What principles connect--and what distinctions separate--"The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," The Waste Land, and Four Quartets?
The thought-tormented characters in T. S. Eliot's early poetry are
paralyzed by the gap between mind and body, thought and action. The need
to address this impasse is part of what drew Eliot to philosophy, and
the failure of philosophy to appease his disquiet is the reason he gave
for abandoning it. In T. S. Eliot's Dialectical Imagination, Jewel
Spears Brooker argues that two of the principles that Eliot absorbed as
a PhD student at Harvard and Oxford were to become permanent features of
his mind, grounding his lifelong quest for wholeness and underpinning
most of his subsequent poetry.
The first principle is that contradictions are best understood
dialectically, by moving to perspectives that both include and transcend
them. The second is that all truths exist in relation to other truths.
Together or in tandem, these two principles--dialectic and
relativism--constitute the basis of a continual reshaping of Eliot's
imagination. The dialectic serves as a kinetic principle, undergirding
his impulse to move forward by looping back, and the relativism supports
his ingrained ambivalence.
Brooker considers Eliot's poetry in three blocks, each represented by a
signature masterpiece: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," The Waste
Land, and Four Quartets. She correlates these works with stages in
the poet's intellectual and spiritual life: disjunction, ambivalence,
and transcendence. Using a methodology that is both inductive--moving
from texts to theories--and comparative--juxtaposing the evolution of
Eliot's mind as reflected in his philosophical prose and the evolution
of style as seen in his poetry--Brooker integrates cultural and
biographical contexts. The first book to read Eliot's poems alongside
all of his prose and letters, T. S. Eliot's Dialectical Imagination
will revise received readings of his mind and art, as well as of
literary modernism.
