T.S. Eliot and Indic Traditions: A Study in Poetry and Belief

T.S. Eliot and Indic Traditions: A Study in Poetry and Belief

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the influence of India on western culture and especially on America became more and more pronounced, especially in philosophy, religion and the arts. The major twentieth century poet T. S. Eliot registered that influence acutely and perceptively both in his thought and in his poetry. In this book author and literary critic Cleo Kearns traces the intellectual background, interpretive context, and personal experience that enabled him to do so. She then offers a close and illuminating reading of The Waste Land and Four Quartets, the two poems that defined Eliot's legacy and that were -- not incidentally -- the most deeply influenced by his immersion in Indic traditions. The great American critic Harold Bloom called her study “rigorous,” “persuasive, and “comprehensive,” and “more cognitively acute than any before it.” The book begins with a discussion of Eliot’s way of reading literary, philosophical and religious texts, each of which for hm requires a different approach. It continues with a review of his sources for Hinduism and Buddhism and an account of his studies of Sanskrit in graduate school at Harvard University,. These sources thus included both personal experience and the academic scholarship of his time, which was burgeoning with respect to India and its cultural traditions during this period. Kearns continues with a discussion of Eliot's understanding of the philosophical problems at stake here and of their implications for western religion, especially as reflected in the thought of William James and Josiah Royce, who were also deeply engaged in Indic studies. This section of her book concludes with a detailed and moving account of Eliot’s own clinical experience of meditation when he was under treatment for depression during the period leading up to the writing of The Waste Land . In the second part of her study Kearns analyses the literary influences on Eliot with respect to Indic traditions, especially through the work of Walt Whitman. She approaches these in terms of a distinction between metaphysics and wisdom she derives from the work of the great American critic Harold Bloom.. Finally, she provides a close reading of The Waste Land and Four Quartets, a reading that -- like Eliot’s poetry -- is steeped in learning, aesthetic theory, and philosophical study but original and acute in the concrete application of these to the actual texts at hand. This study will inform future work not only in Eliot but in one of the most profound and extensive cultural transmissions between east and west in our time.