"First-Rate Blasphemy"

When T. S. Eliot first discovered Baudelaire and the Symbolists in 1908, he found assurance that in French symbolist poetry there existed a truly poetic language and that there were similar unexplored possibilities of language and imagery in English poetry. The aesthetic presence of Baudelaire is evident throughout Eliot's early poetry, but when he returned to a fuller study of Baudelaire's poetry and prose in 1920 his interest had clearly shifted to the moral and spiritual plane. Underlying the Baudelairean imagery and allusions in The Waste Land (1922) is Eliot's deeper and more pervasive interest in Baudelaire as a waste land saint, as the first desert father of the reaction against Romanticism, and in the early twenties Baudelaire succeeded even Dante as the central figure through whom Eliot defined the spiritual difficulties and moral responsibilities of the modern poet. Of greater consequence than the early poetic influence of Baudelaire on Eliot is Eliot's subsequent use of Baudelaire in developing his theory for the moral valuation of literature. In his reengagement with Baudelaire's sensibility from 1920 to 1935, Eliot labored to define in Baudelaire and his decadent followers the manifestation of a morbid spiritual condition that he saw as characteristic of the most profound quests in modern literature. He eventually delimited the moral center of his theory not, as traditionally supposed, in the heresy of Blake and the orthodoxy of Dante, but in his absorbing interest in the of Baudelaire. In the process of redefining modern blasphemy as his pivotal concept, he made concerted attempts to find a coherent terminology capable of accurately reflecting his moral presuppositions and attitudes. But both the intent and the chronology of his resultant Christian idiom have, since its noticeable adoption, been misunderstood, if not abused. Eliot further made important distinctions between moral and aesthetic criticism, and between religious and other forms of imaginative literature, but most of these

Art · Blasphemy · Criticism · Literature · Theology · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Modernist Literature and Criticism · Philosophy · Religious studies · Short Stories in Global Literature · Religious Studies

• They saw one they knew

  Raphaël Ingelbien•English Studies•2007

  Add to list