Message of Hope in The Waste Land, Gerontion, and The Love Song by J. Alfred Prufrock Thomas Stearns Eliot was no revolutionary, yet he revolutionized the world way in which the Western world writes and reads poetry. Some of his works were as imaginative and incomprehensible as most would be in free verse, yet his concentration was always on the meaning of his language and the lessons he wished to teach with them. Eliot hung out with the modernist literary iconoclast Ezra Pound but was obsessed with the traditional works of Shakespeare and Dante. He was a man of his time but was haunted by the past. He was born in the United States, but later became a royal subject in England. In short, Eliot is as complete and utter a contradiction as any artist of his time, as is evident in his poetry, drama and criticism. But the prevalence of his contradictions involves two main themes in his poetry: history and faith. He called himself an "Anglo-Catholic" in his life, but grew up a Midwestern Unitarian in St. Louis. Eliot biographer Peter Ackroyd describes the religion of Eliot's ancestors as "a faith [that] reside[s] in the Church, the City and the University for it is a faith chiefly social in intent and concerned with the nature of moral obligations to inside it." a company. It places its trust in good works, in respect for authority and its institutions, in public service, in thrift and in success" (18). It is through Eliot's insistence on these "moral obligations" that his didactic poetry gives us insight into both his outwardly rejected faith and his inability to shun its tenets. He becomes, through his greatest poetry, a professor of what he supposedly does not believe. Eliot's... medium of paper... In "The Waste Land", Eliot launches an indictment against the selfish service, irresponsibility of modern society, but not without giving us, especially the young, a message of hope at the end of the Thames. And in "Ash Wednesday," Eliot finally describes an example of the small, gracious images that God offers us as oases in the wasteland of modern culture. Eliot constantly refers, unconsciously, to his childhood responsibilities as a missionary in an ungodly world. It is only through a careful and diligent reading of his poetry that we can understand his faithful message of hope. Works Cited Ackroyd, Peter. TS Eliot: a life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984. Kenner, Hugh. TS Eliot: a collection of critical essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1962. Tate, Allen. TS Eliot: The Man and His Work. New York: Delacorte Press, 1966.