Eliot's Context

In the middle of the twentieth century, British idealist philosophy was facing a slow but unmistakable decline in popularity. It would be replaced with a hard-nosed, literalist form of language philosophy. One could no longer take The Idea for granted; an analysis of form was required to defend metaphysical claims. Early twentieth-century philosophy had circumnavigated questions of form: How did language attach itself to the world? How did meaning work? The death of idealism at mid-century would signal the decline in popularity of absolutes and mark a shift toward logical analysis. C. S. Lewis describes the decline of idealism as the fall of a broader philosophical approach:

Not without reservation, T. S. Eliot greatly admired idealism, and allusions to his disappointment with its fall appear in papers he drafted as a doctoral candidate in philosophy at Harvard and, occasionally, in his retrospective late work. Lines from “East Coker,” for instance, recall a generational paradigm shift in terms that resonate with Lewis's recollection of the decline of idealism: “And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us, / Or deceived themselves, the quietvoiced elders, / Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?” In an unsigned New Statesman review titled “A Contemporary Thomist” (1917), Eliot wrote of “[Bertrand] Russell who has insisted that philosophy must proceed from the simple, if it can be found, to the complex; and [of F. H.] Bradley, who has insisted that the simple cannot be found. These two writers between them have nearly laid metaphysics in the grave.” Although Eliot took inspiration from both, he was not a disciple of either, and he was skeptical at times of both idealism and realism.