Abstract
In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot describes how the poetic mind—and his own mind—works in a fragmentary manner in the process of literary creation. In this essay he states that The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together. (SP 41) Not only do these words contain a measure for understanding the creative process, but they also contain fragments of Eliot’s beginning, his early interest in the philosophy of French philosopher, Henri Bergson. Author of such influential books such as Creative Evolution, Mind and Memory, and Time and Free Will, Bergson’s ideas were pervasive and conspicuous in the writing of the early twentieth century. Paul Douglass asserts that “Bergson played an important, perhaps decisive role in the development of an expressly ‘modern’ philosophy and literature” (1). Bergson’s philosophy, while popular during the modernist period, is little known or explored by most graduate students today. Yet, without knowledge of Bergson’s philosophy, a scholar lacks full understanding of this period’s writing. Bergson viewed time’s spatial representation by science and mathematics—that of an unalterable, irreversible time line—as unsuitable and illusory for the actual human experience and event of time and memory. Instead, Bergson’s idea of time and memory posits that a moment in the present leads us to a surviving memory which leads to another memory in a free flowing association and movement from present to past, past to present. In Bergson’s complex philosophy of time and consciousness, he noted two types of memory—Practical and Pure. For us to achieve Bergson’s almost mystical Pure Memory, we must separate ourselves from the demands of our practical bodies and our practical worlds. Only in this separation can we become conscious of Pure Memory. If a memory has survived, it has survived for a purpose. When we are in the midst of a consciousness that allows for Pure Memory, time past and time present become one in a type of synchronicity, wherein time bends and folds back on itself freely and seems to lengthen. We then become one with time and memory on a universal level. There is, however, the potentiality for memory and time to cause effects of inaction and inarticulateness that can have debilitating effects—as when a person turns away from the present and looks so far towards the past that he or she become filled with sorrow. The poetry of T. S. Eliot is filled with such temporal concerns because of his early interest in Bergson. Indeed, the influence of Henri Bergson’s philosophy on T.S. Eliot’s early poetry has been explored and documented by scholars Donald Childs, Philip LeBrun, Lyndall Gordon, and Piers Gray. Evidence of Bergson’s enduring and perhaps unconscious influence on Eliot’s poetry remains explored to a significantly lesser degree—particularly in reference to his post-conversion poetry. Childs’ final assertion is that “Bergsonsim, to quote Eliot’s mother, becomes in his thought a ‘diminishing quality,’ [yet] it nonetheless endures in its pseudo-mystical dimension as an important quality of Eliot’s poetic and religious sensibility” (488). My thesis looks at Bergson’s influence in Eliot’s poetry in his early and late work, in other words, his beginning and his end. In particular, I evaluate evidence of Bergson’s philosophical influence in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “The Hollow Men,” and Four Quartets. Even in these last poems, the echo of Bergson’s intuition and duration, pure memory and practical memory, reverberates as “Time present and time past” intertwine, leading to the illumination that “In my beginning is my end.” I will not only explore evidence of Bergson’s philosophy in Four Quartets, but also examine Bergson’s influence throughout a representative scope of Eliot’s work because, after extensive research and careful analysis, I find it plausible that Bergson became part of Eliot’s poetic voice. As scholar Phillip Le Brun states in his essay on “T.S. Eliot and Henri Bergson,” “had he not known Bergson’s philosophical writings, Eliot’s major formulations about poetry—about tradition, the associated sensibility of the artist, and the work of art as objective correlative—would have been quite different from what they are” (10). And so would his poetry have been vastly different had he not been forever altered by Bergson. Focusing on time, memory and the Bergsonian, memory-related consequence of inaction and inarticulateness in Eliot’s poetic voices, my thesis analyzes the artistic evolution of Eliot in an effort to show how his poetic mind arrived at a “new compound.”