This paper is not a study of F.H.Bradley’s influence on T.S.Eliot, nor of the relationship between philosophy and poetry. Despite its concern with poetry, language and thought, it does not attempt to enlist Eliot as a ‘poet in a destitute time’. () It has grown out of a confrontation with Eliot’s writing and the contradictions inherent in his poetry where, it might be said, jouissance erupts in negations. ().

The novels of Virginia Woolf and the poetry of T.S. Eliot are an integral part of the modernist literary canon. The life and work of both writers continue to attract critical attention because, as Woolf said of Shelley.