ABSTRACT
In a retrospective view of his intellectual life as artist, Eliot himself proposed how much he, with greater stress than Pound, was dominated by what he called "a problem of order". Certainly for Eliot poetry was the expressive medium for the sensibility of a culture, even if not, as it was for Stevens, the rich ultimate source of the "sanctions" that maintain people's lives. Under this pressure Eliot led in the large modernist theme that explored the abyss of subjectivity. To escape solipsist experience it would be necessary to escape personal emotion. The ill health of language was found in its barrier to natural and cultural reality. There was that remarkable breadth and simplicity in Eliot's view of culture, even while most of the complex concerns of his religious, moral, and political life were focused on definition. Specifically, culture was the focus of resistance to modern naturalist myths of power, in all their aspects, nihilist, anarchic, amoral, and sordidly utilitarian.
