Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Preface
- I ANTIQUITY
- II THE EARLY CHRISTIAN PERIOD AND THE MIDDLE AGES
- III THE RENAISSANCE AND THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
- IV THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
- V THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
- VI THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
- 24 Introduction
- 25 Yeats and Platonism
- 26 Virginia Woolf and Plato: the Platonic background of Jacob's Room
- 27 Plato and Eliot's earlier verse
- 28 The Cantos of Ezra Pound: ‘to build light’
- 29 Platonism in Auden
- 30 Platonism in Iris Murdoch
- Bibliography
- Index
27 - Plato and Eliot's earlier verse
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Preface
- I ANTIQUITY
- II THE EARLY CHRISTIAN PERIOD AND THE MIDDLE AGES
- III THE RENAISSANCE AND THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
- IV THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
- V THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
- VI THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
- 24 Introduction
- 25 Yeats and Platonism
- 26 Virginia Woolf and Plato: the Platonic background of Jacob's Room
- 27 Plato and Eliot's earlier verse
- 28 The Cantos of Ezra Pound: ‘to build light’
- 29 Platonism in Auden
- 30 Platonism in Iris Murdoch
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Critics of T.S. Eliot's poetry have frequently cited a Platonic influence. This is scarcely surprising since Eliot not only studied Plato, in the Greek, at Harvard, but also wrote essays on Platonic thought while commencing his doctoral work on F.H. Bradley at Oxford. Overall, Eliot's poetic career strangely replicates Plato's own progression from dramatised dialogue to a more monological commitment to the Real: the earlier verse is dialogical and sceptical; Four Quartets is affirmatory and declarative. In effect, the earlier verse of Eliot, which will be the main focus here,calls into question the nature of Platonism itself. It queries whether Plato's own philosophical contribution should be regarded as an elaboration of ideal truths (as Neoplatonism often represents it) or as a quasi-sceptical journey into ultimate mystery. Eliot's earlier poetry suggests the latter. The exercise of questioning will be a strong theme in this essay: Socrates, Plato and Eliot are alike in deeming the ‘unexamined life’ not worth living. And while, this end of twentieth-century cultural history, Eliot's career can easily be construed as an end-directed pilgrimage towards Christian faith (where both Plato and Aristotle make a contribution), his inquiry was always rooted in Socratic humility (‘“I can connect / Nothing with nothing”’) and Socrates' unceasing interrogation of any asserted knowledge: ‘Are these ideas right or wrong?’
It is well known that the foundation of Eliot's poetic style was formed through an absorption in the verse of Jules Laforgue between the years 1908 and 1912.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Platonism and the English Imagination , pp. 298 - 307Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994