Eliot’s Prismatic Plays: A Multifaceted Quest

The book studies the theme of quest in T.S. Eliot’s drama, showing how religious and symbolic implications, both oriental and occidental, have a direct bearing on his personal life. Eliot used various symbols in his quest because he believed in the idea of the "objective correlative," about which he speaks in his essay Hamlet and His Problems. In order to express his theme, Eliot used Christian symbols like the quest of the Holy Grail and the idea of the incarnation on the one hand, and non-Christian elements like the teachings and life of the Buddha, along with references to the Gita and the Upanishad on the other. In his quest for form and articulation Eliot was influenced by French Symbolist poetry, the metaphysical poets, the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the poems of John Davidson, Conrad’s fiction, music-hall performances and jazz music–to name only a few. Eliot wanted to project dramatization as the ideal form of poetic articulation on various levels of significance–drama as a diversified multifarious intensified medium of audio-visual-intellectual expression. His search seems to have led him to a kind of consummation as an experimenter, in his plays, in communication through diverse verse forms, themes, characters and situations, exposing a multiplicity of experiences both physical and spiritual. In all his plays there is a distinct development towards more precise articulation of the innermost feelings and emotions of modern urban man. But, more important, the book traces Eliot’s personal quest for understanding the meaning of existence–his own life and its meaning–of which his poetry and plays are a sort of autobiography.