Oswald Spengler and T. S. Eliot

Oswald Spengler and T. S. Eliot

Just a few months before the end of the Great War in 1918, Oswald Spengler, the German philosopher of history, published the first volume of The Decline of the West, which foretold the demise of Western culture. Subsequently he published the second volume of the same title in 1922. Rightly understood or not, these controversial books aroused enormous popularity among historians, philosophers, and intellectuals in Germany as well as other European countries. This paper examines some of the seminal ideas of Spengler’s Decline of the West which T. S. Eliot regarded as one of the powerful European ideas emerged after the War. Tracing the debate in Germany and other Western countries, particularly this paper attempts to disclose how Eliot responded to Spengler’s philosophy of history which he read and how The Criterion, the international journal of ideas and literature, treated Spengler’s thesis. Although Eliot did not appreciate favourably the work of the German historian through The Criterion, he did not entirely nullify Spengler’s ideas in his poem, The Waste Land, as some critics claimed, and in his prose work, Notes towards the Definition of Culture. Particularly in his later life, he appears to have adopted some of Spengler’s ideas in his own conception of cultural theory.