TY - JOUR
T1 - An Objective Chemistry
T2 - what T. S. Eliot borrowed from Schopenhauer
AU - Virkar-Yates, Aakanksha
N1 - © 2016 The Johns Hopkins University Press. This article first appeared in Philosophy and Literature, Volume 39, Issue 2, October, 2015, pages 527-537.
PY - 2015/10/1
Y1 - 2015/10/1
N2 - “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) is T. S. Eliot's expression of his poetics of impersonality, a spirited rejection of romantic subjectivism and emotionalism. But could Eliot's modernist essay be derived in part from what he presents as the unremittingly “emotional” philosophy of Schopenhauer? Section 51 of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation I (1818) presents a metaphor resoundingly familiar to modern readers: the chemistry of verse-writing. A closer examination of “Tradition” and “Hamlet and his Problems” (1919) betrays Schopenhauer's unacknowledged role in Eliot's dictums of impersonal emotion and the “objective correlative.”
AB - “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) is T. S. Eliot's expression of his poetics of impersonality, a spirited rejection of romantic subjectivism and emotionalism. But could Eliot's modernist essay be derived in part from what he presents as the unremittingly “emotional” philosophy of Schopenhauer? Section 51 of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation I (1818) presents a metaphor resoundingly familiar to modern readers: the chemistry of verse-writing. A closer examination of “Tradition” and “Hamlet and his Problems” (1919) betrays Schopenhauer's unacknowledged role in Eliot's dictums of impersonal emotion and the “objective correlative.”
U2 - 10.1353/phl.2015.0057
DO - 10.1353/phl.2015.0057
M3 - Article
SN - 0190-0013
VL - 39
SP - 527
EP - 537
JO - Philosophy and Literature
JF - Philosophy and Literature
IS - 2
ER -
