This book is the first full-length study of Eliot as the "greatest man of letters in his time." The book draws upon Eliot's experience as well as upon his poetry & prose, tracing the links between his life & his writings for the whole of his career.

A Philosophical Study of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets By MartinWarner. The Edwin Mellen Press. 1999. xi + 138.

In this essay, I elaborate a reading of the Buddhist allusions throughout T.S. Eliot's poetry as being not confessions of Buddhist faith or merely syncretic experiments, but rather ‘conceptual rhymes’ with the crisis of personal connection that preoccupies Eliot across multiple texts. In the Buddhist concepts of pratītya-samutpāda, śūnyatā, saṃsāra, and the pretas, Eliot finds thematic resonances with his own emotional and psychological concerns and so alludes to these concepts in ‘The Fire Sermon’ section of The Waste Land and ‘Burnt (...) Norton’ of Four Quartets as part of his characteristic poetic collage. By examining the connection between Eliot's personal poetic practice and the cross-cultural traditions upon which he drew, my argument intervenes in a long-standing debate regarding the meaning of Asian religio-philosophical influences in the poet's key texts. Moreover, by close reading the third movement of ‘Burnt Norton’ for Buddhist allusions, I attempt to refocus scrutiny of Buddhism in Eliot from the oft-discussed ‘Fire Sermon’ section of The Waste Land to Eliot's later Four Quartets, which remains under-examined for its Buddhist influences by scholars who instead attend to the latter text's more pronounced Vedic references. (shrink)

This paper draws together as many as possible of the clues and pieces of the puzzle surrounding T. S. Eliot’s “infamous” literary term “objective correlative”. Many different scholars have claimed many different sources for the term, in Pound, Whitman, Baudelaire, Washington Allston, Santayana, Husserl, Nietzsche, Newman, Walter Pater, Coleridge, Russell, Bradley, Bergson, Bosanquet, Schopenhauer and Arnold. This paper aims to rewrite this list by surveying those individuals who, in different ways, either offer the truest claim to being the source of (...) the term, or contributed the most to Eliot’s development of it: Allston, Husserl, Bradley and Bergson. What the paper will argue is that Eliot’s possible inspiration for the term is more indebted to the idealist tradition, and Bergson’s aesthetic development of it, than to the phenomenology of Husserl. (shrink)

