T. S. Eliot has attracted an unprecedented degree of worldwide attention for almost a century but he has rarely been approached from the angle of his politics to the third world reader. His proclaimed position as anglo-Catholic, monarchist, and classicist, however philosophically pure he stood for these values, does not seem to be in accordance with the interest of the third world, most countries of which were once colonized and have continued to be under its prolonged traumatic influences. Eliot’s west- centered value amounts to supporting the ideology through which the imperialism of the previous centuries exploited the third world and rationalized their deeds in the course. John Ashbery, on the other hand, shows a relativistic worldview in his “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” whose apparent subject matter is an Italian Mannerist self-portrait with the same title. Ashbery in the poem questions the hierarchical value system, which Eliot shows in Four Quartets. Ashbery, refusing to attribute any superior values to certain views or notions over others, reasons that one cannot rely on any absolute values or premises. Questioning the validity of metaphysical and transcendental values on which traditional societies relied, he presents diverse postmodernistic skeptical visions on such issues as center versus periphery, appearance versus reality, and intention versus outcome. In the work, however, he is not absolutely without a tint of Eliotian propensity toward the transcendental, enriching its poetic suggestiveness.

1. Introduction
 2. Political Implications of T. S. Eliot’s Poetry
 3. “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” as a Response to Monistic Worldviews
 4. Questions Entailed
 Works Cited
 Abstract

• Byung-Hwa Joh(Koje College)