PRUFROCK, PHILOSOPHY, AND POLITICS

In After Strange Gods, that notorious battle-cry against the unorthodox, Eliot names as “the struggle of our time” the effort “to re-establish a vital connexion between the individual and the race; the struggle, in a word, against Liberalism.” In this way, Eliot announces clearly what had been implicit in his work for a long time. The distress he reveals over the liberal divorce of individual and race had been working in him since his student days, and the reconciliation of these two estranged entities was the first philosophical problem he confronted. For Eliot, as for Yeats, the desire to solve this problem sprung at least in part from his own anomalous position. He was an urban expatriate who prescribed for others a settled life on the soil, a cosmopolitan, famed for garbling together half the languages of humankind, who preached the virtues of a rooted tradition, and a painfully private religionist who saw religion as a cohesive social force. Eliot's genius was to insist that these apparent contradictions are in fact identities, that community can only come about through detachment, tradition only through the individual talent, ethics only through specific historical facts. His most complex works in criticism and in poetry attempt to make good these claims and thus to find a new basis for his own life as an individual, a member of the educated elite, and a poet.

Eliot's early teachers all made quite clear the fact that the gap between the individual and the world was an immediate political problem as well as a philosophical puzzle.