T. S. Eliot and the "Gesamtkunstwerk" or "Total Work of Art"

This chapter explores T. S. Eliot’s search for impersonality in art in light of Arthur Schopenhauer’s aesthetics, beginning with a discussion of the philosopher’s influence on Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919). The chapter moves to consider Schopenhauer’s thought as the foundation of Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk or “total work of art,” synthesizing music, poetry, and drama. Eliot’s Beethoven-inspired series Four Quartets (1942) is centrally understood as a “total work of art” that draws on the Schopenhauerian aesthetics of Wagner’s “Beethoven” essay (1870) and Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy (1872). Eliot’s 1942 series is further connected with his earlier poetic series Coriolan (1932), similarly inspired by Beethoven. In particular, “Triumphal March” (Coriolan I) is read as an ekphrastic poem that responds to Max Klinger’s 1902 “Beethoven” sculpture, first displayed as part of the Gesamtkunstwerk Beethoven visual art exhibition in Vienna (1902)