This study attempts to establish a connection between the moral philosophy of F. H. Bradley, particularly as expressed in his Ethical Studies and modified in the teaching of Josiah Royce, and the moral thought of Eliot's poetic writings, beginning with "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," culminating in Four Quartets, and finding a new mode of expression in the dramas. By tracing Eliot's moral thought to the nineteenth century anti-utilitarian moral controversies out of which Bradley's Ethical Studies grew, this study clarifies Eliot's position in the history of moral philosophy. For Bradley, the end of morality is not self-gratification; it is the realization of the universal will in the will of the individual. Hence the aim of moral action must be away from self-concern and toward the duties that society imposes on the individual. The Absolute, in which all individuals and societies culminate, invites us to true self-realization, while the egotistic self solicits us to physical and spiritual self-indulgence. Royce modifies Bradley's Absolute by making it a redemptive community in which the selfish actions of the past are given new meaning by heroic sacrifices in the present and future. The moral thought of Eliot's poetry and drama closely parallels this ethical system. In these works, Eliot dramatizes situations in which selfless motives are scarcely distinguishable from egotistic needs, merited suffering from heroic martyrdom. In Murder in the Cathedral, for instance, Thomas the Archbishop cannot will his martyrdom for the good of God's kingdom without also willing the gratification of his personal vanity. Four Quartets presents the same moral dilemma working itself out in Eliot's thoughts about his own life. He wonders if he has chosen his life as poet and critic as an unselfish response to duty--and hence as a path to God--or if he has chosen it out of personal vanity. In his considerations of time and eternity he comes to the conclusion that it is possible to redeem past mistakes by the present right intention.

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This comprehensive analysis of T. S. Eliot's literary-critical corpus provides both a long-overdue reassessment of the nature and extent of his commitment to notions of aesthetic autonomy, and an Eliotic critique of the hypostatization of art that characterizes both philosophical postmodernism and its literary-theoretical derivatives. / The broader context for these two primary objectives is the "ancient quarrel" between the poets and the philosophers and its various manifestations in the work of a number of prominent post- and anti-Enlightenment thinkers. Accordingly, I begin by highlighting several fundamental but much-neglected (or misunderstood) features of Eliot's critical canon that testify to his life-long preoccupation with this still resonant issue. Specifically, I demonstrate that there is a logical connection between his sustained opposition to those who seek in literature a substitute for religious faith or at least philosophic belief, his critique of various more or less sophisticated forms of generic confusion, and his robust defence of the integrity of different discursive forms, social practices, and disciplinary domains. In anticipation of my Eliotic critique of philosophical and literary-theoretical postmodernism, I then locate Eliot's account of these characteristic features of "the modern mind" within the context of Jurgen Habermas remarkably congenial The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. / In successive chapters, I next provide detailed analyses of Eliot's account of the discursive and functional integrity of art, literature, poetry, and criticism. By way of providing additional support for the concept of "integrity," and indicating its relevance to contemporary debates about the relationship between literature, criticism, and philosophy, I advert to the work of a number of other contemporary philosophers, John Searle, Goran Hermeren, Monroe Beardsley, Peter Lamarque, Paisley Livingston, and Richard Shusterman chief among them. I then demonstrate that Eliot's critique of the hypostatizing and levelling tendencies of many of his predecessors and contemporaries can itself legitimately be brought to bear on the similar practices of contemporary postmoderns such as Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty. / I conclude by suggesting that a return to Eliot's literary critical corpus is both timely and instructive, for it provides a much-needed corrective to some late twentieth-century trends in literary studies, and, in particular, to the influence of philosophical postmodernism upon it.

This thesis explores Eliot's allusive method, that is his use of Judaeo-Christianity with its analogues (and sometimes sources) in pre-Biblical primitive myths and legends. The first chapters study The Confidential Clerk and the draft material of the play which contains overt allusions-subsequently expurgated - to Sargon and Dionysos'as pre-Biblical archetypes of Moses and Christ respectively. I discuss the growth and development of the two legends of Sargon and Dionysos and their Biblical counterparts through successive drafts of the' play. In adapting the Sargon-Moses legend, Eliot was influenced by Sigmund Freud and Sir James George Frazer who both believed that the legend of Moses's birth and early life closely resembles that of his Babylonian predecessor, Sargon of Accad, which the Hebrews imitated. In adapting, on another level of the play, the Dionysos-Christ legend, Eliot was in debt of Frazer and. John M. Robertson who have persuasively shorn the shaping influence of Dionysos and the Dionysos religion upon the Founder of Christianity and the Christian system. I have used the same approach in studying the other plays of Eliot, The same pattern,ie.,the adaptation of a pre-Biblical legend which has its counterpart in the Bible is to be found in The Family Reunion in which Eliot drew upon the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh from which he adapted the pre- Biblical legend of the Fall and the deluge story. For the minutiae of these legends in the epic of Gilgamesh and their Old Testament parallels Eliot is indebted to Alfred Loisy, the French Modernist theologian who explains the Genesis in terms of Babylonian mythology. In writing. The Cocktail Party, Eliot went to The Golden Ass of Apuleius, an anti- Christian work, from which he transformed the pre-Biblical legend of Isis, the forerunner of the Virgin Mary, as well as other motifs. Finally The Elder Statesman, Eliot's last play, adapts the pre-Biblical legend of Ahriman, an archetype of the Biblical story of Satan and the concept of evil in the Old Testament. But I have not included this play in my thesis, although I have investigated it, because of limitations of length, and also because the connection of text and sub-text in The Elder Statesman is less significant than that in the other plays.

