{"id":53,"date":"2019-06-07T18:14:13","date_gmt":"2019-06-08T01:14:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.chapman.edu\/bglaser\/?page_id=53"},"modified":"2026-06-01T13:52:32","modified_gmt":"2026-06-01T20:52:32","slug":"t-s-eliot","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.chapman.edu\/bglaser\/essays\/t-s-eliot\/","title":{"rendered":"T. S. Eliot"},"content":{"rendered":"

This, “Also F.H. Bradley<\/a>,” was my first scholarly publication, and in it I see myself reflected in my essence and my youth.<\/p>\n

I loved even as an adolescent Eliot’s earworms — who can help it? — but by the time I was writing poetry seriously, in my late twenties, I knew that Eliot’s refusal of philosophy and of Whitman were not for me. They would be friends rather than enemies. This is still true. Modernist autonomy is, for me, a canard.<\/p>\n

Where I see my youthful waywardness in this essay is in its idea of the self — that it is alienated because it is a social construct. That assumption, rooted in the endemic Marxism of Berkeley, led me, inevitably, given my spiritual cast of mind, to Hegel and his Christian narrative in Ph\u00e4nomenologie des Geistes.\u00a0<\/em>To my credit, I knew it was a trap, and I never gave up on thinking my way out of that trap. It just took me decades to find the teachers I needed.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This, “Also F.H. Bradley,” was my first scholarly publication, and in it I see myself reflected in my essence and my youth. I loved even as an adolescent Eliot’s earworms — who can help it? — but by the time I was writing poetry seriously, in my late twenties, I knew that Eliot’s refusal of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"parent":30,"menu_order":4,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-53","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.chapman.edu\/bglaser\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/53","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.chapman.edu\/bglaser\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.chapman.edu\/bglaser\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.chapman.edu\/bglaser\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.chapman.edu\/bglaser\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.chapman.edu\/bglaser\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/53\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.chapman.edu\/bglaser\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/30"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.chapman.edu\/bglaser\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}