The four regimes that form the subject matter of this volume have generally received negative treatment from traditional Chinese historians and have been viewed as an interruption in the grand sweep of Chinese history. Each was established by a non-Chinese ruling group, who maintained their own cultural identity while ruling over a multiethnic state including large Han Chinese populations, and each controlled large territories that had long been ruled by Chinese. Each regime presented a challenge to the integrity of Chinese culture and to China's deeply rooted assumptions about its cultural supremacy and international order.

Yet these regimes were remarkably successful. The Khitan Liao dynasty lasted longer than had any previous Chinese dynasty except for the Han and the T'ang. For more than a century after the fall of the T'ang dynasty in 907, the Tangut in northern Shensi and Kansu clung tenaciously to the regional authority that they had acquired under the late T'ang and then formed their own empire of Hsia, which as an independent state survived for two centuries more. More than two centuries after the collapse of Khitan power, the official historians of the Mongolian Yüan court grudgingly conceded to the Liao the title of a legitimate dynasty but denied that status to Hsia, who would seem to us to have had almost as good a claim. Both were long-lasting, stable regimes, firmly rooted in territories that had been in part settled by Han Chinese for a millennium, and both regimes survived in the face of a hostile Chinese regime, the Sung, whose population outnumbered them twenty to one and whose economic resources were even more overpoweringly superior.

As a dramatic performance, the character “T. S. Eliot” had one of the century's most successful runs. Formidably stylish, like Edith Evans's Lady Bracknell, it was exotic yet lifelike, as critics said when Olivier played Othello, and should have been extensively recorded on film. The grave voice and firm though melancholy gestures, head inclined a little to the side, were expert renditions of presence. Even the costume was capable of taking on small character-parts: as witness the heavily lapelled overcoat, the reliable shoes and umbrella, the wardrobe of identical three-piece suits ( “Nothing ever quite to excess,” his tailor is reported as saying). The Eliot costume, moreover, was animated by a range of interested parties, some of whom contributed anonymously to journals like the Times Literary Supplement, while others published poems in their own name with Faber and Faber, or signed letters under this or that nom de plume. Eliot the ventriloquist has been admired by plenty of commentators now, just as he himself admired artists able to carry off the difficult trick of vanishing into their own performance. Whether it was Nellie Wallace and Little Tich in the music-hall, offering “an inconceivable orgy of parody of the human race” (The Criterion 1.2: 193), or the Diaghilev Ballet's leading dancers (“Massine, the most completely unhuman, impersonal, abstract, belongs to the future stage,” he wrote in 1932: ibid., 1.4: 305), what he seems to have valued particularly is theater's power of removing both spectator and performer out of ordinary life.

In the course of a late lecture, “The Frontiers of Criticism,” Eliot recommended that readers of a poem should endeavor to grasp what the poem is aiming to be. Tentatively drawing on the language of philosophy, he suggested they should try to grasp its “entelechy” (PP [London], p. 110), a word which in Aristotle emphasizes purpose in contradistinction to cause. Eliot's recommendation offers a useful way to understand the relation of his early poems to those that follow, in terms of the end he thought they shared, and this end can be elucidated by means of a comparison with W. B. Yeats.

Take, for example, the well-known lines which close Yeats's “Among School Children,”describing the image of the chestnut tree and the impossibility of knowing the dancer from the dance. What equivalent ecstatic moment is there in Eliot to set alongside these lines, when all is felt as unity? The images of the Chinese jar in its stillness in Burnt Norton and of the ceremonious dancers in East Coker come immediately to mind, but there are a dozen possibilities to choose from, across the whole span of Eliot's career, from Four Quartets back to The Waste Land and “Gerontion” and before. It is difficult to settle on any one of them, and the difficulty is indeed the first fact to emerge from the comparison.

There are also many similar passages in Yeats which extend the meaning of what he wrote in “Among School Children.” For example, “Upon a Dying Lady” associates the dancing-place with a heavenly afterlife, the fourth stanza of “Byzantium” equates the dance with trance, and so on. But in Eliot the case is significantly different. Each of the possibilities is partial, haunting, suggestive. Altogether, they send the reader turning backward and forward, from one to another, and that is their nature; each set of lines needs another to complete its meaning, not just to add another dimension to a meaning which is already complete.

