As a way of investigating the interrelationship between T. S. Eliot and French Symbolism, this paper intensively delves into his criticism on the French Symbolist poets chiefly including Charles Baudelaire, Jules Laforgue, and Paul Valéry, and, briefly covered in his critical essays, Tristan Corbière and Stéphane Mallarmé, rather than the influence of French Symbolism on him, which is barely studied in Korea but widely explored overseas. Eliot's criticism on French Symbolism is summarized as follows. Firstly, Eliot on Baudelaire leads Arthur Symons to change his view, but does not fundamentally allow him to accept Baudelaire as the representative poet of Symbolism just like Eliot. Whereas Peter Quennell on Baudelaire is negative and limited by the viewpoint of Eliot. Eliot on Baudelaire in “Baudelaire in Our Time” (1927) gives us the impression of his observation of mistranslated parts derived from Symons's metrical translation. In addition, Baudelaire's technique of “synesthesia” renders him connected with Dante, Shakespeare, Donne, and Eliot in terms of the “unification of sensibility“ in the mainstream of poetry. Meanwhile, it is acceptable that Eliot evaluates Baudelaire in his “Baudelaire“ (1930) as “a fragmentary Dante,“ but it is controversial to position him below Goethe and Gautier. And Eliot considers Satanism one characteristic of Baudelaire and ironically defines him as a classicist, directly related with T. E. Hulme in terms of the Original Sin. Secondly, Eliot on Corbière suggests that a few poems of Corbière bring about the effect of irony by a unified sensibility similar to Crashaw's concentrated conceit, rather than wit as found in the metaphysical conceit of the metaphysical poets. Meanwhile, Eliot on Laforgue argues that Laforgue reveals the dissociation of sensibility, the fissure of thought and feeling, but he still is a metaphysical poet with an expanded metaphysicality, i.e., “the intellectualising of sensibility and the emotionalising of the idea.“ From this practical criticism Eliot discovers a unified sensibility similar to the metaphysical conceit in his quoted Laforgue's Derniers Vers, but G. M. Turnell and Warren Ramsey interestingly contradict this view. And Eliot indicates the Laforguian irony more ubiquitously employed in Laforgue than in Baudelaire, but he uses it more skillfully in his poetry than Laforgue himself. Additionally, Eliot argues that Laforgue rather than Whitman is the most important innovator of vers libre, but Turnell and Ramsey also deny this argument. In short, Eliot evaluates Laforgue as lower than Donne, Donne as lower than Dante, whom he praises most, over all the other poets of the world. Thirdly, Eliot on Mallarmé emphasizes Mallarmé's musicality by indicating that his technique rather than significance is crucial in the understanding of his poetry at the opposite extreme of Dante's Divine Comedy. Eliot on Valéry insists that Valéry, the last poet of French Symbolism, as the successor of experiments and exploration pursued by Mallarmé, has developed the music and fluidity, as well as a variety of technical expressions, of Symbolism. And Eliot includes Valéry's impersonality in his impersonal theory of poetry, and argues that from the viewpoint of impersonality Valery's “Le Cimetière Marin” (1920) with its philosophical structure is greater than Gray's ”Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751). Furthermore, Eliot speaks highly of Valéry as the representative poet in the first half of the 20th century, who will remain longer in posterity than Yeats, Rilke, or any other poet. Eliot points out Valéry's two characteristics, first he is the most self-conscious poet and second, he is an utmost skeptic who disbelieves even art. Meanwhile, Eliot maintains that though Valéry's anti-romantic theory of poetry regarding sonnets as the true quintessence of poetry is influenced by Poe's, it surpasses Poe's “The Philosophy of Composition” and is more original. Finally, Eliot critically subverts Valéry's comparison of poetry with “dancing” and prose with “walking” or “running.” In conclusion, it is Eliot the critic's great merit that he provides a deep, insightful, and comprehensive view, though sometimes not well-balanced one, on the relationship between French Symbolism and modernism, including himself. He does this by surveying in his essays, prefaces, forewords, and book reviews the French Symbolist poets focusing on Baudelaire, Corbière, Laforgue, Mallarmé, and Valéry, rather unfamiliar to the British and American critics in his days.

• 안중은(안동대학교) | Joong-Eun Ahn