the modern Western world, but also reflects the prevalent mood of disillusionment and despair of a whole post-war generation. The structure of the poem is built out of contrast in time and also based on the contrasting ideas between life and death, fertility and sterility, love and lust, and reality and imagination. Unlike the traditional poems, the shape of the poem is more circular than linear, its order more simultaneous than developing.In his later period, Eliot produced two major volumes of poetic works: Ash Wednesday(1930) and Four Quartets(1944). Both clearly reflect his loyalty to the Church of England. Four Quartets is characterized by a fourfold structure, a symphonic structure and fourfold themes. Man, alienated from self and society, finds reconciliation in God. Thus, Four Quartets are characterized by a philosophical and emotio...