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Exteriority and Interiority in T.S. Eliot’s Graduate Work

Abstract:Critics often present Eliot as a poet who emphasizes subjective states or moods as concrete elements of a readily delineable interiority. Such a view suggests that Eliot perceives inwardness as a stable, substantive essence constitutive of individuals’ sense of self. But to essentialize the self in this way necessarily constructs an oppositional relation between the self (the inner) and the “reality” external to that self (the outer). However, as his graduate work in philosophy and social theory makes clear, Eliot in fact perceives interiority and exteriority in mutually constitutive dialectical tension with one another. Neither term exists in isolation; each roots itself constitutively in relation to the other. Eliot’s poetry from this early period reflects these views as well. In “Portrait of a Lady,” one of his first mature poems, Eliot portrays subjectivity dialectically, as a product of subject/object interrelations.