What would we think upon first hearing how Aristotle responded to Plato’s charge that poetry corrupts people by feeding the passions, harming even the good, especially the young? Aristotle’s response concerned with the idea of katharsis, purgation. First of all, we would feel deep sympathy and accord with him. We know that modern people in the 21st century are very attuned to the emotional effect and therapeutic function of poetry, literature, and art.In his book, The Meaning of Health, a collection of essays on existentialism, psychoanalysis, and religion, the philosophical theologian Paul Tillich said “We must replace ‘religion’ by ‘salvation’.” He added that the root of the Greek word ‘soteria,’ meaning salvation, is derived from ‘saos,’ the Latin word ‘salvatio’ from ‘salvus,’ and German word ‘Heiland’ from ‘heil,’ which is akin to the English word “healing.” What we might gather from this is that the most important thing in the realm of religion is basically and essentially “healing.”This essay starts from the idea that the therapeutic function of poetry and poetic drama is not so different from that of religion. Eliot’s later poetry and poetic drama, especially, are filled with healing messages in the religious dimension. This is the reason we expect his poetry and poetic drama to contribute greatly not only to the aesthetic pleasure of poetry but also to the healing of modern reader’s unbalanced emotions.

This paper intends to reveal Emily Hale’s positive influences to Eliot’s poems and plays. Emily Hale who was 40-year-old lover and friend with T. S. Eliot contributes and influences so much the life and the works of T. S. Eliot as the muse. T. S. Eliot didn’t want to disclose his personal evidences such as letters and recordings, because of the fact that he loved Emil Hale for 40 years as well as his guilty consciousness toward his first wife. T. S. Eliot had a deep religious feeying, so he felt a contrition that is much shameful to the death of his former wife, Vivien Haigh-Wood, because he met Emily Hale while his wife died in mental hospital. That’s why he tried to hide all his personal evidences. Critics who studied Eliot’s biographical influences on his works evinced Hale’s contributions to Eliot’s works. Eliot eventually destroyed her letters sent to him, but Hale bequeathed her collection of over a thousand of his letters to her to Princeton, under the restriction that they will not be opened to the public until January 1, 2020. No one but Hale, and maybe the processing archivist, has ever read them. If the day comes to open the letters, the relations and clues between Eliot’s mysterious works and his life will be clearly revealed. The facts and truths of hidden Eliot’s life in letters and recordings will be the evidences of a new horizon to interpret Eliot’s poetry and poetic drama as symbols and allegory.

The paper has the aim to search for why humans should feel spiritual emptiness in spite of material fullness. This is the epistemological reality that humans differ from animals loyal to satiety of stomach. Humans are created with reason as the tool to admire and worship the amazing grace of the Creator and get closer to divinity leading humans to heaven. Eliot as a kind of common human pursued through his poems the ultimate themes such as origin of existences, goal of life, and good / evil, while Augustinus that relied on The Absolute God as the donor of reason as a part of divinity told us them in terms of theology. In the sense, Eliot pursuing the ultimate themes like life and death and also Augustinus resorting to the sacred providence of God, mean representing common people’s desire trying to grasp eternity in spite of having transient longevity. The only two things that we humans including Eliot and Augustinus can know are the terrible realities that we are absurdly thrown into the world and necessarily face with death as the unavoidable and gloomy termination. The pious vision from the saint of Hippo on Eliot’s some ultimate themes is aimed for the practice of ‘caritas’ that means sacred love to both the Absolute and ordinary people. In conclusion, R. Descartes depending upon human’s own apparent thought rather than turning to God, F. Nietzsche declaring the death of God, and K. Marx disregarding divinity and reducing human to molecular state would commit errors because they misused reason given by God that they hated, and produced the proposition of ‘Cogito ergo sum’, the Birth of Tragedy, and the Capital, which also can be recognized as a reality of double bind.

