T.S. Eliot, the shaman who dressed like a banker

The majority of critical interpretations of Eliot’s poetry traditionally stress the poet’s development from a negative view of the world (sociological, psychological, cultural, philosophical, ethical: evidence his early poetry and his first masterpiece “The Waste Land”) to a not less traditional religious haven attained through his “conversion” to Anglo-Catholicism, as metaphorically recorded in the “Ariel Poems” and in “Ash-Wednesday”, and to mysticism as exemplified in “Four Quartets”. Nonetheless, from his very debut poetry (1910) to his final mystical-Dantesque images/visions in “Four Quartets” (1942), an undercurrent of ancestral rituals and experiences, mainly shamanic, initiatory, and ecstatic, characterizes his whole canon. This brief essay focuses on such evidence, and proves it also through Eliot’s anthropological writing, newly published by Johns Hopkins U.P.