T. S. Eliot has attracted an unprecedented degree of worldwide attention for almost a century but he has rarely been approached from the angle of his politics to the third world reader. His proclaimed position as anglo-Catholic, monarchist, and classicist, however philosophically pure he stood for these values, does not seem to be in accordance with the interest of the third world, most countries of which were once colonized and have continued to be under its prolonged traumatic influences. Eliot’s west- centered value amounts to supporting the ideology through which the imperialism of the previous centuries exploited the third world and rationalized their deeds in the course. John Ashbery, on the other hand, shows a relativistic worldview in his “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” whose apparent subject matter is an Italian Mannerist self-portrait with the same title. Ashbery in the poem questions the hierarchical value system, which Eliot shows in Four Quartets. Ashbery, refusing to attribute any superior values to certain views or notions over others, reasons that one cannot rely on any absolute values or premises. Questioning the validity of metaphysical and transcendental values on which traditional societies relied, he presents diverse postmodernistic skeptical visions on such issues as center versus periphery, appearance versus reality, and intention versus outcome. In the work, however, he is not absolutely without a tint of Eliotian propensity toward the transcendental, enriching its poetic suggestiveness.

Although Jungian interpretation of T. S. Eliot has not been very active for the last half century, a number of reasons make C. G. Jung an attractive tool for reading Eliot. First of all, they were contemporaries undergoing the identical moments of history, responding to them in interestingly similar ways. Secondly, they commonly objected to the positivist trend of their times and tried to revive metaphysical and religious visions of the old. Their ultimate concerns lay in transcendental issues, not in the immediate world. Thirdly, they made their main subject matters out of their visions and other non-empirical materials while resorting heavily to mythic and anthropological studies. Resultantly, Eliot’s works are flooded with archetypal figures, especially those of the mother and the anima. Fourthly, they tried to map out the paths to the Ultimate, sharing many parallel motifs in their courses. Eliot’s literary ideas including impersonality, objective correlative, metaphysical conceit, and collage can all be viewed as a means to make possible transcendental experiences. They encourage the enlargement of cognitive power, a pre-condition for contact with the world beyond. In this sense Jung and Eliot were both shamanic figures who strove to offer remedies to the disorders and the maladies they found haunting their times by retrieving the lost connection to the source of human existence. However, despite his rational interest in the ultimate encounter between human and divine, Eliot has his works overflowing with characters, scenes, and motifs suggesting his inclination toward the mother.

Ash-Wednesday contrasts well with Four Quartets in the degree of feminine participation. The former has rich feminine presences while in the latter are heard only their faintly-heard voices. The richness of feminine involvement allows the reader a subtler look at the attributes and workings of feminine elements, the feminine archetypes here. Unlike most of Eliot’s poetical works where the motherly figures are dominant, Ash-Wednesday presents the anima actively functioning: the archetype shows its quality of variability, which the persona finds distasteful and struggles to escape from; it also displays its transformative and mediating nature through the Lady’s position of bridging the mundane and the transcendental; it reveals its dual nature as a helping partner and a destroyer alike by presenting itself as benign or hostile to the protagonist; it also shows its relation to the mother by presenting itself in collaboration with, or in opposition to, the other. The anima figures including invisible Vivienne of Poem I and the Lady, as a receptacle of these diverse and conflicting attributes of the anima, attract or repel the persona, depending on his different situations. She is a benign being at one time but she threatens his wellbeing at another time. Ultimately, however, the persona’s efforts to reach the world beyond seem to be limited by his propensity to gravitate toward the mother. He is consistently found regressively drawn to the mother in the poem and elsewhere.

Eliot's image as a highly reputable and influential literary figure does not go along with the personality as found in Four Quartets in terms of analytical psychology. What the reader is led to find there is the return to the world of his childhood, where the poet is ruled by the mother, rather than to seek for equal and harmonious terms with the anima-figures. Eliot strongly advocates Ihe communion wilh the Logos, which is parallel 10 the psychological encounler with the Self, the God-image. However, in Four Quartets there is hardly found any feminine participation, which is a vilal preliminary step for the union of the ego with Ihe Self. The role of the feminine element, the anima, in the development of the psyche is to strengtheD ego-consciousDess against the overwhelming power of the unconscious. The ego-coDsciousness, firmly established wilh stability and autonomy, is then ready to experieDce the EDcounter without the risk of self-diss이utiOD， achieving a harmony and balance in its relalioDship to the Self. Four Quartets is dominated by the motif of self찌bnegatioD and Eliot here appears to deDy the value of autonomy of the human, urging giviDg it up ahogether for an access to the Logos. Analytical psychology would n이 see this posture as any way leading to the goal of psychological development, the individuatioD, but just a regression to the mother-ruled childhood.