Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The Souls of the Devout
- 2 Divisions and Precisions: Ambivalence and Ambiguity
- 3 A Gesture and a Pose: Homo Duplex
- 4 Where Are the Eagles and the Trumpets? American Aesthetes
- 5 The Silhouette of Sweeney: Cultures and Conflict
- 6 Being Between Two Lives: Reading The Waste Land
- Afterword
- Notes
- Index
1 - The Souls of the Devout
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The Souls of the Devout
- 2 Divisions and Precisions: Ambivalence and Ambiguity
- 3 A Gesture and a Pose: Homo Duplex
- 4 Where Are the Eagles and the Trumpets? American Aesthetes
- 5 The Silhouette of Sweeney: Cultures and Conflict
- 6 Being Between Two Lives: Reading The Waste Land
- Afterword
- Notes
- Index
Summary
In New England, where education and liberty spring from morality and religion and where an already old and long-settled society has been able to shape its own maxims and habits, the people, though rid of all forms of superiority ever created by wealth or birth among men, are accustomed to respect intellectual and moral superiority and to submit thereto without displeasure; and so we find New England democracy making choices better than those made elsewhere. … But [in] the new states of the Southwest, where the body of society, formed yesterday, is nothing but an agglomeration of speculators and adventurers, one is appalled to see into what hands public authority has been entrusted, and one wonders by what power, independent of legislation and of men, the state has been able to grow and society to prosper.
De Tocqueville, Democracy in AmericaThe essential idea of humanity is not derived from weakness and sin, but from that mysterious connection of the soul and body, – the immortal spirit with the corruptible flesh, – by which the soul is made subject to earthly influence. Our spiritual nature is probably the same, in its elements, with that of the most exalted archangel.
Rev. William Greenleaf Eliot, Discourses on the Doctrines of ChristianityToo much pudding choked the dog.
Henry Ware Eliot, Sr., on why he chose not to become a Unitarian ministerFAMILY, NATION, AND RELIGION
The primary channel of transmission of culture is the family: no man wholly escapes from the kind, or wholly surpasses the degree, of culture which he acquired from his early environment.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The American T. S. EliotA Study of the Early Writings, pp. 1 - 35Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989