Person

A definitive figure within Anglo-American modernism, T.S. Eliot's poetry expresses many of the central tensions and violent dislocations characteristic of life in the post-WWI era. My research approaches the subject of "the divided self" in Eliot's works from a variety of angles. Beginning with the division between "the man who suffers" and "the mind which creates", I go on to discuss the conflict between the self-professed "classicist" and the "romantic"; the divided mind (both subject and object of its own observation); and the antithetical forces of disgust and desire in Eliot's early works. The thesis culminates with a discussion of spiritual exhaustion and fragmentation, versus the longing for wholeness, which precipitated Eliot's conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in 1927. Incorporating perspectives ranging from the philosophical to the neuroscientific, I aim to instantiate Eliot's powerful poetic works within an ongoing dialogue on the contradictory experience of being human.

Research

My profile in Lund University research portal