T.S. ELIOT’S USE OF SILENCE AS AN EVOLVING MODE OF POETIC COMMUNICATION

Creative minds at the beginning of the twentieth century had been placed in a challenging situation. Language assumed the character of a resistant medium, and as Roland Barthes notes, the words erupted like “an act without immediate past, without environment, and which holds forth only the dense shadow of reflexes from all sources which are associated with it.” The crisis deepened under the compulsive need of projecting new perceptual profiles through these given set of pre-determined symbols – the words. Eliot’s anxiety with the limits of the logos as an effective mode of communication leads to a sustained quest and experimentation for a medium that can deliver the message. Intriguing use of silences, often heightened by use of elemental sounds, is but an essential prelude preparing for a bursting forth of a language laden with profound communicative possibilities, almost like what Roland Barthes describes as“…an unexpected object, a Pandora’s box from which fly out all the potentialities of language.” The phases of vacancy and dark void are but prelude to a mesmerizing multiplicity of forms.