A imagem como limiar na poesia de T. S. Eliot

Abstract

Literature and photography share a mutual objective: to capture and to perpetuate moments. On
poetry, in particular, word and image complement and sustain each other on the creative process. This can
be noticed in the poem “Morning at the window”, published by T. S. Eliot in his book Prufrock and other
observations (1917), in which the poetic persona concentrate its focus on a window through where he
perceives the daily urban life. The scenes are marked by a clear, non-personal and objective language that
converge into vivid and varied images of the modern city. The “framing effect”, or contention effet, used
by Eliot on this poem opens space for a plural reading of the captured imagetic elements and the
represented reality, setting up a dialogue with the reader such as a photography. Therefore, in the present
work we propose to analyse the construction of imagery in Eliot’s poetry, taking the poem in question as
a starting point. We aim at showing the relation between literature and image in the author's work, or yet,
to show the approximation between poetry and photography as a way to notice how both of them propose
a syntax of visual images. For this, we will discuss the influences which provided the author with poetic
elements to develop an “imagery new”, observacional and objective, and also the post-war context in
which the poem is situated. To support the work, we based on Georges Didi-Huberman’s impressions to
think of image as a threshold. Even though Eliot’s poem does not present a corresponding photograph,
one can think of the photographic effect established by the text in the options of the spacial cuts.