This thesis is to examine biblical poetics, which deals with the many biblical echoes and rhetoric of paradox in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Biblical poetics, the counterpart of biblical theology, tries to mystify history in the poetic text, as opposed to the theologizing of biblical history. Time and history are of great importance in the poetry of T. S. Eliot and in the modernistic milieu, because modernism hinges, in a sense, upon the dispensation of history. Eliot, the champion of the 20th century poetry, tries to mythify the present history by means of a mystical method, assuming that modern history itself is not fit for poetry. Malinowski rightly defines myth as not of the nature of fiction, but instead as a living truth, believed to have once happened in primitive times and continue influencing our everyday lives. In this paper the present writer tries to describe the process of transformation of history in four phases, that is, carpe diem, which can be roughly transliterated as “seize the day,” the rejected history, the deconstructed time, and finally the transfigured time. “Burnt Norton” prefaces the problem of the redemption of history, agreeing with the biblical time concept that all history is divine history. “East Coker”, as the rejected history, reveals the painful confession of the poet in terms of death, not only of ours but also of Jesus Christ. His death is the most rejected and paradoxical of all deaths, because he was rejected by his people and even his Father. In turn, through this death, history is rejected. “Dry Salvages” demonstrates time by decreating time and starting a movement backward to the time of creation. While portraying the sea, one of the motifs of “Dry Salvages,” he mentions both the original sea, which “is” from the beginning and the Logos, Jesus Christ, who “was” from the beginning. The incarnation is the crux of paradoxical events, where the impossible union is accomplished. His resurrection is the paradox of paradoxes, in which the rejected history is deconstructed with life-giving Eros springing forth from abyssal Thanatos. “Little Gidding” breaks the air with flames of fire, urging us to choose between the flames of fire and of the Holy Spirit to be saved. Beginning with the Pentecostal fire, time starts to be so completely transformed that here is “England and nowhere, never and always.” The event on the mountain of transfiguration is the most paradoxical and transformational of events, substantiating history into myth where time and eternity meet. The voyagers must continue going forward until they receive the transfigured vision of the place from which he started.

The literary achievements T. S. Eliot, as a poet, critic and publisher, had made with The Criterion (1922-1939), mostly a quarterly journal, at Faber & Faber, are supposed to be a good example by which we can examine the process of human studies in terms of production, consumption, and distribution of poetry. Lady Rothermere was a patron of the arts, including Eliot’s publishing activities for the commentary journal of The Criterion, yet she was not happy working with him for a long time. The response of Lady Rothermere to the first publication of The Criterion, by Eliot as publisher in October 1922, was critically and cynically ‘dull’; Ezra Pound considered such a comment by Lady Rothermere on Eliot’s works “intentionally offensive” in a letter to Eliot in 1922. Lady Rothermere pursued entertainment in cheap and vulgar literature for the public, different from Eliot, who wanted to publish an elite journal, intellectual and sincere in literary commentary, on his own. Nonetheless, the contribution of Lady Rothermere on Eliot’s works in The Criterion casts a great shadow, by supporting human studies and by the promoting popularity of humanities, into the early literary history of the 20th century. As a matter of fact, Lady Rothermere turned out to be an essential patron for Eliot’s literary activities in the 1920s, yet her active passion and involvement in Eliot’s publication of The Criterion appeared to be a considerable threat to his literary life in poetry and criticism.

T. S. Eliot was raised and educated under the influence of his Unitarian parents and family. Thanks to William Greenleaf Eliot, the founder who is Washington University in St. Louis and the Church of the Messiah, which is the first Unitarian church, Eliot’s father and mother practised and inculcated the family religion to T. S. Eliot. His mother, Charlotte Champe Eliot, was a writer and a reformer and committed to father-in-law’s decrees. But Eliot criticized radicalism of Christianity―it made it too tepid, too liberal, too much like the enlightened Unitarianism of his family. Eliot also worried about the Church as an institution. Eliot’s denounced empty idolatry of forms with the reforming zeal that his forebears had. Eliot took up a position opposite to the humanitarian attitude of his mother and grandfather, the faith that one tries to approach God through human effort. Everytime he went back during these undergraduate years to join in his family’s Sunday’s worship, he found it an increasingly stifling ritual. Eliot suffered religious experiences “as though traversing the Boston street were like wading through time” in undergraduate years at Harvard which are described in his Four Quartets. Eliot divorced his wife through his attorney in spite of her refusal to recognize a divorce. Eliot repented his wrongdoing due to the consciousness of guilty to her and marriage life since his former wife died lonely in mental hospital. During the rest of his life he suffered from his deeds, for which he was possessed of the consciousness of guilty and sin to his dead wife. The sense of damnation, the remorse and guilt that Vivienne evoked were essential to Eliot’s long purgatorial journey that continued long after his formal conversion and their separation six years later. He could escape from her, morally, only by embracing the ascetic Way of the Catholic mystics. In “Little Gidding” of Four Quartets written during in remorse and the sense of guilt due to the debt to Vivienne, we can find the opposite meanings that are both the fire of bomb implying the death of desire and the fire of Christ implying the love of Spirit. Eliot showed a sense of sin through the protagonists of his later poetic plays. In his poetic plays, Eliot sought human love, which was the fruit of blessings of his second marriage free from guilty consciousness after revealing his sin to his family.