Many critics resort to explaining readers' experiences of poems like William Blake's Jerusalem and T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets in terms of "spirituality" or "religion". These experiences are broadly defined in this thesis as jouissance (after Roland Barthes' essay The Pleasure of the Text) or "experience qua experience". Critical attempts at the reduction of jouissance into abstract constructs serve merely as stopgap measures by which critics might avoid having to account for the limits of their own rational discourse. These poems, in particular, are deliberately structured to preserve the reader's experience of the poem from reduction to any particular meta-discursive construct, including "the spiritual". Through a broad application of Rezeption-Asthetik principles, this thesis demonstrates how the poems are structured to direct readers' faculties to engage with the hypothetical realm within which jouissance occurs, beyond the rationally abstractable. T.S. Eliot's poetic oeuvre appears to chart his growing confidence in non-rational, pre-critical faculties. Through "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", The Waste Land, and Four Quartets, Eliot's poetry becomes gradually less prescriptive of the terms to which the experience of his poetry might be reduced. In Four Quartets he finally entrusts readers with a great deal of responsibility for "co-creating" the poem's significance. Like T.S . Eliot, although more consistently throughout his oeuvre, William Blake is similarly concerned with the validation of the reader's subjective interpretative/creative faculties. Blake's Jerusalem is carefully structured on various intertwined levels to rouse and exercise in the reader what the poet calls the "All Glorious Imagination" (Keynes 1972: 679). The jouissance of Jerusalem or Four Quartets is located in the reader's efforts to co-create the significance of the poems. It is only during a direct engagement with this process, rather than in subsequent attempts to abstract it, that the "experience qua experience" may be understood.

Common to certain poems of John Donne and T. S. Eliot is the expression of a desire for a unity of experience which will involve a reconciliation of the apparently contradictory demands of flesh and spirit. In an early poem, Eliot aligns himself with the poetic sensibility he perceives in Donne, a spiritual suffering expressed in sensory terms in the image of “the anguish of the marrow". The poetry of each poet develops the analysis of thought and feeling involved in the search for unifying, transcendent experience: in the poems of Donne dealing with profane and divine love, the relationships between man and woman, and man and God, are explored with wit and dramatic fervour; in the dramatic dialogues of the early poems of Eliot, the poetic persona seeks spiritual purpose in a world apparently devoid of belief and meaning. Comparison of poetic vision and method in Donne and Eliot is most valid in examination of the two long poems, Donne's Anniversaries and Eliot’s Four Quartets. In these poems, an anatomization of the mutable, spiritually dead world is contrasted with the progress of the poet's own soul toward an understanding of divine love; divine love is seen to demand imitation of the suffering incarnate principle of virtue, symbolized by Donne as the maiden Elizabeth Drury, and by Eliot as the Incarnation of God. Similarity of technique in each poem consists in the use of a dialectical method of developing themes and definitions of "death", "birth", "wisdom", "love" and "joy". The imagery used by both poets involves paradoxes basic to Christian theodicy: death-as-life, darkness-as-light, ignorance-as-wisdom, suffering-as-love. The expression of his belief is seen by each poet as a holy task, in which the drawing of all experience into a new unity is imitative of the divine unifying order. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This study attempts to determine what is the basic feature of Romanticism and in what relation to it Charles Baudelaire and T. S. Eliot stand. Since few terms are as misunderstood and as weighed down with numerous and contradictory meanings as Romanticism, this thesis begins by trying to "reconstruct the Romantic situation" and turns to its major aesthetician, Friedrich Schlegel, in order to discover in what the revolutionary new outlook consisted. The fundamental characteristic of Romanticism, that which distinguishes it from all other literary and cultural movements, is here maintained to be the awareness of fragmentation, of division, and of chaos. The great important realization of Romanticism was of the modern world's and man's fragmentation and disunity in contrast to the wholeness and order of the distant past. The task which it assigned itself was to strive for a reintegration of the severed forces — Spirit and Nature — in a new synthesis that would, in turn, create a new man and a new world. In seeking to achieve this harmony, Romanticism turned to symbol, myth, and religion. Two of the most important and influential poets of the modern age, Baudelaire and Eliot, were deeply entrenched in the Romantic Weltanschauung and tradition, although while the former was consciously and progressively so, the. latter was an unconscious and reactionary Romantic. Both poets continue that tradition by virtue of their essential awareness of the duality of man or, in Eliot's phrase, of the "dissociation of sensibility". The two fundamental principles of life and art, Spirit and Nature, are continually operative in their work and strive for harmony in their conflict. The conclusion to which this thesis comes, however, is that neither poet fully realized the Romantic goal: the harmony of Spirit and Nature. The two forces co-habit in their verse, but never surpass conflict in a higher third synthesis. The reason for this failure, it is maintained, is their misunderstanding of Nature. Both poets were hostile to and biased against Nature, preferring the exclusiveness of the Spirit. As a result, Baudelaire sought the way of transformation of Nature and Eliot the way of sublimation of Nature. With Eliot Romanticism came to a dead end, disavowing itself consciously yet tormented by its ever-pressing vision of the fragmentariness of man and art. Eliot, sought to heal the Romantic agony in a way which was not unorthodox for Romantics — conversion and conservatism. But the dilemma which the Romantic vision reveals so clearly — the dissociation of Spirit and Nature — has not thus been solved for modern man. This thesis maintains that Nature must be re-examined and re-understood for poetry to receive a new lease on life in our day. Only thereby will Romanticism once again find a new opening for creation. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

