격변기의 가치관의 혼란과 T S. Eliot의 신비주의

Abstract

T.S. Eliot, a major Twentieth-Century English poet, has witnessed and lived through the cataclysmic changes represented and caused by the two World Wars. These turbulent times have caused him to see through the futility of human existence in the spiritual Waste Land of his own making and search for meaning in life. His' tendency to search for meaning takes on the quality of mysticism. In this paper I try to show that Eliot's mystical tendency is a major factor throughout his life and is found in many of his works. In the early stages of the development, his mystical tendency finds its way in his critical concepts such as objective correlative, immediate experience, and the impersonality of poetry. What he wants to do in these concepts is to spatialize, visualize, and fix time through concrete imageries. His concept of tradition, however, is an improvement over these critical concepts in that tradition presupposes synchronic existence of the past in the present. His late~ ideas such as still point and pattern, however, are contingent upon the idea of the Incarnation of Christ in time, and in this respect they are qualitatively different from his earlier critical concepts. In his later stage, Eliot sees the importance of history as a meeting of time with the timeless in pattern and still point. This is possible only through the mediation of the Incarnated Christ. These ideas are very clearly shown in Murder in the Cathedral and Four Quartets. Even though Eliot's Christian mystical element is prominent in his later period (especially after his conversion to Anglican Church in 1927), we should not overlook the importance of the Oriental influences in his mystical tendency. For instance, the absence of ego (self) found in his impersonal theory of poetry in the early stage of his life is still found in his later poem Four Quartets. This means that the Buddhistic and Hinduistic elements have stayed with him throughout his life. We should also remember that mysticism to Eliot is not rejecting this world and seeking after refuge in the other world. His mysticism is firmly based on "here" and "now", and this "here" and "now" is the backbone of his "always". The fact that he uses concrete images throughout his poetry bears this out.