Modernism is a terminology given by historians to the literary movement towards the end of the 19th century. It is an artistic movement whose aim is to produce art in different traditional forms. Its literary purpose is to criticize the problems of their world. They implicitly and explicitly use specific characteristics; implicitly to send messages to each other or to educated people in positions of authority or explicitly to influence public opinion. “We are talking about two timelines. One is the sequence of texts; the other is the sequence of intellectual movements. Like feminism or Marxism which change the way we read texts. (Armstrong). One of the most influential modernist writers is Thomas Stearns Eliot. His among many poems, Preludes, is a direct and indirect critique of his society. I will discuss in the following paragraphs how the approaches of structuralism, Marxism, and feminism are found in the poem and how the historical context of the poem can add a better understanding of modernism. Firstly, in the Preludes written by TS Eliot, structuralism can be easily identified as a main characteristic of modernism. First, the verses have different lengths. “Six o'clock” (Eliot 9) consists of only two words, it is an incomplete sentence structure and the rest of the verses consist of three to eight words. Second, the parts are not divided equally, either in equal number of stanzas or in number of verses. For example, the first part is made up of two stanzas, the second part of two stanzas, the third part of one stanza, and the fourth part of three stanzas. The first stanza is made up of twelve lines, the second stanza is made up of a single line, the third and fourth are made up of five lines. The fifth stanzas are from the fifth te...... middle of paper ......s, 1996”. Ebscohost.com. ELL Reference Center.December 15, 2011Graham Martin. “Poetic” literature in the modern world. The Open University, 2005Hanlon, Tina. “Preludes”. ebscohost.com.EBSCO Information Services. December 14, 2011 Olney, James and Harold Bloom. “Four quartets: “united into one party”. ebscohost.com. 20050304. EBSCO Information Services. December 15 2011