The War Within: Feeling and Intellect in Early Eliot

Abstract

T. S. Eliot’s career began with a struggle between poetry and philosophy. The agon featured Dante, whose work informed Eliot’s earliest poems, and F. H. Bradley, whose thought was the subject of his Ph.D. thesis. Eliot’s most detailed discussion of the connection between poetry and philosophy is contained in his 1926 Clark Lectures at Cambridge University, published as Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry. He defines the “philosophic poet” in Bradleyean terms as one who “enlarges immediate experience” by “drawing within the orbit of feeling and sense what had existed only in thought” (VMP 55,51). Philosophic poetry is work of the “highest intensity, in which the thought is fused into poetry at a very high temperature” (VMP 50). Eliot argues that Dante’s poetry perfectly illustrates the integration of feeling and intelligence, both in life and in art. In this paper, I explore Eliot’s attempt to negotiate the claims of philosophy and poetry, as represented by Bradley and Dante, and his ultimate decision to abandon a promising career in philosophy for a tenuous career in poetry. Eliot’s ambition of becoming a “philosophic poet,” combining Bradley and Dante, was realized in his Dantean sequences Ash-Wednesday and Four Quartets.