Many critics have observed that Bergson's time and memory have had a profound effect on the poetry and plays of T. S. Eliot. Observing his poetry as a student at Harvard, we find that Eliot was obsessed with the problem of time and eternity. Eliot attended the lecture of Henri Bergson at the Collège de France during the short period of 1910-11. After contacting Bergson, Eliot may have let his young sensibility of literature be under the deep influence of Bergson. It isn't difficult to find the evidence of pure memory of Bergson in Eliot's great poetry, Four Quartets. Eliot hoped that he could find ‘the promise of immortality’ in Bergson's philosophy, but later he dismissed it ith a ‘somewhat meretricious captivation’. Even though Eliot realized the religious depth and mystical experience shown in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, his late work, Eliot's disappointment of the absence of immortality revealed in earlier Bergson's works made him reject the philosophy of Bergson. Eliot claims that memory is indispensable for contemplating ‘the still point’ and brings us nearer to a revelation of the divine, a concept adopted from Albertus Magnus and Thomas Acquina. Eliot considers memory not simply the repository for images of the past, but power for us to reshape and interpret past experience into a new and different form. But Bergson's pure memory gave Eliot a limited ability to regain the lost experiences and to realize the meanings of the past action, so Eliot found that he didn't have the hope to reach to reach eternity from Bergson, which resulted in denouncing his philosophy later. In 1948, Eliot confessed that his only “real conversion, by the deliberate influence of any individual, was a temporarily conversion to Bergson.” The philosophy of Bergson embodies the tendency towards anti-intellectualism found in western traditional philosophy. But Eliot wanted to be ‘the mind of Europe’ described in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” as well as to be the inheritor of the abstract and rational stream of western philosophy, from Plato to Dante, Kant, and Russel in western philosophy. Also he wanted to follow the tradition of royalist Maurras and classicist Irving Babbit. In the late 1920's, Eliot openly avowed the principles of Hulme's “religious attitude” in several essays, and that his critical theory owes some of its essential features to Hulme. The cornerstone of Hulme's position was the concept of original sin in christianity. After the temporary influence of Bergson's philosophy, Eliot denounced its positions, and famously declared that he would become “a classicist in literature, a royalist in politics and an anglo-catholic in religion”. This position and identity of Eliot's are why Eliot repudiated Bergson's philosophy even if he perceived the continuous transformation of Bergson himself.

Ⅱ. 시간과 기억 개념 고찰
 Ⅲ. 엘리엇과 베르그송의 언어관과 철학 논쟁
 Ⅳ. 결론
 인용 문헌
 Abstract

• 양재용(전주대) | Jae-yong Yang