T. S. Eliot and the use of memory
By: Grover Smith.
Publisher: Bucknell University Press; Associated University Presses
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Lewisburg; London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 186
Subjects: Eliot, T. S. 1888-1965 -- Criticism and interpretation.; Eliot, T. S. 1888-1965 -- Knowledge -- Literature.; Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.); Memory in literature.; Intertextuality.
Description: This book explores poetry of T. S. Eliot and three plays, Sweeney Agonistes, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party, in the light of his responses to his cultural tradition.

The concept of memory, as an acknowledgment both of a cultural heritage and of its availability for original works of mind and imagination, unifies this study by Grover Smith. Eliot was tradition-oriented, drawing upon various cultures - primitive, Indic, European, and American - for poetic inspiration and models. By education, he was multicultural in a thoroughly legitimate sense.

In separate chapters, Smith, though commenting on a few verbal sources of types familiar from Eliot's practice of stylistic borrowing, focuses on thematic concerns.

Included are the psychological labyrinth of death-in-life of Poe's tales and poems; transfigurations of Hamlet from Shakespeare to Goethe, Coleridge, and Freud; popular stage entertainment in nineteenth-century America; poetic stimuli from James Barrie, Arnold Bennett, and Aldous Huxley; twentieth-century speculations on time and serialism; the world of occult phenomena in W. B. Yeats and, later, the novelist Charles Williams; and Eliot's obsessive critiques of primitive myth and ritual.

. In various ways, all of these interests intersected. Smith shows in Eliot's dedication to diverse traditions a practical imperative, and to a great extent a moral one, for a poetic art grounded in traditional American reverence for inherited values.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 171-178) and index.