The Early T. S. Eliot and Western Philosophy

Rafey Habib’s book offers a comprehensive study of Eliot’s philosophical writings and attempts to assess their impact on both his early poetry through ‘The Waste Land’ and the central concepts of his literary criticsm. Habib presents the first scholarly analysis of Eliot’s difficult unpublished papers on Kant and Bergson and establishes the nature of Eliot’s connections with major figures in the Western philosophical tradition, including Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bradley and Russell. The Early T. S. Eliot and Western Philosophy 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.

• First sustained examination of Eliot’s engagement with western philosophy • Uses unpublished essays of Eliot

Preface; 1. (a) Henry Adams and the search for unity (b) Irving Babbitt: the one and the many (c) George Santayana: the marriage of philosophy and poetry (d) Laforgue, Schopenhauer and the poetry of Eliot’s youth; 2. Bergson Resartus and T. S. Eliot’s manuscript (a) Analysis of Eliot’s manuscript on Bergson (b) Significance of Eliot’s manuscript; 3. Philosophy and Laughter (a) Schopenhauer, Laforgue and Bergson, (b) Eliot’s Paris poems: ‘Prufrock’ and ‘Portrait’; 4. Irony as a Kantian meditation: Eliot’s manuscripts on Kant (a) Analysis of Eliot’s three manuscripts on Kant (b) Significance of Eliot’s engagement with Kant; 5. Eliot, Bradley and the irony of common sense (a) Bradley’s Philosophical Context (b) Eliot’s doctoral dissertation (c) The objective correlative (d) Eliot’s early verse and Bradley; 6. The divorce from old barren reason: from philosophy to aesthetics (a) Tradition and impersonality (b) The emotions of art (c) Impersonality and the bourgeois ego; 7. The struggle against realism (a) Realism, Romanticism and Classicism (b) Realism refined (c) Language and reality; 8. Irony as form: ‘The Waste Land’ (a) Tiresias in literary tradition (b) Tiresias in ‘The Waste Land’.