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.

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.

After his conversion in 1927, Eliot started a new life. This new life was directed by George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, whose interest was in the reconciliation of the Church and the arts. Eliot appears to have taken seemingly two divergent roads laid by George Bell after his meeting with the bishop in 1930; one is turning his gift towards poetic drama and another is moving towards the Church of England as a Christian social critic while reconciling two different activities in his career. After the Oxford Conference in 1937, an order of Christian lay people called the Moot emerged by dint of J. H. Oldham who was a prime mover of the Oxford Conference. The Moot, the group of distinguished intellectuals, met from 1938 to 1947 to discuss the nature of modern society, the relationship between social planning and freedom, and the role of religiously-based values in shaping society. Learning much from discussions with other intellectuals in the Moot, Eliot, one of the core members of the Moot who attended 12 meetings out of 21 total meetings, formulated his idea of a Christian elite which is necessary for shaping an ideal Christian society. Distinguishing between an elite and the clerisy in his paper ‘On the Place and Function of the Clerisy’ delivered to the Moot meeting in December 1944, Eliot defined the often confusing terms precisely—elite is ‘any category of men and women who because of their individual capacities exercise significant power in any particular area’. However, the clerisy is ‘those individuals who originate the dominant ideas, and alter the sensibility, of their time’ at the top. This means that the clerisy is elite at the highest level who generate the new ideas of their time, including the new expression of an old idea, and who alter sensibility. Thus, Eliot’s use of the term clerisy includes clergy and laity as Samuel Coleridge did, however, Eliot’s idea of the clerisy is wider than that of Samuel Coleridge whose clerisy implies a body of the definite vocation which tends to become ‘merely a brahminical caste’. Eliot’s clerisy is even wider than the ‘Community of Christians’ which he expounded in The Idea of a Christian Society in 1939; ‘the consciously and thoughtfully practicing Christians, especially those of intellectual and spiritual superiority’.

In T. S. Eliot’s early poetry there is a fascination with sexual behavior, sexual criminality, and even instances of cannibalism. These occur in both his published work and in his unpublished Columbo and Bolo poems. Critical attention on this aspect of Eliot’s early work has focused on the themes of gender and race. His attitudes towards women have been well studied by feminist scholars. The critical focus on the Columbo and Bolo poems has emphasized Eliot’s attitudes towards African Americans and his consciousness of race in the American context. But there is another way of understanding these themes and this has rather more to do with class than gender or race. Eliot’s emblematic figure for the ordinary man from the lower classes, namely his Sweeney persona, has a decidedly Irish character. Eliot’s references to sex crimes and cannibalism emphasize the presence of such savagery, not in what used to be called ‘primitive’ societies, but in the very heart of civilization. For a well-educated, upper middle class young man with a New England background during the period of Irish immigration to America and to the political assertiveness of the Irish in both the United States and Great Britain, there is more to fear from the Sweeneys than from comical characters like King Bolo.

Dante is one of those poets, Eliot once said, that one only grows up to at the end of one’s life. In Eliot’s work, growing up to (learning from) his Italian master has three primary dimensions. The first is psychological, and it has to do with a perception, in reading, of feelings and ideas as unified. The second is aesthetic, and it has to do with poetry, with understanding how to achieve such unification in art. And the third is moral, and it has to do with social and spiritual unification through the cultivation of humility.

The aim of this paper is threefold. First, this study introduces the context of objectivity in modernist poetry, especially Moore’s objectivity and Williams’s objectivity. Second, it differentiates T. S. Eliot’s objectivity from their objectivity. In doing so, this paper analyzes the poems in Prufrock and Other Observations according to the different type of observation and the different type of persona. The poetics of observation in Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations is dramatic, psychological, and complex. His manner of observation is more inward looking than Moore’s, and his poetics of exploring urban reality is more dramatic and psychological than Williams’s. Third, this paper intends to rescue Eliot from Williams’s harsh criticism against him. From Williams’s point of view, Eliot’s poetry represents the “old” world spirit. However, Eliot’s seemingly traditional way of dealing with the world is so resilient that we can appreciate his work even after the age of Eliot and across geographical borders.

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.

In the 1926 Clark Lectures at Cambridge, T. S. Eliot redrew the map of metaphysical poetry in the Western literature by including not just the Metaphysical poets of the 17th century England but Lucretius, Dante, and Baudelaire among many others. In the Lectures, published posthumously in 1993 under the title of The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, Eliot also revaluated the metaphysical poems of Dante and Donne in terms of their socio-cultural, philosophical, and religious background. Especially, Christian mysticism was, Eliot insisted, one of the most important factors in understanding these great poets’ works accurately. According to Eliot’s somewhat idiosyncratic genealogy of Christian mysticism, it could be basically divided into two streams: ontological-classical and psychological- romantic. A fundamental tenet of ontological-classical mysticism is that God is transcendental and the vision of God can “only be attained by a process in which the analytic intellect took apart.” By contrast, God, for psychological-romantic mystics, is immanent and a human being has an innate capability to perceive and recognize God-head intuitively and to be united with it, whether momentarily or not.Ontological-classical mysticism, whose origin Eliot attributed to Aristotle’s metaphysics, was developed by such theologians as Richard of St. Victor and Thomas Aquinas, and culminated in Dante’s poetry aesthetically. Notably, for Eliot, Dante was not merely a religious poet faithful to his own mysticism but, far more importantly, the paradigmatic figure of what Eliot famously called “united sensibility.” Inextricably combined with Eliot’s enthusiastic support of both Dante’s mysticism and his poetic achievement is his radical revision of the aesthetics of united sensibility; in addition to union of thought and feeling, order, system, and harmony, as championed by classicism, toward which he increasingly inclined, become essential parts of united sensibility. In contrast to Dante, Donne, once eulogized as a representative poet of united sensibility by Eliot himself, was degraded into a precursor of “dissociation of sensibility.” Behind this dissociation, Eliot claimed. lay Donne’s embracement of psychological-romantic mysticism, originated from Plotinus and fully developed by Eckhardt, Ignatius, Theresa and St. John of the Cross. By reading closely Donne’s “The Extasie” and examining its dualistic view of soul and body, Eliot exemplified how the poet’s disintegrated sensibility is merged with his psychological mysticism.

