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Eliot and Nietzsche: The Birth of Impersonal Theory

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Eliot’s and Nietzsche’s epistemological frames are compatible with each other. Although there is no evidence that Eliot’s literary taste was affected by Nietzsche’s thought, there seems to be a discernable continuity in impersonal theory between them. Philosophy, Nietzsche thought, was bound by epistemological dilemmas. So was it in Eliot’s view while he was a student of philosophy. Both of them meditated on a way out of the fix that philosophy had raised. As a solution, Nietzsche asserts in The Birth of Tragedy the primacy of art over philosophy. In his view the world of art was a Dionysian affirmation of the world as it was without subtraction, exception, or selection. The knowledge of self through art was not a sign that art was purely personal and subjective. Rather, art demanded a triumph over personal will and desire, simultaneously rejecting personal feelings and embodying objectivity. Eliot’s poetics is in substantial agreement with Nietzsche’s in this regard.