Vol. 7, Issue 2, Part N (2025)

This article offers an extended critical examination of the interrelated themes of melancholia, memory, and modernity in the poetry of T. S. Eliot, focusing on “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” The Waste Land, and Four Quartets. It argues that Eliot’s poetic imagination articulates a uniquely modern form of melancholia—one shaped not simply by personal sorrow but by historical rupture, cultural fragmentation, and the accelerating tempo of twentieth-century life. The study situates Prufrock’s psychic paralysis within Freud’s notion of melancholia as inward-turned critique, reading the poem as a portrait of the modern subject caught between self-scrutiny and inaction. It then explores how The Waste Land transforms this psychological framework into a sweeping cultural diagnosis, depicting a civilization reduced to “a heap of broken images” and haunted by its own fractured memory. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s theory of historical ruins, the article argues that Eliot’s dense inter-textuality reflects both the persistence and the incompleteness of cultural memory in an age of dislocation. The discussion culminates in a reading of Four Quartets, where Eliot reframes melancholia as contemplative longing rather than despair. Here, memory becomes a potential means of spiritual orientation, and time appears cyclical rather than purely linear—an insight encapsulated in the line “the end is where we start from.” Through this trajectory, the article traces Eliot’s evolving response to modernity, moving from fragmentation toward a tentative, introspective search for coherence.