T. S. Eliot's mind encompasses just about every important avant-garde intellectual movement of his time. His thought, as well as his poetry, represents an essential and original achievement within Modernism. This study presents Eliot's unique synthesis of contemporary philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and studies in mysticism, and demonstrates how it is responsible for the nature of his religious belief, the basic tenets of his literary theory, and the figurative, structural, and dramatic aspects of his verse, pervading virtually everything he wrote throughout his life. The chapters are Skepticism, Mysticism, The Unconscious, Primitive Experience, Mythic Consciousness, and A Surrealist Poetic.
What principles connect—and what distinctions separate—“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” The Waste Land, and Four Quartets? The thought-tormented characters in T. S. Eliot’s early poetry are paralyzed by the gap between mind and body, thought and action. The need to address this impasse is part of what drew Eliot to philosophy, and the failure of philosophy to appease his disquiet is the reason he gave for abandoning it. In T. S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination, Jewel Spears Brooker argues that two of the principles that Eliot absorbed as a PhD student at Harvard and Oxford were to become permanent features of his mind, grounding his lifelong quest for wholeness and underpinning most of his subsequent poetry. The first principle is that contradictions are best understood dialectically, by moving to perspectives that both include and transcend them. The second is that all truths exist in relation to other truths. Together or in tandem, these two principles—dialectic and relativism—constitute the basis of a continual reshaping of Eliot’s imagination. The dialectic serves as a kinetic principle, undergirding his impulse to move forward by looping back, and the relativism supports his ingrained ambivalence. Brooker considers Eliot’s poetry in three blocks, each represented by a signature masterpiece: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” The Waste Land, and Four Quartets. She correlates these works with stages in the poet’s intellectual and spiritual life: disjunction, ambivalence, and transcendence. Using a methodology that is both inductive—moving from texts to theories—and comparative—juxtaposing the evolution of Eliot’s mind as reflected in his philosophical prose and the evolution of style as seen in his poetry—Brooker integrates cultural and biographical contexts. The first book to read Eliot’s poems alongside all of his prose and letters, T. S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination will revise received readings of his mind and art, as well as of literary modernism.
In this Companion, an international team of leading T. S. Eliot scholars contribute studies of different facets of the writer's work to build up a carefully co-ordinated and fully rounded introduction. Five chapters give a complete account of Eliot's poems and plays from several distinct points of view. The major aspects and issues of his life and thought are assessed: his American origins and his becoming English; his position as a philosopher; his literary, social, and political criticism; and the evolution of his religious sense. Later chapters place his work in a number of historical perspectives; and the final chapter provides an expert review of the whole field of Eliot studies and is supplemented by a listing of the most significant publications. There is a useful chronological outline. Taken as a whole, the Companion comprises an essential handbook for students and other readers of Eliot.
T. S. Elliot left Harvard during his third year of study in the department of philosophy and went to England. Forty-six years later he authorized the publication of his doctoral dissertation. Here we have a reprint of his sympathetic but not entirely uncritical study of the English idealist philosopher F. H. Bradley.
In late 1910, after graduating from Harvard with a master’s degree in philosophy, the young T. S. Eliot headed across the Atlantic for a year of life and study in France, a country whose poets had already deeply affected his sensibility. His short year there was to change him even more decisively, as he rubbed up against the artistic, philosophical, psychological and political currents of early-century Paris. The absorbent mind of Eliot – as shaped by what he later termed “the mind of Europe” – was a node in this interlocking grid of influences. As there is no understanding T. S. Eliot without considering the impact of French art and thought on his development, this volume serves both as a centennial commemoration of Eliot’s year in Paris and as a reconsideration of the role of France and, more widely, Europe, as they bore on his growth as an artist and critic. Most scholarship on Eliot and France has focused on Eliot’s relationship to the nineteenth-century Symbolists and to the philosophy of Henri Bergson. This old frame of reference is broken apart in favor of a much wider field that still takes Paris as its center but reaches across national borders. The volume is divided into two overlapping sections: the first, “Eliot and France,” focuses on French authors and trends that shaped Eliot and on the personal experiences in Paris that are legible in his artistic development. The second section, “Eliot and Europe,” situates Eliot in a broader matrix, including Anglo-French literary theory, evolutionary sociology, and German influences. Contributors include several highly respected names in the field of modernist studies – including Jean-Michel Rabaté, Jewel Spears Brooker, and Joyce Wexler – as well as a number of well-established Eliot scholars. Reflecting multiple perspectives, this volume does not offer a single, revisionist take on French and European influence in Eliot’s work. Rather, it circles back to familiar territory, deepening and complicating the accepted narratives. It also opens up new veins of inquiry from unexpected sources and understudied phenomena, drawing on the recently published letters and essays that are currently remapping the field of Eliot studies.
Manju Jain traces the genesis of Eliot's major literary, religious and intellectual preoccupations in his early work as a student of philosophy, and explores its influence on his poetic and critical practice.
T. S. Eliot's mind encompasses just about every important avant-garde intellectual movement of his time. His thought, as well as his poetry, represents an essential and original achievement within Modernism. This study presents Eliot's unique synthesis of contemporary philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and studies in mysticism, and demonstrates how it is responsible for the nature of his religious belief, the basic tenets of his literary theory, and the figurative, structural, and dramatic aspects of his verse, pervading virtually everything he wrote throughout his life. The chapters are Skepticism, Mysticism, The Unconscious, Primitive Experience, Mythic Consciousness, and A Surrealist Poetic.
Late in his life T. S. Eliot, when asked if his poetry belonged in the tradition of American literature, replied: “I’d say that my poetry has obviously more in common with my distinguished contemporaries in America than with anything written in my generation in England. That I’m sure of. . . . In its sources, in its emotional springs, it comes from America.” In T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet, James Miller offers the first sustained account of Eliot’s early years, showing that the emotional springs of his poetry did indeed come from America. Miller challenges long-held assumptions about Eliot’s poetry and his life. Eliot himself always maintained that his poems were not based on personal experience, and thus should not be read as personal poems. But Miller convincingly combines a reading of the early work with careful analysis of surviving early correspondence, accounts from Eliot’s friends and acquaintances, and new scholarship that delves into Eliot’s Harvard years. Ultimately, Miller demonstrates that Eliot’s poetry is filled with reflections of his personal experiences: his relationships with family, friends, and wives; his sexuality; his intellectual and social development; his influences. Publication of T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet marks a milestone in Eliot scholarship. At last we have a balanced portrait of the poet and the man, one that takes seriously his American roots. In the process, we gain a fuller appreciation for some of the best-loved poetry of the twentieth century.
