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T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

David Chinitz
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Abstract

T. S. Eliot is remembered as a champion of elite tradition who struggled to rescue an autonomous and uncompromised high art from the encroaching tide of mass culture. However, the essays, poems, and plays of his early career reveal an Eliot who believed that the ever-deepening division between the “high” and the “low” in culture represented a form of social disintegration that threatened to make art irrelevant. Rejecting the sacralization of high art as a stultifying bourgeois misappropriation, Eliot allied himself with the lower class and its participatory engagement with popular culture—an engagement that Eliot himself shared. Despite a complex personal ambivalence manifested in his poetry, Eliot sought to reconcile the dissociated levels of culture by theorizing and attempting to create a new public art form: a poetic drama based on such popular forms as music-hall comedy and jazz.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 110 , Issue 2: Special Millennium issue , March 1995 , pp. 236 - 247
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1995

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