This paper attempts to trace T. S. Eliot’s thoughts on Lancelot Andrewes. Readers have thought little of Andrewes’s fame until Eliot wrote on him, thinking of him as only a prominent writer or preacher. But surprisingly Eliot in “Andrewes” compares Andrewes’s writing method with Donne’s. The paper suggests many ways Andrewes influenced Eliot. Eliot attributes to Andrewes’s writings three qualities ―1) ordonnance or arrangement and structure, 2) precision in the use of words, 3) relevant intensity.Eliot says that Dante in his Divine Comedy succeeds in harmonizing intelligence with emotion properly. Similarly, Eliot holds that the internal structures correspond to the external ones in Andrewes’s sermons. We can see influences from Andrewes’s sermons in Eliot’s “Gerontion” and Ash-Wednesday. Especially Eliot emphasizes that Andrews uses the phrases easy to remember. Eliot views Donne as continuously seeking for objects suitable for his emotions, and Andrewes as after the ones to express his self, not his own self. Thus Eliot finds Andrewes “wholly absorbed in the object.”

So obvious are T. S. Eliot’s conservative tendencies that the only valid question about his politics seems to be how conservative he was. He declared his own position so in religious, political and literary sides, and most of his literary works support this position quite positively. But The Waste Land and his other early works carry some elements which suggest the poet’s sympathy to liberal causes. His well-known literary theories and techniques including ‘objective correlative,’ ‘union of sensibility,’ and ‘collage’ also reflect Eliot’s belief in reason. This advocacy of reason is parallel with liberal and democratic tenets against which Eliot showed overt abhorrence. Psychologically Eliot can be seen to be on the stage of alienation around the time of the composition of his early works including The Waste Land. One is necessarily subject to the drive to move away, at a stage of growth, from the mother or the world one used to belong to in one’s initial phase of life. Eliot gives in to the transcendental in Four Quartets and Ash-Wednesday, suggesting he has returned to the dominance of the mother in infancy. It is questionable how Eliot looked at the difficulties of the underprivileged then suffering from the world order he supported with his increasingly conservative outlooks.

s is well known, T. S. Eliot converted to Anglo-Catholicism from Unitarianism. But he had kept a strong interest in Buddhism throughout his life and Buddhism had left a deep impression on his poetry. The poem “East Coker” was first published in 1940, long after his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism. It contains lots of Buddhist thoughts. The poem begins with a citation from Mary Stuart that “in my beginning is my end” and ends with a sentence, “in my end is my beginning.” These two sentences surely show the concept of reincarnation of Buddhism. Though the phenomenal world is vain and the entity is deep in our minds, human beings don’t understand it.Human beings repeat their phenomenal lives and cannot break up the chain of reincarnation. This poem presents two ways of breaking the chain of metempsychosis: one is to abandon the phenomenal world through practice and the other is to take the middle way of Buddhism. The former is the same as the way St. John of the Cross presented. And the latter is what Nagarjuna Boddhisatva proposed. When we break up the chain of reincarnation, the reality will be a rose garden, that is, in Buddhist term, paradise. We ought to exert a great effort to get to the state. One of the successful efforts is to become humble. Humility is emphasized in Christianity and Buddhism. Humility makes us go into the way of darkness, and that is not different from Buddhist’s way of abandoning selfhood.

Boredom has been recognized as an important cultural symptom in the formation of modernism. Charles Baudelaire, who had affected to a remarkable extent upon modernism, was representatively a poet of “spleen” or in other words, “boredom.” It is widely conjectured that T. S. Eliot, who was once under the influence of Baudelaire, was interested in the problem of boredom as a socio-cultural phenomenon. There have been several terms that designate the similar meaning to boredom such as, melancholy, acedia, ennui and so on. As they are various, the individual meanings and usages are slightly different. However, it is widely acknowledged that the concept of boredom first emerged before and after the World Wars to be merged into modernity. Therefore, the problem of boredom shows the slice of human mentality in an industrialized and urbanized society that may expands into the existential problems. In this respect, The Waste Land shows the barren and sterile landscape of human mind after experiencing the World War, in which people had witnessed absurdity, meaninglessness of life, the sense of emptiness, and the overwhelming boredom. Eliot suggests lots of images of boredom in the poem, these images sometimes appear directively and other times by way of providing barren images of natural landscapes that metaphorize the human existential conditions. Most of such images are very much poetic; and also at the same time, they are the life conditions that modernist writers tried to express as the core essence of life in modernism. The Waste Land is one of the most representative texts that show this relationship between boredom and modernism.

