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.

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.

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.”

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 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.

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.

T. S. Eliot is regarded as one of the greatest critics in the last century. As a critic he tends to have strict canonical standards. However, his attitude toward Tennyson seems rather favorable. Of Tennysonian canonical traits, Eliot thinks abundance, variety, and competence are the essence of Tennysonian excellence as a poet. He further feels that Tennyson is highly competent to express himself aptly whatever intention it is in his poetry and prose. It is probably because Tennyson is a master technician in poetry: his poetic language and its skills are rich and varied. He has absorbed all poetic skills, use of words, rhymes, rhythms, as in Maud and In Memoriam. Tennyson’s poetic excellence has already proved in Poems by Two Brothers co-authored with his brother, Frederick. In his criticism on Tennyson, Eliot often makes use of “great,” “wondrous,” or “master,” which he rarely uses when he studies other poets. Besides, it is rather interesting that Tennyson and Eliot are rather well compared: both use dramatic monologues while they withhold expression of personal feelings or emotion. As a poet and critic, Eliot is characterized by objective correlative, impersonality, unified sensibility, which almost parallel Tennyson’s. As a later poet, Eliot must have learned from Tennyson, a great technician of the last century.

This study is to find out how various number of themes are revealed and then developed progressively in T. S. Eliot’s plays, Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk and The Elder Statesman. The martyrdom, which may be defined as the identification with the will of the God, of Archbishop Thomas Becket is so much emphasized that the aspect of salvation is neglected in Eliot’s first major play, Murder in the Cathedral. Thus in the second play, The Family Reunion, Harry’s salvation becomes the main theme. However, the process of salvation is sought here too vigorously and even violently to induce the death of Harry’s mother as well as that of his wife. In the third play, The Cocktail Party, several ways to salvation are suggested according to the levels of perception. ‘the best life’ of martyrdom is offered to the selected few including Thomas Becket. However, ‘a good life,’ in which a cocktail party is being held sometimes, is more than enough for the salvation of common peple because “human kind cannot bear very much reality.” For the third group of “a living object, but no longer a person,” to be an ordinary person can be the best way of savlation. The Confidential Clerk contains answers to the questions presented in Murder in the Cathedral, as The Cocktail Party has the solutions to the problems presented in The Family Reunion. Lucasta, ‘a living object,’ is changed into ‘an ordinary person,’ while Colby, ‘a good life,’ is changing into the mode of ‘the best life’ in The Confidential Clerk. The Elder Statesman, Eliot’s last play, tries to show that the salvation of Lord Claverton may be achieved by the confession of the past misdeeds.

T. S. Eliot wrote the poem, “Animula,” in 1929 at the age of 41, which belongs in the later part of his literary life as a poet and critic. Eliot converted to a Catholic in 1927, the year his father-in-law, Charles Haigh-Wood, died. It was in 1929 that he was thinking of divorce with his wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, and his mother, Charlotte Champe Eliot, died as well. Biographically, the poem “Animula” is certain to reflect his own life from infantry to death, physically and spiritually. Actually, the poem develops with three stages ranging from the period of an infant, who “Issues from the hand of God, the simple soul,” to the period between adolescence and youth, who gets “irresolute and selfish, misshapen, lame,” with the characters who follow as if living in limbo in the final lines: Guiterriez “avid of speed and power” and Boudin “blown to pieces.” The title of “Animula” thus alludes to the poem “Animula vagula blandula”(a pale vagrant little soul) the Roman Emperor Hadrianus left dying - the little soul, once the friend of and guest to the body, now leaving its dying body. So, the poem “Animula” is designed to convey how to live till death from infantry, especially in the childhood. The child’s soul is identified as simple, yet miserable even in the childhood without religious discipline: “Pray for us now and at the hour of our birth.”

