T.S.Eliot’s Enquiry into the Limits of the Logos and the Shifting Cultural Paradigms

Abstract

The word and the world are no longer coeval. The modern world, near anarchic and totally absurd, emerges like a formidable fortress with complex labyrinths. The poet, the manipulator of words, struggles with the words themselves in quest of a possible exit. The verbal artifice erects a distinct world confusing, abstract, and volatile; the entrapped intellect reacts in a desperate attack. Human thoughts are largely shaped by cultural influences, and cultural conventions and values embedded in language of the race or clan coordinate the multiple subsystems of a larger societal organization. The fact that language, thought and socio-cultural dimensions are inexplicably intertwined, in a way indicates a deterministic perspective. However, if language itself hovers at the edge of continual flux and indeterminacy, the socio-cultural context of relevance and interpretative exercises in any given context, assume kaleidoscopic variety and generate intriguing questions. Eliot’s poetry and critical formulations continually question the validity of the word as an effective communicative medium and the perennially shifting linguistic bases of cultural paradigms. [