The criticism of T. S. Eliot shows an extraordinary lack of interest in what literary works actually say. Its attention is almost extremely confined to qualities of language, styles of feeling, the relations of image and experience. With Arnold, however, the emphasis is on substance rather than on form. Such emphasis led him into his attempted definition of poetry as criticism of life. In like manner, Leavis also emphasized that poetry be in serious relation to “Life,” have a firm grasp of the actual, of the object. If we may call Eliot a poet as poet, either Arnold or Leavis can be rightly labeled a poet as preacher. These two contrasting attitudes are illustrated in their criticism on such Romantic poets as Wordsworth, Shelley, and especially Keats, where the difference is most distinctly manifested. Though Eliot, in his later poems and essays, have passed on to other problems including the relation of poetry to the spiritual and social life of its time, he has never derailed himself from considering poetry primarily as poetry, not as any other.

This paper purports to read “Portrait of a Lady” in terms of Henry James’ influence. Unlike the influence of French Symbolist poets, H. James’s influence has not drawn many critical attentions. Eliot is greatly indebted to H. James in many ways. First of all, it is James from whom Eliot had learned that poetry ought to be as well written as prose. Also, as Eliot himself said, he was stimulated by the method to make a place real not descriptively but by something happening there and to let a situation, a relation, and an atmosphere give only what the writer wants in James’s stories. Under the inspiration of James, Eliot can cultivate his gift for dramatic verse. So, we can say the dramatic quality of Eliot’s poetry which is no less than in James’s stories, is not irrelevant to the Jamesian method. Considering such influence of James, this paper aims at comparing Eliot’s “Portrait of a Lady” and James’s The Portrait of a Lady and “The Beast in the Jungle”, in the light of the character’s failure and frustration. Especially, Eliot’s “Portrait of a Lady” and James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” portray a man who fails in having relations with a woman in common. In both of works, each man is distinctively selfish. We can investigate more concretely in what ways “the egotism of a man” is expressed and presented as a hindrance in human relations in both works.

Centering around with the marriage in 1915, in the poems that were written before the year we can find characters who are timid and indecisive. It is because Eliot grew up in the puritan family and so he controlled his passions in everything. In the poems that were written after the marriage we can find Eliot's negative views about women. It is because Eliot was influenced on his father and daughters thinking that “Sex and sin were the same thing” (Matthews 22) and on Vivienne's having a chronic nervous disease, a headache, and stomach cramps and on Vivienne's having been involved with not her husband but other men. In conclusion, Eliot transformed all the situations caused from Eliot's unhappy marriage with Vivienne into the materials for the poems. Especially we can find the negative views about women in his poetry written after the marriage.

Literature cannot be discussed in a social and cultural vacuum, because it is a culture-bound political construct. This paper investigates the Iimits of the modernist canon, focusing on the relationship between T. S. Eliot and women. Previous formalistic readings of Eliot is이ated the critics and readers from social and biographical concerns, which made it impossible to evaluate him in a balanced viewpoint. In recent decades, as Gibert indicates, "the criteria used to evaluate writers and to understand literary history have shifted from an emphasis on formal elements to an emphasis on ethical and moral ones. The poetics of Eliot, who is considered one of the most influential leading modernists, is closely related to his politics implied in his poetics.’'(191). Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in their essay entitled "Tradition and Female Talent" in No Man ’'s Land, attacks the mas띠Iinity of the modernists, especially Eliot, identifying modernism as masculinism. This paper reviews the re-evaluation of Eliot and of Iiterary modernism by such feminist critics. There can be found some problems and limits in the process of the formation of the modernist canon, which is delicately related with masculinism as indicated by Gilbert and Gubar. However, their presumption that modernism is a product of sexual battle also reveals its Iimits, because it is developed by the use of extreme binary logic. Consequently, this paper, trying to pin down the position of Eliot in the modernist canon, aims to extend the horizon of the understanding of Eliot and modernism as well, by indicating the problems and Iimits in the formation of the modernist canon and also those of the feminist criticism. Its clue lies in Eliot’s essay "Tradition and the lndividual Talent." ’Tradition’ by which Eliot means involves in it the possibility of the revision and innovation as well as the reservation. It is because "The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them." as Eliot emphasized in his essay. When the dynamism implied in the concept of "tradition" is properly understood, the new (the really new) work of art by women writers will be included in tradition, and the feminist criticism will be properly evaluated beyond its misunderstandings and distortions revealed in the blind attack on modemist writers and the modemist canon as well.

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.”

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.

We can find that the whole of his works is one poem and it has a consistent developing theme. The theme is no other than a union with an Absolute, that is, a pursuit of salvation. Eliot finds aesthetic means to express the moment of the union with God; the means is 'objective correlative'. One of the 'objective correlatives' is the 'still point', which is the most important and significant of all the imagery for the moment of salvation, and for the union with an Absolute. The purpose of this thesis is to study the meaning of the 'still point', its character and the process of reaching it, and to clarify the relation with the concept of criticism and philosophy which Eliot had studied. We can find the concept of 'still point' in the 'logos' of Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher, and in the 'Sunyata' of Madhyamika made by Nagarjuna, an Indic Buddhist priest. 'Logos' represents the character of the central-point and Sunyata represents the unification and removal of boundary for two different concepts. The way in which 'still point' is extracted can be discovered in Eliot's criticism and philosophy. 'Immediate experience' which is the essential concept of Eliot's philosophy and 'objective correlative' are very similar to the 'still point' in that they are the harmony, balance and unification of two opposites. 'Tradition' which he makes much of in his criticism is related to the 'still point' is also related to 'objective correlative', for 'objective correlative' is the product of the unification and reconciliation of two aspects. The significant symbols for 'still point' are 'Mandala' and 'wheel'. The circle in the middle of it and a square outside it signify the power of God. The wheel schematizes the tension and unification of spirit We can discover many other models of unification of 'still point' through the union of love and fire, word and Word, beginning and ending, exploration and revelation, etc. They are the examples of showing similarity that things of different nature can be unified. The 'still point' is achieved by intellectual perception of the 'Incarnated Word' in "Burnt Norton", by passional participation in 'Atonement' in "East Coker", by volitional response to the 'Annunciation' in the "Dry Salvages", and by 'Pentecostal Purifying' in "Little Gidding".