T. S. Eliot began his career by training as a professional philosopher rather than as poet or critic. He ambitiously pursued this academic study at such major philosophical centers as Harvard, the Sorbonne, Marburg, and Oxford, between 1908 and 1915; completed a Harvard doctoral thesis on the philosophy of F. H. Bradley in 1916; and even published between 1916 and 1918 a number of professional articles and reviews of philosophy. Most studies of Eliot recognize that his early absorption in philosophy was very important for his development as poet and critic, though opinions sometimes differ as to which ways and through which thinkers the philosophical influence was most powerfully and beneficially expressed. Bergson's notions of durée, memory, and intuition have been recognized in the flow of consciousness of Eliot's early poems; and Royce, Bradley, and Russell have been cogently invoked to explain such Eliotic notions as tradition, poetic impersonality, the objective correlative, analytic precision, and critical objectivity.

Typically, however, these studies of Eliot as philosopher confine themselves to Eliot as “young philosopher,” the aspiring, well-trained novice who soon abandoned philosophy to pursue a literary career. Philosophy in these studies remains a past, residual influence of youth rather than a continuously active interest and vital concern of Eliot's entire career. This essay will instead insist on showing how Eliot pursued philosophical questions throughout his career, though he ceased to do so through professional philosophical channels. Instead, Eliot insightfully attacked these questions in his criticism, social theory, and poetry. In doing so, he helped by both argument and example to highlight and challenge the narrowness of professional, academic philosophy, so that philosophy could become closer to what is today in the academy often called “theory,” a genre where non-professional philosophers like Walter Benjamin can be studied for their philosophical import and where Eliot himself deserves a better place.