Abstract

T.S. Eliot, no less a distinguished as a critic than as a poet, began as a student of philosophy. As a young man he planned to take up philosophy as a career, and his later critical theory was deeply influenced by his philosophical outlook. This book, written by a professional philosopher trained in the analytic tradition, is the first philosophically rigorous and systematic account of Eliot's views and development. Tracing this devolpment against the mainstream twentieth-century philosophy, both Anglo-American and continental, it defends Eliot's critical theory against the dismissive attitude of the poststructuralists and Marxist, illuminating not only the work of Eliot himself but the state of literary theory today.