Notes Towards the Definition of Culture
by T. S. Eliot
On This Page
Description
The word culture, in recent years, has been widely and erroneously employed in political, educational, and journalistic contexts. In helping to define a word so greatly misused, T. S. Eliot contradicts many of our popular assumptions about culture, reminding us that it is not the possession of a class but of a whole society and yet its preservation may depend on the continuance of a class system, and that a "classless" society may be a society in which culture has ceased to exist. show more Surveying the contemporary scene, Mr. Eliot points out that our standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago, finds evidence of this decay in every department of human activity, and sees no reason why the decay of culture should not proceed much further. He suggests that culture and religion have a common root and that if one decays the other may die too. He reminds us that "the Russians have been the first modern people to practise the political direction of culture consciously, and to attack at every point the culture of any people whom they wish to dominate." The appendix includes his broadcasts to Europe, ending with a plea to preserve the legacy of Greece, Rome, and Israel, and Europe's legacy throughout the last 2,000 years. "Behind the urbanity, the modesty, the mere good manners of Mr. Eliot's exposition, one cannot mistake the force and significance of what he has to say, or ignore that it constitutes a fundamental attack on most of our assumptions on the subject." --THE LONDON SPECTATOR. show lessTags
Recommendations
Member Reviews
I enjoyed this book, but there’s something slightly irritating about an author passing off what is clearly a planned and polished work of prose as mere “notes.” There’s nothing note-like about this essay. The chapter on region and culture is also a bit much seeing as Eliot himself was a living repudiation of that chapter’s thesis.
All in all, however, a thought provoking essay, that remains astonishingly relevant today, possibly more so even than when he wrote it.
All in all, however, a thought provoking essay, that remains astonishingly relevant today, possibly more so even than when he wrote it.
Even allowing for the 1946 publication and the fact that much of the opinion in Eliot's book follows post-war thinking, this book is still takes evidence from broad claims about class and society and forms what reads as a poorly researched opinion piece about what defines culture. Some sections (observations on Russia that are interesting from a historical context pre-iron-curtain; the last chapter on education) have some interesting merit but really this is a poor read and other researchers from the era present better arguments, with better research. Disappointing as my first foray into TS Eliot's critical writing.
Ratings
Members
- Recently Added By
Author Information
508+ Works 47,867 Members
T. S. Eliot is considered by many to be a literary genius and one of the most influential men of letters during the half-century after World War I. He was born on September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri. Eliot attended Harvard University, with time abroad pursuing graduate studies at the Sorbonne, Marburg, and Oxford. The outbreak of World War show more I prevented his return to the United States, and, persuaded by Ezra Pound to remain in England, he decided to settle there permanently. He published his influential early criticism, much of it written as occasional pieces for literary periodicals. He developed such doctrines as the "dissociation of sensibility" and the "objective correlative" and elaborated his views on wit and on the relation of tradition to the individual talent. Eliot by this time had left his early, derivative verse far behind and had begun to publish avant-garde poetry (including "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), which exploited fresh rhythms, abrupt juxtapositions, contemporary subject matter, and witty allusion. This period of creativity also resulted in another collection of verse (including "Gerontian") and culminated in The Waste Land, a masterpiece published in 1922 and produced partly during a period of psychological breakdown while married to his wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot. In 1922, Eliot became a director of the Faber & Faber publishing house, and in 1927 he became a British citizen and joined the Church of England. Thereafter, his career underwent a change. With the publication of Ash Wednesday in 1930, his poetry became more overtly Christian. As editor of the influential literary magazine The Criterion, he turned his hand to social as well as literary criticism, with an increasingly conservative orientation. His religious poetry culminated in Four Quartets, published individually from 1936 onward and collectively in 1943. This work is often considered to be his greatest poetic achievement. Eliot also wrote poetry in a much lighter vein, such as Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939), a collection that was used during the early 1980s as the basis for the musical, Cats. In addition to his contributions in poetry and criticism, Eliot is the pivotal verse dramatist of this century. He followed the lead of William Butler Yeats in attempting to revive metrical language in the theater. But, unlike Yeats, Eliot wanted a dramatic verse that would be self-effacing, capable of expressing the most prosaic passages in a play, and an insistent, undetected presence capable of elevating itself at a moment's notice. His progression from the pageant The Rock (1934) and Murder in the Cathedral (1935), written for the Canterbury Festival, through The Family Reunion (1939) and The Cocktail Party (1949), a West End hit, was thus a matter of neutralizing obvious poetic effects and bringing prose passages into the flow of verse. Recent critics have seen Eliot as a divided figure, covertly attracted to the very elements (romanticism, personality, heresy) he overtly condemned. His early attacks on romantic poets, for example, often reveal him as a romantic against the grain. The same divisions carry over into his verse, where violence struggles against restraint, emotion against order, and imagination against ironic detachment. This Eliot is more human and more attractive to contemporary taste. During his lifetime, Eliot received many honors and awards, including the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Awards and Honors
Distinctions
Work Relationships
Is contained in
Has as a commentary on the text
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Notes Towards the Definition of Culture
- Original title
- Notes Towards the Definition of Culture
- Original publication date
- 1948
- Original language
- English
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 345
- Popularity
- 91,543
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (3.38)
- Languages
- English, German, Portuguese, Spanish
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 11
- ASINs
- 23
