T.S. Eliot: philosophy vs. poetry

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Cypress

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T. S. Eliot began his career by training as a professional philosopher rather than as poet or literary critic. He ambitiously pursued this academic study at such major philosophical centers as Harvard, the Sorbonne, Marburg, and Oxford. Most studies of Eliot recognize that his early absorption in philosophy was very important for his development as poet and critic.

Eliot’s unpublished notebooks form a strong critique of Philosophy.

Eliot has been termed a post-philosopher who believed that the chief problem of philosophy was its language.

He felt that philosophers had moved away from the study of "fictions at work” (language and social practice in fiction and prose) to the quest to find an ultimate reality, which Eliot regarded as a mistake. Eliot said that philosophy was a conversation, not a science.

Eliot finished his critique of philosophy in 1916, and then he left the discipline and took up poetry.



Source credits:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/book...-philosopher/C48C577E0B5A0C50BD10D34E6B7CC90E

Jeffrey Perl, PhD, University of Texas
 
Plato wanted to kick the poets out of the the Republic because he felt poetry was an unreliable source of truth that would lead us astray from reason.

The defenders of poetry, like T.S. Eliot felt poetry and art offered us a kind of deep moral truth that philosophy and science could not.
 
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