Based on T. S. Eliot’s cardinal literary essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), this essay examines the two great poetic masters of the twentieth century, W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. Touching on the poetic traditions of the two masters, this essay shows how much Eliot absorbed Yeats’s poetic tradition into his own poetry through the deep communion with his senior. The poetic tradition of W. B. Yeats is bound up with theosophy, magic, occultism, Irish mythology, Irish legendary heroes at the dawn of history, saints and poets wandering around the island before the coming of Anglo-Saxons. Yeats’s poetic world is fundamentally different from that of Eliot; Yeats’s existential sense of ‛prolonged genocidal humiliation’ is ‛the bitter culmination of seven centuries of British policy in Ireland’ while Eliot’s starting point is with ‘his sense of inner devastation’ against the background of ‘overwhelming desacralization of the Western world.’ Nonetheless, Eliot had learned much from the poetry of Yeats whose poetry is one of ‘refrain, of repetition in a finer tone, raised to the Sublime, to the limits of art.’ Such solemn refrains or incantations raised to the limits of language are also found in Eliot’s major poetic works; The Waste Land, “Ash-Wednesday”, and Four Quartets. On his part, obviously Yeats also learned something from his junior’s critical dictum, “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists,” when he defined his theory of supreme art; “Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned.”

How does T. S. Eliot represent women in his poetry? One of the recent arguments puts forward stresses Eliot’s way of describing negative aspects of women in his poetry, while ignoring any good qualities that they may have had. However, a careful study of Eliot’s early poetry shows women torn by the pain of abandonment, betrayal, fear, isolation and loneliness. Furthermore, it is not easy to find the poet’s sympathetic attitude toward women throughout his early poetry. This study aims at investigating the sources of the frustration, failure and unhappiness through the polyphonic voices of man and woman heard in “Portrait of a Lady,” while considering the real sense of Eliot’s attitude toward women. The poem ends in unresolved pain and uncertainty, suffered by men and women alike, which implicitly shows the agony and isolation that people must encounter in human relationships. It is usually apparent when they recognize their own destiny and their confused feelings and longings. In the final analysis, it basically derives from the existential recognition of human beings.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Eliot’s and Nietzsche’s epistemological frames are compatible with each other. Although there is no evidence that Eliot’s literary taste was affected by Nietzsche’s thought, there seems to be a discernable continuity in impersonal theory between them. Philosophy, Nietzsche thought, was bound by epistemological dilemmas. So was it in Eliot’s view while he was a student of philosophy. Both of them meditated on a way out of the fix that philosophy had raised. As a solution, Nietzsche asserts in The Birth of Tragedy the primacy of art over philosophy. In his view the world of art was a Dionysian affirmation of the world as it was without subtraction, exception, or selection. The knowledge of self through art was not a sign that art was purely personal and subjective. Rather, art demanded a triumph over personal will and desire, simultaneously rejecting personal feelings and embodying objectivity. Eliot’s poetics is in substantial agreement with Nietzsche’s in this regard.

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.

T. S. Eliot’s darkest poem, “The Hollow Men”(1925) dramatizes the spiritual and emotional sterility of the hollow men who are at the bottom of the abyss. In “The Hollow Men”, the hollow men or stuffed scarecrow men in the sinful or fallen “death’s dream kingdom” are called to rearrange their death-in-life but they are appalled to do any significant actions or decisions. And they don’t have any courage to take part in the final meeting in “twilight kingdom,” a kind of painful but hopeful transitional stage between “death’s dream kingdom” and “death’s other Kingdom”, because they face the truth about themselves and their past lives in this “dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.” So they shrink from crossing to the “death’s other Kingdom,” Kingdom of God where there are blessed divine vision of “eyes”, “perpetual star”, and “multifoliate rose.” In spite of the potentiality of their salvation, they are unable to attain rebirth or vision in the higher dream because of their inertia and spiritual aridity. The unhappy period in his life at the time of publishing “The Hollow Men” led Eliot to change his life and convert to Christianity in 1927. In this respect we can regard “The Hollow Men”, as a prelude or a vision of Eliot‘s New Life from nadir of despair through humility to thirst for divine love.