The thesis consists of a selection of original poems and an essay on the literary relationship between Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot. The poems are loosely related in theme; they are the responses of the poet to the various forces in his upbringing, such as literature, religion and the American Southwest. The essay compares the literary criticism of Arnold and Eliot, the foremost critics of their respective periods, with special attention to Eliot's criticism of Arnold. The conclusion is that despite this criticism Eliot accepted Arnold's major critical precepts and perpetuated in his own work Arnold's central concerns about literature and culture.

Lau Kin-wai. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 101-109). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.ii / 論文摘要 --- p.iii / Acknowledgements --- p.iv / Introduction: Reading Joyce and Eliot with Baudelaire in View --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter One： --- The City in Literary Representation / Chapter 1. --- The City and its Streets in a Literary and Cultural Context --- p.8 / Chapter 2. --- "Writing (about) the Modern City: ""Joycity"" and Eliot's Cities" --- p.15 / Chapter Chapter Two： --- The City and the Flaneur / Chapter 1. --- Origins and Characteristics of the Baudelairean Flaneur --- p.21 / Chapter 2. --- From Baudelaire to Joyce and Eliot --- p.25 / Chapter Chapter Three： --- In Search of the Joycean/ Eliotian Flaneur / Chapter 1. --- Voices in the City: Personae and Their Perspectives --- p.31 / Chapter 2. --- Literary Reincarnation and the Tradition of Flanerie --- p.33 / Chapter a. --- Stephen and Daedalus --- p.35 / Chapter b. --- Prufrock and Dante --- p.39 / Chapter c. --- Bloom and Odysseus --- p.43 / Chapter d. --- Tiresias as Ancient and Modern --- p.46 / Chapter Chapter Four： --- Flanerie and Two Faces of Unreality of the City / Chapter 1. --- Cities as States of Mind --- p.49 / Chapter a. --- Eliot's Unreal City 1 --- p.50 / Chapter b. --- Joyce's Unreal Dublin 1 --- p.56 / Chapter 2. --- Wandering in the City with the Dead --- p.61 / Chapter a. --- Eliot's Unreal City II --- p.63 / Chapter b. --- Joyce's Unreal Dublin II --- p.68 / Chapter Chapter Five: --- Flanerie in a Wider Context of the Society / Chapter 1. --- Flanerie as an Asocial Act --- p.72 / Chapter 2. --- The Flaneur and the Familiar Stranger --- p.82 / Chapter 3. --- The Erotic as Sociality --- p.85 / Conclusion： Flanerie and the Emergence of a Critical Vision --- p.95 / Works Cited --- p.101

This thesis addresses the impact of religious conversion on the later works of Eliot and Auden, and the manner in which they responded to each other as they developed a Christian poetics. Following an introduction which discusses the nature of their relationship as well as their basic theological positions, Chapter One examines their postconversion criticism, and particularly their stance on what is typically formulated as "the problem of belief in poetry," which focuses on how ideology influences a work's creation and reception. Chapter Two considers their transitional poetry, wherein their new religious beliefs figure prominently and their anxiety over the potential conflict between artistic and spiritual values is most acute. Chapter Three looks at their major postconversion poems and specifically at how Eliot's and Auden's understanding of the Incarnation informs their views on time, history, language, and literature, as embodied by these works. Chapter Four centers on their drama, initially comparing their early plays---written when Eliot was a Christian but Auden was not---to show how they employed similar techniques to further different ends, before turning to an examination of Eliot's later verse plays and Auden's libretti. I investigate the ideological motivation behind the adoption of these different dramatic forms, as well as the specific ways in which they affect how belief is conveyed. Throughout the dissertation, the effects of Eliot's and Auden's conversion upon their reputations and the difficulties facing modern Christian artists in general are given particular consideration.