The Early T. S. Eliot and Western Philosophy

by Rafey Habib

• ISBN13: 9780521063531
• ISBN10: 0521063531
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-05-29
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This book offers a comprehensive study of Eliot's philosophical writings and attempts to assess their impact on both his early poetry and his literary criticism. Rafey Habib attempts to unravel the complex notions of irony underlying Eliot's poetry, arguing that these originate in his philosophical thinking and achieve persistent expression in his early aesthetics. This book offers close readings of Eliot's major poems and critical essays, shedding valuable light on his views on language, tradition, impersonality and emotion, and situating these in a broad aesthetic and philosophical context.

Table of Contents

Preface

And the search for unity

The one and the many

The marriage of philosophy and poetry

And the poetry of Eliot's youth

And T. S. Eliot's manuscript

Analysis of Eliot's manuscript on Bergson

Significance of Eliot's manuscript

Philosophy and Laughter

Schopenhauer, Laforgue and Bergson

Eliot's Paris poems: 'Prufrock' and 'Portrait'

Irony as a Kantian meditation: Eliot's manuscripts on Kant

Analysis of Eliot's three manuscripts on Kant

Significance of Eliot's engagement with Kant

Eliot, Bradley and the irony of common sense

Bradley's Philosophical Context

Eliot's doctoral dissertation

The objective correlative

Eliot's early verse and Bradley

The divorce from old barren reason: from philosophy to aesthetics

Tradition and impersonality

The emotions of art

Impersonality and the bourgeois ego

The struggle against realism

Realism, Romanticism and Classicism

Realism refined

Language and reality

Irony as form: 'The Waste Land'

Tiresias in literary tradition

Tiresias in 'The Waste Land'

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