The main aim of this paper is double-folded: it aims to examine the significance of Eliot’s re/reading of Baudelaire’s urban poetry in the formation of his modernist poetics and, thereby, to uncover the lasting presence of allegory in the modernist poetry of Eliot. Important texts for the exploration of Baudelaire’s impact on Eliot are his own later essays on the French poet. The poet of The Flower of Evil, according to Eliot, revolutionizes modern poetry not just by selecting the metropolitan life as the main subject matter of poetry but by penetrating into its shocking reality deeply and accurately. Eliot highlights the fusion of reality and fantasy as the essence of Baudelaire’s urban poetics and, at the same time, as the most important factor that he has learned from the French poet. However, Eliot’s later essays on Baudelaire are not fully helpful in explicating the French poet’s influence on his own urban poems in that Eliot’s critical writings on Baudelaire, mostly written after his 1927 conversion, are not so much concerned with the urban aesthetics of his poetry as with the ethical and religious agendas. Eliot’s early poems reveal that he develops his modernist sensibilities under the strong influence of Laforgue and Baudelaire. Viewed in the context of the poetic discourse of the French poets, Eliot’s early poems gradually move from Laforguian ironic voice and his detached attitude to Baudelairean aesthetics of allegory and shock. At the center of the impact of Baudelaire on Eliot lies the French poet’s deployment of the souvenir as an allegorical sign of the barrenness and the self-alienation of modern experience. In Eliot’s urban poetry, the souvenir is transfigured into debris and there exists a certain “genealogy” of debris. This genealogy begins with “Second Caprice in North Cambridge,” in which “the debris of a city” is a realistic sign of its ruined cityscape, and makes a radical turn in “Goldfish,” where “the debris of the year” is internalized as allegory of the inner death of modern experience. “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” unifies these opposing sides of debris in that “A crowd of twisted things” are mobilized to describe both the external urban space and the protagonist’s memory or “inner-scape.” Eliot’s deployment of debris as allegory of modern experience reach a peak in The Waste Land. As the title bespeaks, the poem is about the land of waste or debris. In this allegorical city of modernity, ghosts of the ancient period return as modernity’s others and their return transfigures the desert-like city into a ghostly land. In the secular Hell of The Waste Land, ruins/debris of cities, an allegorical sign of modern experience, become fused with ghosts, an allegorical sign of modernity’s others.

In his creative activities, T. S. Eliot used a systematic mysticism as the basis for the aesthetic principles of modern poetry and criticism. Seemingly, Eliot’s aestheticism resembles much of Romanticist organic unity in mind, poetry, and criticism; but Eliot disliked the personal tastes of poetic romanticism, which were largely an extension of Western romantic idealism. Eliot’s impersonal theory of poetry was, in fact, involved in many aspects of his understanding of Chinese poetry and tradition, as well as F. H. Bradley’s philosophical ideas. Briefly, as we see from Ezra Pound, Eliot is at once Confucian in form and Taoist or Buddhist in spirit. Such enlightened mysticism in Chinese thought has much to do with Eliot’s poetics, especially Bradleyan philosophy, in which philosophy and religion are considered neither academic nor dogmatic, but practical and felt, such that we experience it daily. This is called religio-philosophical experience as found in Eliot’s poetry Four Quartets and also is commonly found in Chinese ideas, especially the middle point (chung-mean) of the temporal (ch’i-spirit) and the timeless (li-principle), and thinking and behaving.