ts eliot notes towards the definition of culture

In Eliot’s view, literature, in addition to its provision of entertainment and personal enrichment, has as its proper end the maintenance and enrichment of culture. Championed by a few religious and traditional conservative thinkers, these writings also are mentioned in connection with charges of Eliot’s anti-Semitism, or more often, simply ignored.īut Eliot’s writings on culture are important precisely because they grow so directly from his literary criticism and because they so clearly are of a piece with his conception of the purpose and role of literature itself.

Least regarded in the mainstream of English-speaking letters are Eliot’s writings on culture. Thus Eliot’s thought has been dismissed as “arrogant” and “elitist” even as the products of that thought have been accepted as essential elements of our literature. But Eliot’s stature as a critic has suffered due to the same elements that make his poetry so highly admired-its call to intellectual rigor and demand for active, learned engagement with the Western tradition and with traditions and civilizations outside the West. Continuing interest in Eliot is shown in the recent re-issue of Russell Kirk’s Eliot and His Age.

His journal, The Criterion, despite its short lifespan, remains the standard of high modernism. Eliot is almost as well known among literate persons as a critic and literary theorist. Eliot indisputably was, and remains, in the first rank of poets of any era and any culture.

Ts eliot notes towards the definition of culture