The Forgetting of Idealism: T.S. Eliot, Robert Browning, and the Origins of Literary Criticism

Abstract:This essay aims to initiate a reconsideration of literary criticism's ambivalent relation to idealism by returning to the moment of the discipline's emergence: the postwar essays of T. S. Eliot. Eliot, famously, came to literary criticism from philosophy, having completed a doctorate on the British Idealist F. H. Bradley. However, the broader intellectual context of British Idealism (in which Bradley's voice was but one among many) has attracted little scholarly attention. I argue that Eliot's innovative literary criticism was profoundly shaped by the Kantian strain of British Idealism represented by T. H. Green, Edward Caird, and Henry Jones. In particular, idealism of this stripe relied on a conception of "personality" that both resembled and, in key respects, contested the notion of "impersonality" central to Eliot's critical program. Examining several of Eliot's most influential early essays, I show how the theory of impersonality, as a precondition of good literature and good criticism alike, develops via an anxious negotiation with idealism—an antagonist everywhere present but nowhere named. As I also show, the principal site of this anxiety became Eliot's relation to the poetry of Robert Browning: a favorite among late nineteenth-century idealists and, as such, an embodiment of aesthetic values Eliot's modernism sought to displace.