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T.S. Eliot's Philosophy and His Early Poetry

This paper examines the relationship between T. S. Eliot’s philosophy and his early poetry, focusing on the notions of “points of view” and “half-objects” that Eliot uses in his dissertation, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley. In his thesis Eliot employs the terms “points of view” and “half-objects” to show how individuals apprehend and interact with one another in social life. “Points of view” and “half-objects” are useful terms to describe how Eliot’s personae, especially in his early poetry change their attitudes toward others in social life. In the socializing process most of the personae are caught in “the internal-external point of view” of the half-object, hesitating painfully between the two points of view: the internal point of view, through which they identify with others as perceiving subjects like them, and the external point of view, through which they observe the external behavior of others by apprehending them as mere objects(Schwartz 184). This doubleness of aspect is the justification for the use of the term “half-object.” Fortunately there is “a felt continuity between the object and oneself”(KE 81). However, Eliot’s personae consider the identification with others, which may offer a sympathetic communion between themselves, as threatening their own identity. Accordingly, the personae in Eliot’s early poetry, especially in “Portrait of a Lady,” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” are suspended between the two points of view, without “unifying jarring and incompatible” ones.