Although he was often criticized for the near papal authority with he made his critical pronouncements, T. S. Eliot claimed in Poetry and Propaganda (1930) that our literary judgment is always fallible According Eliot, the fallibility of critical judgment is due an inevitable lack of objectivity--the unavoidable overestimation of poetry a view of can understand and accept. (1) For Eliot, balance is the key. We are not really entitled prize such poetry so highly, he warned, also make the effort enter worlds of poetry in are (qtd. in Zabel 106-07). Despite the stance of objectivity, Eliot's use of the pronoun we is more than a rhetorical gesture; it resonates with an entire set of cultural assumptions. That view of which can understand and is Western and Christian, while those worlds of poetry in are are the products of cultures as yet unredeemed. (2) Although the aim of the reader, according Eliot, is to come rest in some poetry that shall realize poetically what ourselves believe, this cannot be achieved unless pass in and out freely among the various worlds of poetic creation (qtd. in Zabel 106). Reversing the cultural hierarchy implicit in Eliot's comment, the following essay is an attempt on the part of one Jewish reader enter such an alien world--the post-conversion poetry of Eliot. Even more, it is an attempt find an answer the question of why I have returned again and again a poet so thoroughly committed doctrinal Christianity, a tradition that grew out of, differentiated itself from, and often opposed my own. What might a poetry that embodies a view of life that I do not accept contribute a reader who resists its theological premises? Conversely, what might a reading from within a Jewish perspective contribute an understanding of Christian religious poetry? Finally, does reading from the point of view of the Other always and only produce an adversarial reading? In the context of current critical concerns, the issue of the relationship between poetry and may seem a quaint, outmoded holdover from a bygone era. It is probably safe assume that for many postmodern readers religion and belief have become either ideological positions or functions of language, both of can be scrutinized under the cold light of recent theory. These views, however, deflect an important modality of reader response or, perhaps, neutralize it within an overarching secular world view. The particular theological or religious system of the poet and of the reader is important, I would argue, first because it illuminates one way of making meaning in the world (Boyarin 129) and, second, because readers and writers from different historical and theological orientations have something contribute each other by maintaining, even by highlighting, their differences. Paul Ricoeur's effort account for the particularities of both past and present, text and reader, in the interpretive situation, without setting up a binary opposition between them, provides one set of terms--distanciation and appropriation--that can mediate the uncharted ground between identifying and resisting reading. Distanciation involves the realization that are dealing with the text of an Other, one who is non-coincidental with ourselves in time, space, and orientation. For Ricoeur, the inevitability of distanciation is synonymous with the impossibility of total appropriation, and this situation appears bear a positive valence for Ricoeur. However, one reads, Ricoeur insists, in order make the mind of another part of one's own some extent. This is why reading is consequential, why it has an ethical impetus and significance for the way one leads one's life. Partial appropriation is, for Ricoeur, a non-narcissistic process of self-enlargement, a creative activity; both reader and text are made anew, some extent, in the hermeneutic act (43-44). …
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Jan 27, 2025
Huiming Liu 
Open Access
Just Published
