ELIOT’S AFTER STRANGE GODS: CONTRAPUNTAL READING IN RELIGION & CULTURE

English Language and Literature

The critical authority of T.S.Eliot is dominant in the twentieth century English literature that abides by the modernist trend of high culture, idealism, homogeneity, classicism, the search for a unified structure whole. After Strange Gods (1934) gives full reign to his idealistic and centralized vision. For Eliot poetry deals with actuality, to which Cleanth Brooks adds the approach of “imaginative sympathy.” In this series of three lectures, which were delivered in the University of Virginia, Eliot deals with his high-browed Catholic morals of “one race” and the necessity of a common religious background against the postmodern view of pluralism and multiculturalism. Eliot has given his opinions about the interpretation of „Tradition.‟ He thinks that „tradition‟ should not be associated with dogmas or fixed taboos that do not change with the passage of time and the change of circumstances. His approach to the past is neither emotionally nostalgic nor complete denigration. Eliot has spoken favourably about „novelty‟ which can be the inclusion of certain new ideals instead of repeating our predecessors blindly. Tradition adheres both to the sense of past and present simultaneouly, to accept the timeless and to modify the temporal may be the expertise of a great writer. Eliot also suggests that the past and the present have a reciprocal relationship. If the past can be modified by the present, the present can also be influenced by the past. This complementary approach to the dialectics of the past and the present can be applied to the dialectics of community/ individual, impersonal/ personal, universal/ particular.

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