Presents a penetrating study of Eliot's Four Quartets. Begins with an account of the intellectual and personal context for Eliot's mature work, explaining how his influences shaped his mind, then discusses Eliot's own personal circumstances and the contemporary relevance of his work a half century after it appeared, offering comparisons with Samuel Beckett. A central motif of analysis of "Burnt Norton" is Augustine's discussion of time in relation to subjective memory. Other literary references brought to bear on the Four Quartets (...) include work by Yeats, Milton, and St. John of the Cross, as well as the Bible and the Bhagavad-Gita. Warner is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Warwick, UK. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger defines the world as ‘the ever non-objective to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and death . . . keep us transported into Being’. He writes that the world is ‘not the mere collection of the countable or uncountable, familiar and unfamiliar things that are at hand . . . The world worlds’. Being able to fully and richly express how the world worlds is the task of the artist, whose artwork is the (...) crystallization of this ‘worlding’. For Heidegger it is especially the poet who is attuned to this ‘worlding’, for the poet’s work is focussed on and happens within language itself. The poet is a ‘world-maker’, but this ‘worlding’ is not directed at creating a fictional world; rather it is aimed at revealing the world itself, drawing to the foreground the ‘ever non-objective’ nature of the world, the world happening and unfolding through and with us. This paper, using T.S. Eliot’s poetry, particularly Four Quartets as an example, will delve into how the language of the poet is able to articulate this seemingly invisible boundary between the everyday world and that same world revealed as a mysterious potential that ‘worlds’. The ‘religious imagination’ is central in how this transformation of reality, through poetic language, can manifest. Paul Ricoeur’s work on the poetic and religious dimensions of imagination, particularly the notion of ‘hope’ provides the theoretical underpinnings to explain this transformation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:T. S. Eliot, Dharma Bum:Buddhist Lessons in The Waste LandThomas Michael LeCarnerMany critics have argued that T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land is a poem that attempts to deal with the physical destruction and human atrocities of the First World War, or that he had somehow expressed the disillusionment of a generation. For Eliot, such a characterization was too reductive. He replied, "Nonsense, I may have expressed for them (...) their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention." He did not want to be the poet of a "lost generation" of war survivors, but rather, he wanted, like most poets, to write for all ages. To that end, Eliot sought to transcend time and space by bringing to The Waste Land scores of literary, cultural, and artistic allusions from a variety of sources including the Upanishads, Greek mythology, the Bible, Chaucer, Dante, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Leonardo Da Vinci. Ironically, within this menagerie of literary homages, Eliot has created a vast emptiness, a world of pain, suffering, desolation and despair, as if to suggest that even in the presence of all the greatest artistic and cultural achievements of mankind, we must understand that life is transitory and material things ephemeral.The idea that life is fleeting and filled with suffering is at the core of Buddhist thought and one that Eliot surely learned from his graduate studies at Harvard. Several scholars have examined the influence of Eastern philosophy, and in particular Buddhist thought, on Eliot's work, largely in the past forty years.1 My argument departs from this scholarship in two significant ways. First, I will read The Waste Land through the lens of Eliot's graduate studies, and in doing so will show how the poem functions as a didactic, artistic representation of the Buddhist doctrine of samsāra, an idea that views the world as transitory, overcome [End Page 402] with lustful desires, and forever bound to a cycle of life, death, and rebirth. From this perspective, we can see how Eliot's understanding of the original Buddhist texts, which informed much of his writing of The Waste Land, allowed him to see through the all-too-common misconceptions about Buddhism during the early part of the twentieth century. Lastly, we will see that Eliot looked at these misconceptions as a psychological projection of Europeans' discontent with their own lives in an uncertain time.Over the past three decades an increasing number of scholars have studied Eliot's graduate work. In 1985, Jeffrey Perl and Andrew Tuck published a study that examines the impact that Eliot's coursework and professors had on during his studies at Harvard.2 Perl and Tuck point out that Eliot devoted nearly one third of his graduate program to the study of Asian philosophy and philology. Eliot studied Sanskrit and Pali under C. R. Lanman, the preeminent Sanskrit specialist of the age. In his third year, Eliot took a course entitled "Schools of Religious and Philosophical Thought in Japan" with Professor Masaharu Anesaki, a course that had a profound impact on him. Eliot was exposed to several schools of Buddhism in his studies including the Kegon, Shingon, and Tendai, which are characterized as "descendants of the Madhyamika School, which was founded in the second century A.D. by Nāgārjuna, the Indian Buddhist philosopher." Nāgārjuna is widely considered the most influential Buddhist philosopher after Siddhartha Gautama himself and is the leading proponent of the Mādhyamika ("Middle Way") philosophy.The central teaching of Nāgārjuna was the doctrine of śūnyatā, or as it is often translated, "emptiness." For Mahāyāha Buddhists, all things are totally empty of any defining essence. Thus, all things are void of any fixed identity or inherent existence and remain in a constant state of impermanence, change, and flux. This is the fundamental premise of Mahāyāha Buddhism. Only through the realization of this emptiness in material things can one achieve Buddhahood. According to one standard text, "the real knowledge of Buddha nature is empty of empirical content, and it is the discovery of that emptiness or void, śūnyatā, of the true Buddha... (shrink)

