ABSTRACT
Eliot's historicism is complicated because his firm senses that the human imagination is a product of particular stages in the history of culture. The insinuation is frequently that beauty is something that resides at the level of artfully disposed words. Eliot's urbane disparagement of 'beauty' as a respectable or even interesting literary concept is polemical, a kicking over of the old Romantic traces; and of course he was not alone in such gestures. The case of the Thomistic civilization that informs the poetry of Dante, which Eliot greatly preferred to the individualistic mayhem of the Renaissance: 'at Dante's time thought was orderly and strong and beautiful'. A lot of disdain is packed into 'merely' there, as though beauty were not only no longer the end of art, as an earlier generation of aestheticians might naively have assumed, but is actually the telltale sign of a second rate creativity, one perilously close to the killing sub-praise of 'charming'.