In his essay “Hamlet and His Problems”(1919), Eliot analyses Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and evaluates Macbeth, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra favorably. To Eliot, Hamlet is not as good as Macbeth, because it has no objective correlatives. Macbeth is the work, in which he can find suitable correlatives. Unlike Hamlet, Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra seem to him to be an artistic success. This article investigates Eliot’s evaluation of Antony and Cleopatra based on his objective correlative theory. Eliot claims that an author’s emotions should not be in his works, and that instead he should present them objectively. Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra is the best example of this theory, by way of Shakespeare’s various literary conventions, such as paradox, overtone, image, symbol, etc.

The main aim of this article is to uncover how F. R. Leavis carves out his own theoretical space and re/draws the map of English poetry by re-reading T. S. Eliot’s theory of tradition and the dissociated sensibility. In his well-known essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talents,” Eliot underlines the significance of literary tradition in the development of culture and literature, and valorizes it as an “ideal order” that endlessly re/adjusts and re/organizes itself by merging the new with the existing. Profoundly influenced by Eliot’s criticism and poetry, Leavis published two seminal books, New Bearings in English Poetry and Revalution, in the 1930s, where he thoroughly examines the real value of his contemporary poets as well as the past ones and, thereby, re/constructs the great tradition of English poetry. In the books, Leavis redresses Eliot’s notion of tradition, which allows for the dominating power of the past tradition over the present and individuals, by highlighting that it is a small number of talented individuals that challenge the existing order and establish a new tradition. In doing so, Leavis registers the significance of the active and creative role of the subject in the establishment and revaluation of tradition. Unlike Eliot’s notion of tradition, his theory of the dissociation of sensibility is constantly championed by Leavis, who utilizes it as a significant theoretic tool by which to map out the stream of English poetry. However, this does not mean that Leavis unconditionally embraces Eliot’s theory. Rather, Leavis re-enacts the theory by filling up the theoretic ‘empty gaps’ overlooked by Eliot. One of them is the social background that underlies the dissociation of sensibility. For Leavis, it is not just the socio-political changes around the English Civil War but cultural and intellectual factors, including the decay of the court culture and the development of modern science and modern prose, that lead to the dissociation. Another problem of Eliot’s theory is that it forestalls the possibility of the restoration of the unified sensibility in modern poetry by assuming that it has never recovered itself from the damaging effects of the dissociation. However, for Leavis, it is possibile for great individuals to restore the unified sensibility in the age of the dissociation of sensibility, The poet that fully realizes this, Leavis claims, is no other than Eliot himself, who never takes into serious consideration this possibility.

Mainly exploring Eliot and Loy, this essay examines their networks of literary modernism in relation to their journal publications. By excavating their uses of the words in the poems, I assume that their interrelationships came from literary magazines fluorescent at that time. Journal publication was quite important, and most modernist, even contemporary poets were communicating with each other in their works. Thus, I work on the use of poetic words in order to trace the influence of literary modernists on each other. In addition, quoting significant lines in Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”(1915) and The Waste Land(1922), and Loy’s “Songs to Joaness,”(“Love Songs,” 1915-1917), I attempt to find what similarities and differences they have. In terms of Kristevan connection of flesh/flash in “Stabat Mater,” The Waste Land’s “Murmur of maternal lamentation” is explained and anticipates further research.

After conversion, T. S. Eliot’s religious phrase generates a new kind of experimental form like an unfinished two-part poem Coriolan. The first fragment, “Triumphal March” shows the distance and juxtaposition of the two worlds: the worthless secular world of common people and transcendental reality of war hero Coriolan symbolized as “the still point of the turning world.” In the second fragment “Difficulties of a Statesman,” Eliot describes an anguish soldier-statesman Coriolan facing difficulties of leading public after the war. In this respect political leader Coriolan craves spiritual redemption for his desperate emotional emptiness as a result of rootless human relationship with his people and losing his real identity of “the still point of the turning world.” Coriolan study in terms of Christian symbol of “the still point of the turning world” contains important echoes of poems such as Ash Wednesday and Ariel Poems. It also foreshadows Eliot’s later recurrent images used in Choruses from The Rock and Four Quartets as well as his poetic dramas.