Manju Jain's innovative study of T. S. Eliot's Harvard years traces the genesis of his 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. His concerns were located within the mainstream of Harvard philosophical debates, especially in relation to the controversy of science versus religion. These questions (and Eliot's work as he grappled with them) point forward to important debates in contemporary philosophy and hermeneutics. (...) Drawing extensively on unpublished sources, Manju Jain offers answers to the questions of why Eliot failed to find satisfaction in an academic career devoted to philosophy, and why he abandoned the speculations of metaphysics for the dogmas of theology. (shrink)

T.S. Eliot, no less a distinguished as a critic than as a poet, began as a student of philosophy. As a young man he planned to take up philosophy as a career, and his later critical theory was deeply influenced by his philosophical outlook. This book, written by a professional philosopher trained in the analytic tradition, is the first philosophically rigorous and systematic account of Eliot's views and development. Tracing this devolpment against the mainstream twentieth-century philosophy, both Anglo-American and continental, (...) it defends Eliot's critical theory against the dismissive attitude of the poststructuralists and Marxist, illuminating not only the work of Eliot himself but the state of literary theory today. (shrink)

Peter Knox-Shaw, “The Dry Salvages: T. S. Eliot in Wordsworthian Waters” -/- Since Wordsworth was seen by T. S. Eliot both as a fellow revolutionary and as a cultural adversary, he supplies a particularly rich illustration of Eliot’s contention that the significance of a poem depends on an appreciation of its relation to the great poetry of the past. The Dry Salvages is the poem through which Eliot engages most fully with Romanticism, and it represents, as has long been recognized, (...) his closest approach to the loco-descriptive poem of that movement. Comparison of the many specific motifs that the poem shares with The Prelude allows for a close textured account of the immediate poetic implications of the two writers’ diverging views on the role of the poet, on primitivism, on the rival metaphysics of immanence and transcendence, and on the relative importance of individual and collective identity. The two poems abound in passages sufficiently affined to reveal the differing aims and achievements of each. (shrink)

The T.S. Eliot of the 1920s was a European humanist who was part of an international network of like-minded intellectuals. Their ideas about literature, education and European culture in general remain highly relevant to the cultural debates of our day.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Richard Shusterman T. S. ELIOT ON READING: PLEASURE, GAMES, AND WISDOM Eliot frequently speaks of poetry as essentially a game or amusement whose first and foremost function is to give pleasure. "The poet," says Eliot, "would like to be something of a popular entertainer... would like to convey die pleasures ofpoetry.... As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career but a mug's (...) game" (TUPTUC, p. 154). ' Surely much ofthe point and appeal ofthese remarks is their deflationary contrast to the overlofty claims made for poetry since romanticism, claims which continue to be heard in Arnold's ideas of poetry as criticism of life and surrogate of religion and which extend to modernism with Richards's claim that "poetry is capable of saving us." In mordant debunking of the poet's putative status as world legislator, prophet, and savior, Eliot says he would be pleased to secure for the poet "a part to play in society as worthy as that of the music hall comedian." But Eliot's idea of poetry as an amusement or game is much more than an ironic rhetorical ploy against romantic attitudes. It contains a positive and complex view of what poetry is and how it satisfies. Eliot wants to remind us of "that simple truth that literature is primarily literature, a means of refined and intellectual pleasure."2 However, he also realizes that this truth is really not all that simple to understand or elucidate properly; for it does not mean (though it might seem to suggest ) that literature is a mere means to obtain some external end of pleasure. Nor does it mean that in aiming essentially at pleasure, literature is confined to satisfying our sensual or emotional faculties, and is 2 Philosophy and Literature therefore not significandy connected with improving thought or communicating wisdom, for the pleasure is described as intellectual pleasure. Because of the likely misunderstandings that it is apt to provoke, Eliot's claim that literature is a refined game, that "poetry is a superior amusement," is not confidendy offered as an adequately "true definition, but because if you call it something else, you are likely to call it something still more false" (SW, p. ix). But what substance or value is there in Eliot's preferred view? The idea of poetry as a superior game or amusement is developed in many ways throughout the Eliot critical corpus. We cannot consider them all, but the first we should consider concerns the character of pleasure or enjoyment derived from poetry. If poetry is a refined game, and since games are activities, the pleasure (enjoyment) of poetry would be that ofan activity rather than that ofa pleasant sensation. Eliot's idea of poetic pleasure is thus fundamentally Aristotelian.3 Such pleasure is not a separate sensation or pleasant feeling external to and identifiable apart from the game played, but rather represents the attendant zest or satisfaction with which the game is played or the activity pursued. For Aristotle, "pleasure completes the activity" by the dual and reciprocal action of making it more rewarding and thus promoting it. Our pleasure intensifies our interest in the activity which makes us better pursue it, while displeasure conversely impedes it, as does submitting to the alien pleasures from other activities. If the pleasures of different activities can conflict and impede their respective activities, then these pleasures must be distinguishable and are so in terms of the activities to which they attend. Our enjoyment of an activity thus logically depends on the constitutive structure of that activity and is inseparable from it. We therefore distinguish the pleasures of different games by the different game-activities to which they are bound. One may enjoy tennis, cricket, and football and perhaps feel similar pleasurable sensations from each. But the enjoyment of each game is clearly distinguishable and understood not in terms of these sensations but in terms of the different activities which constitute the formal object or ground of that pleasure. Different games or, more generally, different activities are differendy enjoyable, and each has what Aristotle calls its own "proper pleasure." One could not get the pleasure of playing tennis from playing... (shrink)

