Notes: Culture for T.S Eliot 2 (4/4/12)

In Notes Towards the Definition of Culture T.S. Eliot expresses his concept of culture. He desires to find in culture and in literary works an ideal order, culture and tradition. Culture is an expression of community and it was also an ideal order in Medieval Age. For Mr Eliot Dante Alighieri reached excellence because his society and every person had in common the religious sense of life (sense and cohesion).
Mr Eliot has an aesthetic concept of culture. He lives the problem of disintegration of values and of Europe. Also kinship structures are losing their importance: before this period they were strong, but now it could not be possible. Everything is lost so there is chaos and anarchy.
Topic sentence: "An individual is shaped by the culture into which he or she is born": a person is shaped by the culture where he lives. When culture loosens, the person has not anymore points of reference. Disintegration creates fear, anxiousness and nostalgia, that comes from the desire to come back to a place and time when the person felt good.
Mr Eliot wants to find the artistic form that makes to live again these emotions. He uses poetry and dramatic monologue: there is fragmentation and scenes are kept together by the same atmosphere. Modernists wants to understand how human being puts himself in relation to sense of life and to God.
Mr Eliot wants impersonality in art, because it must to speak to everyone, unlike Romantic poetry: it was the expression of the single individual, but poetry must care about all men.
Mr Eliot is not interested into express uniqueness. Man can not live anymore his uniqueness, while in Romanticism he did it (the key words of Romanticism are imagination and solitude, while Mr Eliot's key word is community, because man can not be always alone). So man have to try to be rooted and live the sense of belonging, but there must be something to clutch to.
The word "communication" comes from the word "communion" (sacrifice). If Christ were not rose again, Christian religion would not have sense.
The real revolution for Mr Eliot is a cultural one. Culture is made of everything. There is a parallelism between past and present, timeless and temporal. Continuity is given by connections, and it creates also relationships. "I feel in the middle of nowhere": without connections, a person feels lost.
In the 19th century M. Arnold thought that culture was the frame of man's life. For Mr Eliot culture is an expression of man. For him religion is what keeps everything together: his forefathers left England for America because of religious persecutions. Mr Eliot decided to be buried near his forefathers graves. In this way he kept the contact with his origins and with his family traditions.