Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Key Figures and Movements
- Part II Secularity, Disenchantment, Re-enchantment
- Part III Religious Forms
- Part IV Myth, Folklore and Magic
- Part V Modern Esotericism, Pantheism and Spiritualism
- Part VI Religious Space, Time and Ritual Practice
- Part VII Global Transitions and Exchange
- Part VIII Queer[y]ing Religion
- Contributor Biographies
- Index
27 - ‘A Miserable Attenuation’: T. S. Eliot, Rabindranath Tagore and Irving Babbitt
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 October 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Key Figures and Movements
- Part II Secularity, Disenchantment, Re-enchantment
- Part III Religious Forms
- Part IV Myth, Folklore and Magic
- Part V Modern Esotericism, Pantheism and Spiritualism
- Part VI Religious Space, Time and Ritual Practice
- Part VII Global Transitions and Exchange
- Part VIII Queer[y]ing Religion
- Contributor Biographies
- Index
Summary
ON 19 SEPTEMBER 1923, T. S. Eliot received a letter from a Mr Stanley Rice, Indian civil servant and Orientalist, who offered to write an article for The Criterion on ‘the artistic influences of Asia on Europe and of Europe on Asia’ with a focus on the ‘cult of Tagore’. Although this proposed article did not appear in The Criterion, Eliot’s letter to Rice, explaining his ‘position’ regarding the ‘scholarly presentation of the Eastern world’, is elucidative of his lifelong interest in the religio-philosophical tradition of India and of its role in his interpretation and formulation of European culture, for which The Criterion was an important organ:
Such an article as you suggest would either fit in admirably with the design of the review or else, if treated in another way, would absolutely contradict it; and it is therefore only fair that I should explain to you the position of the paper. I am myself, having dabbled in Oriental philosophy, very keen on the scholarly presentation of the Eastern world to occidental Europe which knows so little about it. But I am very much opposed to certain forms of Oriental influence which seem to me conducive of hysteria and barbarism. You will have noticed [that] Eastern ideas or rather paraphrases and corroborations of Eastern ideas, have been creeping into Western Europe through the gate of Germany. As the Germans are a very hysterical race they always select the most hysterical and unwholesome aspects of Oriental art and thought and within the last few years they have turned more toward the East […] The effect of this, if the influence permeates Western Europe, will be to relax our hold on those European traditions without which I believe we would relapse into a state of barbarism […] My friend Herman Hesse […] is an example of the sort of orientalisation which I fear […] Now the standpoint of the Criterion is distinctly Aristotelian and in a sense Orthodox. As for Tagore, I cannot read at all but his work in translation seems to me a miserable attenuation of the robust philosophy of early India.
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- Information
- The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion , pp. 441 - 456Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2023