In T. S. Eliot's early poetic works, from his juvenilia to The Waste Land, the style changes are remarkable. The coherent, homogeneous, hypotactic, linear, logical style turns into the fragmented, heterogeneous, illogical, incoherent, paratactic style. Many literary critics have reviewed the diverse literary influences as well as philosophical, artistic, political, and social influences on his poems, but they have not taken into consideration one important factor: his writing tool. A writing tool is not merely a tool to record one's thought, but it can function as “a precondition of production that contributes to our thinking prior to any conscious reaction” (Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter 214). In his early career, Eliot replaced the traditional writing tools of pen and ink with a modern mechanical writing tool, typewriter. These two writing tools are closely related with two distinct ratios of human senses and two different kinds of cultures. Handwriting requires the hand's collaboration with the eye that guides the hand through each movement and constantly attending to the creation of each letter. When the visual technology of handwriting is emphasized, it transforms fragmented and heterogeneous reality into “homogeneity, uniformity, and continuity” (Marshall McLuhan Understanding Media 87). However, typewriting that depends on blind and tactile technologies does not require the use of the eye in the act of composition. When the eye does not have to participate in the typewriting act, there is a radical change of the ratio of human senses in the moment of composition. On making tremendous impacts on modern human consciousness, and on the ways in which modern human beings perceive reality, think, and produce discourse, typewriting produces fragmented and disruptive writings, in which illogical thinking, heterogeneity, multi-formity, and discontinuity are prominent. Thus, I suggest that a new poetics of fragmentation and disruption in modernist works would be profitably reconsidered with respect to the typewriting technologies that dissociate the eye from the writing acts.

This study will explore Eliot’s later poetics through Four Quartets and his later criticism in the sense that Four Quartets reveals the social function of poetry and poets, and his remarks on other poets give us some important clues to his own later poetry. A recurring theme in Eliot’s writings on language, in particular the English language can be described in the following terms: what a poet does to the common speech, and what he does for it. Eliot addressed considerable thought to the issue of linguistic change and originality and to the poet’s particular role as both an innovator and preserver of language. The first point is that language must involve change and creativity, because of its functions as the structuring medium of our experience and as a tool which both reflects and serves our needs and interests in coping with the world. To quote “Little Gidding,” “poetry must purify the dialect of the tribe.” Next, we arrive at a final question in Eliot’s thinking about poetic language: can its “realizing” powers touch something beyond human unreality? In a way to search for the answer, the music of poetry begins to take on more and more importance, partly because Eliot feels that it can express the inexpressible. It would be an error, however, to link Four Quartets with music too hastily. Eliot brings music and meaning together, and recognizes them as a unity. He was also wary of any equation of music with mellifluousness or sonority. At any rate, I suppose, the most important of all Eliot’s ideas related to the “music of poetry” is that of the vital relation of poetry to common speech. Four Quartets is one of the most sustained meditations in our tradition on the problems of language and rhetoricity as they bear on practical and poetic expressions of the negative and positive ways alike. Certainly, it is a poem that discusses its own poetics.

The technique of dramatic monologue which affords writers an objective and ironic distance from the speaker was a useful method to Robert Browning and T. S. Eliot who tried to overcome the problem of excessive pursuit of subjective vision of the Romantic poets, their immediate predecessors. In “The Metaphysical Poets,” Eliot denies any direct influence from and continuity with the Romantic and Victorian poets and finds his inspiration in the works of Metaphysical poets and French Symbolist poets. In a review on John Middleton Murry's Cinnamon and Angelica, however, he recommends Browning to the modern poets, including himself, as a pattern to follow. Eliot's contradictory attitude toward Browning stems, I think, from the fact that his ambition to become a modern poet of the Twentieth Century sometimes overshadowed his acknowledgement of Browning as one of his masters. But it is hardly possible to deny that he knew Browning very well and his early works show a close affinity to the works of Browning, more than those of any other poet. “My Last Duchess,” Browning's masterpiece of dramatic monologue, and Eliot's “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” share many characteristics; both are written in dramatic monologue, and both are studies of the latent violence and danger of solipsistic self-love. Both Browning's Duke and Eliot's Prufrock are paranoiacs who are imprisoned within their sick self-consciousness. They suffer from their impossible desire for woman, and they reveal their hidden violent nature when their desire for woman is thwarted. As the Duke shows his sadistic character when he transforms his Duchess who was beyond his control into an artifact, the same violence of Prufrock turns against himself and becomes a masochistic one. In this sense Prufrock can be regarded as a modern Duke of Browning, who wallows in the mire of “etherized” self-consciousness. The paranoiac self-consciousness proves itself a hell both to the Duke and Prufrock. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is a good example in which Eliot faithfully followed his own advice to the modern poets, that is “to distill the dramatic essences [of Browning], if we can, and infuse them into some other liquor.”