When I was asked to write on the figure of Eliot in modern poetry I thought of several reasons not to accept. On a personal level I could imagine no way that such critical work would not reveal more about my limitations than about Eliot's powers, since I would miss or mistake crucial aspects of his heritage. And on a theoretical level I deeply mistrust any study claiming to speak of influences. Where such studies are not obvious, they tend to rely on loose speculations about specific echoes or to invoke problematic analogies attempting to establish one writer's shaping overall projects for another.

Yet here I am. The theoretical problem quickly became a challenge to test a concept of impact that might avoid the problems worrying me, since impact is less a matter of one poet deliberately engaging another than it is a matter of the currency of ideas and of a logic informing how writers shape ambitions or develop styles. Thus we shift from trying to inhabit the mind of specific writers to attempting to describe a theater in which Eliot becomes a stimulus focussing a range of possible investments in versions of his work. And then we also shift the personal stakes. My fears did not subside, but they were outweighed by the opportunity to take responsibility for my own love of Eliot: I could ask how and why the now dominant account misses much that was, and is, culturally vital in Eliot's work; and I could use the reception of Eliot's work by other poets to make clear what in his work does not yield to appropriation or modification, but marks instead his still distinctive modernist voice.

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.

England was the scene of Eliot's encounter as a poet with the particularities of history and place. He went on to develop an idea of England of classical proportions. What follows is an attempt to understand both the encounter and the idea.

Eliot was in Marburg when Germany invaded Belgium on August 3, 1914. The British Government responded to the invasion with an ultimatum. The nation had become impatient for war with its belligerent, industrially confident rival. It was the impatience of an empire that had peaked and needed to reassert itself. German aggression was a challenge, something for an uncertain giant to measure itself against. From the beginning there was a self-conscious pride in the war as being of massive historical moment. Lloyd George described it as the “great conflict,” and saw it as a chance for a nation, long used to empire, to wake up from the sloth of tropical prosperity, and recover its authority and right (Marwick, The Deluge, p. 89).

When war broke out Eliot packed his bags and headed for London. He was twenty-five years old and on study-leave from Harvard. He had already arranged to spend most of the year at Oxford, so the move was not a major inconvenience. It became more inconvenient when he realized how much he disliked Oxford which struck him as a quiet unprepossessing place to live, even before its numbers were depleted by the war.

Few readers would disagree that Eliot the man has been as much a puzzle as Eliot the poet. Two small books, with others, have now begun to clarify that puzzle. The chief contribution of biography is to present relevant personal facts, and Ms. Gordon's patiently assembled facts have pointed, very pertinently, to how readers might have erred in their puzzlement over Eliot by not recognizing what might now be considered obvious: that Eliot's work represents a series of efforts, each trying to make sense of a persistent moral dilemma. The oeuvre of T. S. Eliot will appear to us differently if, instead of treating the whole Collected Poems as due to Eliot's “impersonal” aesthetic, we perceive his poetry as negotiating intractable personal material which persists even in the final form.

We now know, in some detail, that there was indeed another woman in the life of the man, and that much of the work of the poet can be seen as full of some emotional and moral matter which the writer would not expose to light, and could not go away from. Since the only way of negotiating a moral dilemma is to find an objective situation which corresponds to that specific dilemma, it may be that Eliot's problems were such that the very données precluded objective resolution. And the alternative to resolution, in anyone who knows what it means to endure a situation one wants to escape from, may indeed be a form of madness, perhaps less the intensity of insanity than the desperate role-playing of the apparentposeur. We need, to be sure, a great many more facts in Eliot's biography; we should like to know, for example, whether, when and in relation to what personal crisis, he read Milton's The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. Certainly his animus towards Milton can seem in excess of the verse as we know it.

There are many Americas. Which were Eliot's? Born into a family whose ancestors came to Massachusetts in the seventeenth century and whose members had more recently settled in a distant region, T. S. Eliot combined a New England cultural memory with midwestern experience. Although his grandparents reached Missouri in the 1830s, the family carefully maintained its New England connection. Indeed, after the patriarch, Rev. William Greenleaf Eliot, died in 1887, the poet's family began to gravitate back to Massachusetts. In the 1890s Eliot's father purchased a house on Cape Ann where his family could retreat from sweltering St. Louis summers. Soon after her husband died, Eliot's mother moved to the Boston area, as would all but her youngest child. A century after his grandparents arrived, none of Eliot's immediate family remained in St. Louis.

