Creative Impulse in the Modern Age: The Embodiment of Anxiety in the Early Poetry of T. S. Eliot (1910-1917)

Abstract

Through focused analysis of T. S. Eliot’s early poetry (1910-1917), this work investigates whether, and if so, how anxiety may be worthwhile or particularly constructive for poetic production in the modern world. In order to explore the connection between anxiety and artistic production, I analyze the presence of skepticism, inaction, solipsism, and despair in Eliot’s self-lacerating and morbidly self-conscious personae. I also discuss the rhetorical means by which he conveys disembodied agency, stunted volition, and seemingly unattainable self-possession. Eliot's evocation of repetitive thought processes—mirroring self-paralysis as actions are dissociated from agents—coincides with his search for an overarching morality to transcend the banal propriety of his sociocultural milieu. Manifesting his preoccupation with social and spiritual decadence, the embodied anxiety in Eliot’s verse reveals his profound desire to confront it, both in himself and in his deeply troubled, war-embittered age.