Transmuting F. H. Bradley: T. S. Eliot’s Notes Towards a Theory of Poetry
The second essay cluster examines the annotations made in books from Eliot’s personal library, recently made available to researchers for the first time. In the first essay, Callison offers the first extensive reading of Eliot’s marginalia to F. H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality. Callison notes a stylistic shift in Eliot’s critical prose, particularly in the philosophical essays written at Harvard and during Michaelmas term 1914 at Oxford, while he was studying and annotating Bradley. In addition to examining Eliot’s annotations and their relevance to his developing philosophical mind, Callison uses these annotations to explain Eliot’s retrospective assessment of Bradley’s “style” as the means by which the philosopher most indelibly influenced the literary and cultural critic. In the second essay, Pierce offers a phenomenological reading of Eliot’s view of language, showing that a phenomenological “suspension” of definite reference is central to his poetic style. Examining annotations from Eliot’s library, Pierce attributes this tendency to Eliot’s reading of Edmund Husserl.