Partly southern and partly midwestern, located in the center of a vast continent but poised on a great inland waterway, St. Louis marked Eliot's childhood imagination. During Missouri winters he yearned for the firs, red granite, and blue ocean of coastal New England. Yet as he summered there, limestone bluffs full of fossil shellfish near the “long dark river“ drew his memory back to the Mississippi. Even opening his mouth to speak, drawling like a southerner during boyhood visits to Boston, reminded Eliot of his double origins. In fact, his father was born and bred in St. Louis, and his mother and both paternal grandparents were born or raised south of the Mason-Dixon line. Yet Eliot also knew that his family, for reasons that reach deep into American history and into their past, considered themselves socially superior to the southerners they met in St. Louis.

By the time in which T. S. Eliot wrote, religion, literature and society in western culture had already, he knew, shared a long and ambivalent history. Often, literature had been a medium of critical support for such Judeo-Christian religious doctrines as creation, covenant, exile, incarnation and redemption, and a source of relative stability for various moral and social orders based on their premises. This “easy and natural” association between religion, literature and society, Eliot argued, had happened when society was moderately healthy and its various discourses in some relation with one another, though necessarily not always perfectly harmonious. Just as often, however, or so it seemed, literature had been either a monolithic reflection or a mode of subversion of society and religion, as each discourse set up its own creative and prophetic energies over and against the others, vying for a totalizing hegemony on its own terms (SE [1950], p. 390; NTDC [New York], pp. 67-69).

Eliot felt keenly the value of the rare moments of “easy and natural” association between literature, religion, and society (though he noted that “many of the most remarkable achievements of culture” had been made “in conditions of disunity” [NTDC [New York], p. 71]); and he spoke with eloquence of their combination of underlying order and deliberate if controlled cultivation of differences in point of view. As Eliot recognized, the maintenance of these differences made for cultural strength; just as their collapse into one totalizing discourse made for one-dimensionality, and their proliferation into a congeries of special interests for disintegration. He also felt, however, the difficulty of realizing the ideal of a harmonious but multivalent culture, especially in the midst of the “immense panorama of futility and anarchy” which was, for him, contemporary history.

While Eliot's prose writings between 1925 and 1945 expound the need for self-transcendence, his poetry can be said to display the difficulties involved in this process. As early as 1916, in his dissertation on Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, he had made it clear that by “self-transcendence” he meant, paradoxically, the struggle to progress from a purely personal experience of contact with the noumenal, the realm that is beyond phenomena and outside the process of time, by entering more fully into the shared world of objects and of time; and by multiplying experiences to pursue the ideal “of an all-inclusive experience outside of which nothing shall fall” (KE p. 31). The assumption is that the more comprehensive our experience, and the more unified our knowledge derived from experience, the nearer we come to the total truth.

It is the limited scope of merely private experience that compels us to go out of ourselves, out of even our most intense and timeless moments, into the common world of others and of passing events. No individual can be self-sufficient, “for the life of a soul does not consist in the contemplation of one consistent world but in the painful task of unifying (to a greater or lesser extent) jarring and incompatible ones” (KE p. 147). But to “unify” is to incorporate and to transmute, to make what was other our own, and so to get free again of the world of timebound phenomena. The vital difference between the beginning and the end of this process is that what was at first simply one's private experience comes to be confirmed and verified, and established as impersonal and absolute truth.

“The borrowed jewels he has set in its head do not make Mr. Eliot's toad the more prepossessing”: so wrote an early reviewer of The Waste Land, affronted by the bold allusions from which Eliot's poetry was built. Those allusions, reinforced by Eliot's own notes to The Waste Land, have never ceased to affront; even today they account for Eliot's still formidable reputation as a “difficult”poet, and several generations of sourcehunting critics have reinforced that impression. Eliot sometimes played this game himself (“Immature poets imitate,” he quipped early in his career, “mature poets steal” [SE [1950], p. 182]), but other times he was dismayed that readers found the surface difficulties of his poems prohibiting. And while it's true that knowledge of Eliot's models and sources does enrich a reading of his poetry, it is ultimately more important to understand the nature of Eliot's allusive practice - to ask not only what is the source? but why does Eliot allude? and how do we experience the allusion?