he main aim of this essay is to extract similarities between James Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night of and The Waste Land. The names of the two poets have often been mentioned in connection, but the relation between their poetry has not drawn a serious attention. This essay is meant to track possible exchanges between the poets by examining mainly The City of Dreadful Night and The Waste Land. My focus has been on how Thomson influenced the urban scenes in Eliot’s poems and the images of the “Unreal City,” which are centered on London.Thomson’s poetry shows much influence from Dante. I have tried to present a meaningful number of verbal details showing that Eliot’s reading of Thomson was not confined to The City of Dreadful Night. Thomson seems to have also been a major influence on Eliot’s general thoughts and techniques. Eliot seems to make a good case of how a later-coming and greater-talented poet can make a more universally-appealing work out of the stuffs a locally-confined predecessor presented to the world.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The writing style of Hart Crane has embarked on Symbolism that French Symbolists had developed in the nineteenth century and that modern English poets, such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, found as a new poetic form in the early twentieth century. In the nineteen-twenties, Crane had felt the strong power of Eliot’s poetic skills which brought English aesthetic styles in his early poetic life from the French poets, such as Arthur Rimbaud or Jules Laforgue. Hence, it is interestingly remarkable to see Eliot’s objective, impersonal stance leading the literary tendency of the nineteen-twenties in view of French poets and Crane’s different goal in style. Obviously, in reaction to Eliot’s negative attitudes to human characters as seen in The Waste Land, Crane’s different style developed further with the conventional symbols, Faustus and Helen, which yet function to associate his imagination with the agreeable life of New Yorkers the speaker sympathetically talks about in the first long poem, “Faustus and Helen.”In a matter of style, Crane, away from Eliot’s perspective of poetry, opened the way to another convention in poetry: Symbolism in a historical sense. Unlike Edmund Wilson who confined French Symbolism within modern poetry, Northrop Frye widely connected Symbolism to the whole history of literature, revealing it as a proper term to interpret its meaning. In the nineteen-twenties, Eliot, discrediting romantic sensibility, engaged thoroughly in synthesizing the complex literary movements, French Symbolism and English classic aestheticism, into religio-philosophical directions for years to come. Yet, Crane tried to reconcile the romantically spirited French Symbolism and Coleridgean imagination within his poetic style relying more on romantically spirited personality. Unfortunately, Crane stopped his poetic life when only thirty-three years old, allegedly buried by the prominent movement, a contemporary Classicism of Eliot.

This paper focuses on the fluctuations of the Self in two different versions of Modernist poetry as they are proposed by T.S. Eliot and Conrad Aiken. During their stay at Harvard, they read many of the same books and studied the same theories. Both were influenced by William James, Emerson, Bergson, Bradley, the French symbolists, and their instructor Santayana. But the same books and theories generated different modes of comprehension in them. While Eliot offered a condensed vision of philosophy in his works, Aiken tended to depict the long process of self-exploration, which at times resulted in extreme monotony in his longer poetic pieces. Eliot claimed that poetic production supersedes the poet, who functions merely as an agent of its creation; this is quite a contrast with the autobiographical method Aiken applied in his works. Eliot’s name stands for the allusive method in poetry; Aiken’s, for psychoanalytic method. Aiken endeavoured to write a perfect long poem, while Eliot strove for a distilled type of poetry with concrete, economical and exact phrasing. Despite the many differences in form and content in the two versions of Modernist poetry written by Eliot and Aiken, they shared a single vision of life as a journey that sets the personality in a constant flux and presumes a continuous development of consciousness. While Aiken was still influenced by the Neo-Romantics when he depicted the subjectivity of the persona in his early writings, Eliot’s early poetry activated the classicist idea by rendering the objective detachment of his personae.

The baptism and confirmation in June 1927 is surely the most important event in Eliot’s life. To think first and most of the “supernatural order” became the prime principle of his new life and thought. It is an indispensable task, therefore, for Eliot scholars to assess why he decided to join the Church of England’s Anglo-Catholic wing, and what sort of effect his belief exerted upon his literary works. In this paper I intend to do two things: firstly, to present a thesis how Eliot came to espouse Anglo-Catholicism; I will look into the influence of the Oxford Movement, the solidification of his faith manifested in his vehement attack on the scheme for the Church Union in South India, and his freeing himself from the prejudices against Roman Catholicism that he encountered at first hand in St. Louis, Boston, and London. Catholicism was fixed with the image of unintellectual Irish immigrants, and totally alien to the English Protestant identity. He chose the Established, and national, Church of England because he believed it was “the Catholic Church in England”, and in his adopted country, Roman Catholic Church was only “a sect”. Secondly, I consider the “limits” of Eliot’s Christian faith. So far, the problem of his faith has not been fully addressed. It looms large, however, in a postcolonial context. The claim I should like to make is that the world of Eliot’s Christianity is closed to the ‘other’ worlds. This I discuss looking into the world of The Cocktail Party. Set in a post-Vatican II context, Eliot’s Anglo-Catholicism looks very restricted.