The Meeting Point of Belief and Skepticism in Eliot's Poetry and Criticism

Abstract

A recurring conflict between faith and skepticism characterizes T. S. Eliot's literary career and is central to both his poetry and critical prose. After converting to Anglicanism, Eliot is frequently regarded as a poet of religious affirmation, but his writings nonetheless reflect moral disquiet, societal disintegration, and profound epistemological ambiguity. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, and Ash-Wednesday are a few of Eliot's poems that are examined in this essay, along with critical works like
Tradition and the Individual Talent, The Idea of a Christian Society, and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. The study contends that Eliot's religious and cultural claims are never completely stable and are instead plagued by uncertainty, discontinuity, and textual ambiguity, drawing on post-structuralist concepts from Derrida, Barthes, and Foucault. While his critique tries—often nervously—to impose order, tradition, and authority upon a fractured modern reality, his poetry dramatizes the modern subject's oscillation between the longing for transcendental meaning and the realization of its ongoing deferral. The study argues that Eliot's relevance is found in maintaining the tense cohabitation of believing and skepticism rather than in resolving the tension between them. This places Eliot's work at the intersection of postmodern skepticism toward absolute truths and modernist longing for religion. This study demonstrates how belief in Eliot functions less as doctrinal certainty and more as a brittle, contested practice molded by historical, cultural, and discursive influences by reading Eliot's poetry and criticism together.