ABSTRACT
Eliot’s attitude toward the nation-state is informed by an even greater degree of suspicion than Yeats's, though Eliot, too, is sometimes willing to make strategic use of the sentiments associated with the nation-state and its "invented traditions." This approach receives a particularly clear articulation in Eliot's "Little Gidding," a poem. In his frequently contested but highly influential statements regarding the so-called "dissociation of sensibility," Eliot provides a particularly explicit articulation of the degree to which the aftermath of the English Civil War could retroactively be made to serve as a line of demarcation between the early modernity of the Renaissance and the full-blown modernity of the Enlightenment. The phrase "constitution of silence" is particularly revealing, for it implicitly leads authors back to the problem of how, within a political order, sovereignty is to be given voice. The contradictions at work are of a sort that Michael North has discussed with particular cogency: they pit cultural nationalism against liberal individualism.
