Abstract

Owing to the dichotomous Western attitudes toward death, no significant study has been done on T. S. Eliot's poetic treatment of death in relation to his evolving vision of reality. Drawing from a Buddhist meditation on death as an occasion for freeing the self from the bondage of suffering and for opening to a cosmic reality, this dissertation explores how death/dying serves as an axle around which Eliot constructs his poetic vision, theme and structure. ;Chapter I examines how an early experience--the death of Jean Verdenal--inspired Eliot to use death as the occasion for spiritual awareness. Chapter II reads "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" as the awakening of the "etherized patient" through death. The poet rejects a superficial reality manifested in the lifestyle of the drawing-room women and drowns Prufrock and his companion in the sea. Through drowning at a moment's surrender, Prufrock and his companion possess both the potential to be purified and liberated. Chapter III reads The Waste Land as a visionary seeing of the nothingness of reality at a collective moment of dying. By combining three figures--the Fisher King musing the dead in his lands, Tiresias seeing suffering inherent in life, and Phlebas being involved in reflective drowning--the poet whirls the human beings with their degenerated desires individually and collectively into the Abyss of Nothing. In this enormous maelstrom of the Abyss lies the potential for ultimate liberation. The purgatorial whirlpool devolves into the still point of the turning world in Four Quartets, which is the focus of the last chapter. The lotus rising out of roses amidst the laughing voices of children is a living vision behind the acceptance of death and darkness, and the chapel of Little Gidding offers a starting point for a long journey in the here-and-now of Eliot's time. Therefore, Eliot journeys from a mindfulness of death, to an identification with death, and ultimately to a moment of enlightenment that transcends death. My reading not only explicates Eliot's poems in light of Buddhism, but also invites the reader to undertake the quest for the vision of reality shared by Eliot and Buddhism