T. S. Eliot’s career began with a struggle between poetry and philosophy. The agon featured Dante, whose work informed Eliot’s earliest poems, and F. H. Bradley, whose thought was 배e subject of his Ph.D. thesis. Eliot's most detailed discussion of the connection between poetry and philosophy is contained in his 1926 Clark Lectures at Cambridge University, published as Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry. He defines the “philosophic poet" in Bradleyean terms as one who 객비arges immediate experience" by “drawing within the orbit of feeling and sense what had existed only in thought" (VMP 55,51). Philosophic poetry is work of the “highest intensity, in which the thought is fused into poetry at a very high temperature" (VMP 50). Eliot argues that Dante’s poetη perfectly i1Iustrates the integration of feeling and intel1igence, both in life and in art. 1n tbis paper, 1 explore Eliot’s allempt to negotiate the c1aims of philosophy and poetry, as represented by Bradley and Dante, and his ultimate decision to abandon a promising career in philosophy for a tenuous career in poetry. Eliot's ambition of becoming a 개bilosophic poet," combining Bradley and Dante, was realized in bis Dantean sequences Ash-Wednesday and Four Quartets.

• Jewel Spears Brooker(Eckerd College)