T. S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination by Jewel Spears Brooker

Abstract

Reviewed by: T. S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination by Jewel Spears Brooker John Tamilio III (bio) T. S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination Jewel Spears Brooker Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. 240 pp. $49.95 hardcover. In the introduction to T. S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination, Jewel Spears Brooker notes that, “We are in the dawn of a renaissance in Eliot studies because the long-restricted archival material is now being published in critical editions” (3). Among this material is the two-volume annotated editions of Eliot’s published and unpublished poems by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue, the multivolume letters edited by John Haffenden, and The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, which consists of eight critical editions edited by numerous Eliot scholars with Ronald Schuchard as the general editor (Brooker is coeditor of volumes one and eight). Just recently, the much anticipated letters between Eliot and Emily Hale have been made available through the Princeton University Library. Brooker draws upon this scholarship, especially the prose volumes, in her rigorous analysis of the dialectic she perceives in a sampling of Eliot’s major poems and criticism. She begins with Eliot’s first seminal piece, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and works her way through to his masterpiece Four Quartets, spending scrutinous time probing other anthologized pieces, such as The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, and Ash Wednesday. Some of Eliot’s student poems, lectures, and his dissertation on F. H. Bradley are also examined. Brooker’s analysis is as meticulous as it is innovative, yielding fresh insight into a poet who many feel is indecipherable unless, of course, one finds meaning in the sentiments Eliot evokes in the reader. One cannot read this study without thinking about Hegel, whom Brooker references just once (47). Granted, Hegel focused on the telos of history: how history is moving toward a unified purpose that humanity would understand from an eschatological position. This is part of what Eliot means in his Four Quartets, which begin: “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past” (“Burnt Norton” I, ll. 1–3). This construct is part of the dialectic that Brooker explores in this study and is one of her critical refrains. Using a similar methodology, Brooker develops her cogent claim that Eliot tends to think in triads and that “[t]he dialectical imagination is by definition triadic, a structure that in itself nudges the mind to move beyond contradictions” (120). It moves beyond contradictions in two ways: by arriving at a new thesis, à la the Hegelian paradigm, or by remaining comfortable in the imbalance. But the phrase arriving at is where Brooker would differ in her analysis: throughout the book she uses the term transcends. Such a [End Page 223] distinction is central to her analysis of Eliot. Throughout his work and religious maturation, Eliot thought within a dialectic paradigm. Brooker notes that “the psycho-physical dualism that had troubled Eliot from the beginning of his life as a poet” remained with him (116). The serious believer should not find this strange. Christian Theology lives and grows within a dialectic imagination: the tension of living in the now and the not-yet; of worshipping a God who is present in absence and absent in presence; of serving a Savior who, through the act of kenosis, redeems humanity. Eliot lived within this tension and found that surmounting physical, psychological, emotional, temporal, and of course spiritual quandaries was attained through transcendence. Towards the end of the third section of “East Coker,” Eliot compares opposite states of being and offers a solution: “In order to arrive there, / To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, / You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy” (III, ll. 35–37ff). This pattern pervaded Eliot’s thinking. Brooker shows how Eliot addressed philosophical, spiritual, emotional, and spatiotemporal predicaments in his verse with the goal being to find a third way: to transcend the dilemma in which he was enmeshed or to live, however uncomfortably, in the imbalance. In his early verse, Eliot was drawn to existential questions and the “gap between intellect and...