This paper focuses on the fluctuations of the Self in two different versions of Modernist poetry as they are proposed by T.S. Eliot and Conrad Aiken. During their stay at Harvard, they read many of the same books and studied the same theories. Both were influenced by William James, Emerson, Bergson, Bradley, the French symbolists, and their instructor Santayana. But the same books and theories generated different modes of comprehension in them. While Eliot offered a condensed vision of philosophy in his works, Aiken tended to depict the long process of self-exploration, which at times resulted in extreme monotony in his longer poetic pieces. Eliot claimed that poetic production supersedes the poet, who functions merely as an agent of its creation; this is quite a contrast with the autobiographical method Aiken applied in his works. Eliot’s name stands for the allusive method in poetry; Aiken’s, for psychoanalytic method. Aiken endeavoured to write a perfect long poem, while Eliot strove for a distilled type of poetry with concrete, economical and exact phrasing. Despite the many differences in form and content in the two versions of Modernist poetry written by Eliot and Aiken, they shared a single vision of life as a journey that sets the personality in a constant flux and presumes a continuous development of consciousness. While Aiken was still influenced by the Neo-Romantics when he depicted the subjectivity of the persona in his early writings, Eliot’s early poetry activated the classicist idea by rendering the objective detachment of his personae.

This paper examined how the English Renaissance drama influenced Eliot's early poelry. Many critics like Hugh Kenner and Grover Smith insisted the relalionship between Eliot' s poetη and the English Renaissance drama, but they didn’t tell concretely how Eliot’s poetry was affected by the English Renaissance drama. First, I Iried to examine how the English Renaissance drama affected Eliol's poetry in terms of the form. As some critics indicaled Eliot was a poet who tended to improve the traditional English verse forms and use them. So he learned the blank verse form in lhe English Renaissance drama, improved and used il in his poems especially “Gerontion.'‘ And he used some lechniques like repetition he showed in Ihis poem in his several poems such as “The Love Song of J A lfred PrufTock," and “La Figlia Che Piange." Besides, Eliot used tbe English Renaissance drama as lhe significant source of allusions in his poems. For example, lines 5 and 6 of “Whispers of Immortality" can be associ ated witb Flamineo’s speech of John Webster’s The While Devi/ V. iv. Thus, Eliot Iried to put the concept of tbe deatb in life tbis speech implied in his poem. And he tried to show the speakers' self-dramatization in his early poems Ihat appeared in main characters’ speech in the English Renaissance drama by using these allusions. Thus, he attempted to sho\V the speakers' narcissistic mind that he thought tbe modem men had.

T. S. Eliot was immediately accepted as one of the qualified philosophers in the letter of June 23, 1916 by Prof. J. H. W oods in the Department of Philosophy, Harvard University immediately after the completion of Eliot’s doctoral dissertation, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy 01 F. H. Bradley in April, 1916. Eliot, however, did not go back to U.S.A., which was clearly understood by Eliot himself as the critical decision to give up the bright future as a prominent scholar and to face severe financial difficulties because of the expected problems of the relationships with his own parents in U.S.A. The literary turn of Eliot’s main attention from philosophy is explained in this essay through the examination of Eliot’s doctoral dissertation itself. 1 think Eliot could not accept Bradley’s absolute idealism fully, even though he could not reject it completely. Eliot is not a relativist to give up the whole Bradley’s absolute idealism, i.e. metaphysics, but a relative idealist not to reject blatantly nor to accept, without any condition, the probabi1ity of transcendental experience, i.e. the presence of the Absolute in this world. His dilemma in the study of Bradley’s idealism, the most important philosophy at that time as Eliot thought, led him to the poetry. As Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction is a little different from Postmodernism especially in the view that it did not deny completely the present necessity of metaphysics or the Project of Englitenment, Eliot’s philosophical position is quite similar to that of deconstruction. Eliot’s poetry and literary criticism, which have been regarded as one of the representative cases of Modernism, is discussed in this essay in terms of deconstruction, one of the major literaη criticisms of Postmodernism. 1 think Eliot has to use the ironic language or logic in his literary work, for he has to use the language or logic of Modernism for his already achieved postmodern thought against his manifested intention.