Many times our reading of a particular poem by T. S. Eliot may be deepened by understanding the metaphoric images of cited mythological or literary works, by exploring its relation to the poem we are ready to read. Usually the meaning of mythological or literary works quoted in his poem is invaluable or crucial to understand the whole image of the poem, because it suggests the key to comprehend the particular poem as a whole. T. S. Eliot stated in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that no poet, or no artist of any art has his complete meaning alone. His significance is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. In the structure of Eliot's poems we should be aware of the combination of the heterogeneous elements; the past and present, which makes sometimes readers puzzed at first sight but soon wide awaked. It is required that when poetry calls for knowledge, even a common reader must be prepared to answer the demand which Eliot has made use of combining techniques mixing radical elements of the past and present in his poetry. Such a combinative manner has been long acclaimed for a new and startling technique since his poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was published. This paper is designed to explain some of his poetical techniques, particularly showing some examples of complicated, ambiguous, contradictory expressions and making frequent use of ancient myths, classic literature and folklores. The difficulty which faces the reader immediately lies in his frequent use of distorted quotations and allusions, his reference to many languages and literatures. It is partly due to his careful investigation on mysticism such as Christian Mysticism(1899), The Varieties of Religious Experience(1902) and Mysticism (1911). It is not surprising that Eliot has been blamed for obscurity and pretentiousness. This is the result of being judged by readers who have not attempted to analyse his technique to unite the elements of past and present. Eliot said that difficulty reading modern poems would not be something peculiar to certain writers, but a condition of writing with deeper insights into classical literature.

This study of modernism examines the antithesis between high art and mass culture, which Andreas Huyssen closely analyzed in After the Great Divide (1986). Calling this antithesis the divide, Huyssen elaborated the Adomo/Horkheimer version of this chasm. Suggesting the necessary relationship between "High Modernism" and mass culture, Huyssen marked a comer of modernism--that is to say, the avant-gardism-- that had a positive relationship to mass culture. Dealing with the formation of early modernism and its avant-gardism, first I explore how modernism fits into the commercialization of the industrialized society. Modernist works become the commodities in mass culture, even while modernist writers assume "relentless hostility" to the conversion of their works into "easily consumed products." Though the unearthing early modernism has many controversial facets and writers, I mainly focus on Eliot and Pound, briefly presenting the examples of H. D., Joyce, and Lawrence. As Pound declares, Eliot's The Waste Land was a landmark that manifested the justification of the movement of their modem experiment since 1900. Pound was deeply involved in the editing stage of The Waste Land as well as in the historical process of its publication. As Lawrence Rainey says, the price of The Waste Land was actually that of literary modernism. Along with the historical account of marketing modernist works, literary journals between 1900-1930 are also crucial, in that they were the important venues for modernist poetic experimentation and avant-gardism and of first to publish modernist writers' works. For instance, in 1917, the editors of The Little Review, the American avant-garde magazine, proclaimed that they would "make no compromise with the public taste." However, at the same time, by employing a prominent advertising agent, they adopted plans to market the magazine. This inconsistency can be also found in the marketing strategy of The Egoist, for the poet Richard Aldington even suggested hiring sandwich-board man to march around London advertising and selling copies of The Egoist. While Eliot's The Waste Land was a terminal result of modernist poetic experimentation and avant-gardism since 1900, his and Pound's marketing strategy of The Waste Land was also to follow its determined course as in other modernist writers'. Thus, the publication of The Waste Land inevitably records the canonization and commercialization of literary modernism, which were socially and historically constituted.