This essay surveys some literary, cultural criticism of T. S. Eliot and Kim Ki-Rim, focusing on each writer’s works, The Waste Land and Ki-Sang-Do. In Eliot’s creative and critical practice, his primary concern is to depict his own literature and culture. In other words, he seems to concentrate only on the fate of European literature, art, and cultural heritage, including the political balance of European countries. Therefore, the important issue for Eliot is how they can preserve and develop the tradition of Europe, both to make political peace among the European countries and to achieve “maturity” of their own culture. But Kim Ki-Rim, whose colonial circumstances are quite different from Eliot’s, is affected by double obstacles, the chaos of the pre-modern, underdeveloped Cho-sun and the period of colonial-imperialism from Japan (and the western countries), the prevalent international order then, with cultural ideology of modernity or modernism. In such a situation, Kim Ki-Rim does not concern himself with the idea of preserving the tradition of Europe-originated modernity. Rather, he suggests a possibility of breaking through the very western modernity and modernism, ultimately to build a whole new world, in which post-modern Cho-sun can hold a secure, culturally leading position.

The poem “Marina” of T. S. Eliot technically takes the play Pericles of Shakespeare in terms of two voices: the surface pattern based on a dramatic story of Pericles, prince of Tyre, and the deep pattern based on a ultra-dramatic feature of solemn music. Shakespeare is regarded as a dramatist and poet in his later works, such as Pericles, in which he uses a system of related allusions in dramatic situations to reflect implicitly on drama and its program in a unity of poetry and music. Eliot technically steals it in a different way, called his own program, where he secures a solemnity by virtue of a gaiety of content, and a gaiety by virtue of a solemnity of content. His poem thus is poetry which uses the order in which Pericles is written and his technical relations to the play in conversational language and dramatic situations on the surface and in ultra-dramatic aspects in depth. In the ultra-dramatic presentation, musical pattern, and liturgical treatment of characters’ emotions proceed to comment on the recognition scene (V, i) of the play. In the poem, the ultra-dramatic aspects refer to “Eliot’s perspective on life that is as if from beyond life.” The hidden music from the recognition scene (V, i) of the play seems supernatural, as if we are taking part in a ritual. Finally in terms of synchronicity, Hercules, a stoical character in Seneca, is taken for Pericles in Shakespeare; and Senecan Shakespeare is almost certain to be produced in Eliot’s poem “Marina.” We can see this synchronicities value in Eliot’s view of stoical life, taken from Seneca and Shakespeare as well.

This paper aims to investigate T. S. Eliot at his alma mater, Harvard University, which he attended for seven years from 1906 to 1910 and from 1911 to 1914. Despite Eliot’s academic records displaying a range of subpar grades during his first and second years at Harvard, he succeeded in obtaining his BA and MA in four years. Simultaneously, Eliot contributed his early 10 Harvard poems including “Song: When we came home across the hill,” “Song: If space and time, as sages say,” “Before Morning,” “Circe’s Palace,” “On a Portrait,” “Nocturne,” “Humouresque,” “Spleen,” and “Ode” to The Harvard Advacate. Along with the French Symbolist poet Jules Laforgue, Irving Babbitt, professor and critic of New Humanism during his master’s course, Josiah Royce, pioneer philosopher at Harvard Department of Philosophy and Psychology, George Santayana, philosopher of pragmatism, Bertrand Russell, visiting professor to Harvard from Cambridge University during his doctoral course, deeply influenced the formation of Eliot’s poetic style and visions of Nobel laureate. A number of Eliot’s invaluable materials including his doctoral dissertation, Experience and the Objects of Knowledge in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, are now preserved at Harvard Houghton Library, which may be accessible only with a permission letter from Valerie Eliot.

The concept of Original Sin is central to Anglo-Catholic and Roman Catholic theology. In both Paul's epistle to the Romans and Article IX of the Church of England's Thirty-Nine Articles, Original Sin is not seen merely as an aspect among others of a Christian life but an unavoidable condition of existence. This belief in the fallen state of humanity and nature presents the Christian poet with particular difficulties and nowhere are these difficulties more in evidence than in the matter of language. T. S. Eliot's embrace of Anglo-Catholicism within Anglicanism put the matter of language at the center of his later work, especially Ash-Wednesday and Four Quartets. If humans are fallen creatures, the language they use must, in some sense, be fallen too. Eliot recognized this dilemma and adopted a number of stylistic devices in his later poetry to convey his sense of the fate of language in a fallen world. These devices include his use of repetition that suggests a kind of stammering, incomplete grammatical structures and punctuation, self-deprecatory statements, moments of self-exposure and confession. Most notably in both Ash-Wednesday and Four Quartets, Eliot cautions his readers not to be beguiled by the beauty of poetry itself. In 'East Coker' he goes so far as to state baldly that the 'poetry does not matter'.