Many times our reading of a particular poem by T. S. Eliot may be deepened by understanding the metaphoric images of cited mythological or literary works, by exploring its relation to the poem we are ready to read. Usually the meaning of mythological or literary works quoted in his poem is invaluable or crucial to understand the whole image of the poem, because it suggests the key to comprehend the particular poem as a whole. T. S. Eliot stated in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that no poet, or no artist of any art has his complete meaning alone. His significance is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. In the structure of Eliot's poems we should be aware of the combination of the heterogeneous elements; the past and present, which makes sometimes readers puzzed at first sight but soon wide awaked. It is required that when poetry calls for knowledge, even a common reader must be prepared to answer the demand which Eliot has made use of combining techniques mixing radical elements of the past and present in his poetry. Such a combinative manner has been long acclaimed for a new and startling technique since his poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was published. This paper is designed to explain some of his poetical techniques, particularly showing some examples of complicated, ambiguous, contradictory expressions and making frequent use of ancient myths, classic literature and folklores. The difficulty which faces the reader immediately lies in his frequent use of distorted quotations and allusions, his reference to many languages and literatures. It is partly due to his careful investigation on mysticism such as Christian Mysticism(1899), The Varieties of Religious Experience(1902) and Mysticism (1911). It is not surprising that Eliot has been blamed for obscurity and pretentiousness. This is the result of being judged by readers who have not attempted to analyse his technique to unite the elements of past and present. Eliot said that difficulty reading modern poems would not be something peculiar to certain writers, but a condition of writing with deeper insights into classical literature.

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.

하버드대학교의 로만스 언어학과 교수였던 어빙 배빗(Irving Babbitt)은 1924년에 􋺷민주주의와 지도력􋺸이란 저서를 출간하였다. 이 저서는 배빗이 오랫동안 주창해왔던 휴머니즘에 관한 사상을 이론적으로 정립한 것인데 출간 즉시 배빗의 대표작으로 주목을 받았다. 특히 당시 영미문단에서 비평사상을 주도하기 위해 출발한 􋺷크라이테리언􋺸이란 계간지는 배빗의 제자였던 T. S. 엘리엇이 런던에서 편집을 하고 있었는데, 배빗의 휴머니즘 사상을 쟁점화하여 점검하는데 주도적인 역할을 했다. 본 논문은 배빗의 􋺷민주주의와 지도력􋺸이 출간된 이후 10여 년에 걸쳐 지속된 그의 주된 사상인 휴머니즘에 관한 논쟁에서 배빗이 주창한 핵심사상이 무엇이며, 􋺷크라이테리언􋺸지를 통하여 이 논쟁에 참여한 기고자들이 배빗의 휴머니즘에 대하여 어떤 입장을 취하였는지를 추적한 것이다. 특히 본 논문은 배빗의 휴머니즘에 대하여, 그의 제자였던 엘리엇이 어떤 견해와 입장을 취하였지를 고찰하여 엘리엇의 휴머니즘에 대한 사상의 일면을 드러내는 데 초점을 두었다. 부연하면, 엘리엇이 그의 사상을 형성해 가는 초기에 지대한 영향을 미친 배빗의 사상은 엘리엇이 영국의 철학자 F. H. 브래들리와 특히 T. E. 흄의 사상을 전폭적으로 공감하여 수용하고, 자신의 인생에 결정적인 전환의 계기가 된 영국 국교로의 개종과 뒤이어 영국 신민으로 귀화함으로써 배빗의 휴머니즘에 대해 비판적인 입장을 취한다. 따라서 엘리엇의 배빗에 대한 비판은 그의 종교적․신학적 입장에서 배빗의 불가지론적 입장에 기초한 휴머니즘과 상이함을 드러낸다. 그렇다고 엘리엇이 근본적으로 휴머니즘 자체를 부정하는 것은 아니며, 배빗이 주장했던 것처럼 윤리적 가치에 기초한 휴머니즘을 높이 평가한다는 점이다.