A young TS Eliot is at Harvard where the field of psychology is just now emerging. You can read Freud, of course, but there’s nothing like behavioral or analytic psychology that have yet to be developed. But there are dreams – and what, exactly, are those? Freud himself starts his book by citing what the Greeks thought that they were, which in many cases were visions of alternate realties, a channeling of the gods, a means of clairvoyance where the future, or at least possible futures, were revealed.
What was science supposed to do with all of that?
Well one answer, and one that TS Eliot studied, was that there was a place between heaven and earth, between the purely spiritual and the definitely physical. Eliot begins to wonder, as did Hamlet and then Victor Frankenstein, whether there was more in heaven and earth than was dreamt of in philosophy – or science.
And so the youthful Eliot, seeking a truth that the world itself was only beginning to come to grips with, would not only experiment with the occult but put it rather directly in the forefront of his literary work, including and especially his defining poem, The Wasteland.
After his fame arrived, he would take up a side project, writing a light book of children’s rhymes. About cats. One of those poems he never finished. That poem talked about the dreamspace, maybe that third space between heaven and earth. But that poem went nowhere. It was probably too serious for a children’s book. He just stuck the poem in the back of his stack of paper – the heavyside layer would not come out in his book about cats, but it would get resurrected after his death to form the central frame for the musical.
How deeply was TS Eliot involved with the occult? Why did he put that theme in such a central place in his best poem? How come he kept describing writing poetry like an instance of demon possession? Grab your rosary beads, let’s all stay safe in this episode of THM.
Poll about belief in God and the devil
https://assets.realclear.com/files/2024/01/2334_RCORToplineJan92024.pdf
Cursed books
https://bookbindersmuseum.org/you-have-been-warned-book-curses-and-cursed-books/
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