While literary criticism is often seen as an unself-reflective forerunner to literary theory, this article argues that T.S. Eliot's theory of critical practice was a philosophically informed methodology of reading designed to create a disciplinary and institutional framework. To reconstruct this theory, it enriches theoretical methodology with intellectual and institutional history. Specifically, the article argues that Eliot's early critical theory depended on the paradigms of anthropology and occultism, developed during his philosophical investigation of anthropology and Leibniz. From this investigation, Eliot (...) created an occult project that used spiritual monads as facts to progress toward the Absolute. The article goes on to argue that Eliot's methodology of reading was shaped by anthropology's and occultism's paradigms of non-academic, non-specialist reading societies that sought a super-historic position in human history through individual progress. The reconstruction of Eliot's intellectual and institutional framework for reading reveals a historical moment with sharp differences and surprising similarities to the present. (shrink)

Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land, in the wake of the Great War or the First World War, which was a time particularly in Western Europe when civilization had fallen to pieces, and it was literally, quite literally in ruin as trenches were dug across the fields of France and Belgium and other countries in Western Europe and as the landscape itself is torn apart, finds only death and self-destruction instead of rebirth or any sense of revivification or any sense of (...) life. The poem deals, in its fragmentary way, not only with the aftermath of the war in its physical repercussions but also with the breakdown of social norms, which earlier ensured cultural sureties. In the process the poem, while vindicating the despair of the individual pitted against the unmanageable disillusionment, shows that this urbanscape is devoid of love and seems to be unable to heal itself. What is left is a poetics of despair where the inhabitants of this ruin wait for redemption from their purgatories, and the search for love is laid to rest in pieces. The paper attempts to demonstrate that the fundamental problem of The Waste Land is the broken bonds of love and sordid sex, the primal cause of ruin and waste, all packed inside a montage of myths, left to the readers to sort out the mess till it dawns on them that all the voices, through their different tales, bemoan, chiefly, the lack of love, an idea that sounds essentialist but keeps in tune with its resonance with the poem. (shrink)

Sometime ago, I found myself using the diagnosis of a student’s depression as a critical tool of interpretation, searching for signs of mental illness in her essay that explored order and disorder in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. I realised that my reading had become a creative act, combining poem, poet, student essay and author to create, in a sense, one (un)readable text. The present paper is a reflection upon the processes of order and disorder located in a diagnosis (...) of “madness” and the readings of writer and text this diagnosis initiated. I look to deconstruct acts of reading and diagnosis. (shrink)