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In a nostalgic moment in 1952, T. S. Eliot expressed a longing for the return of "the great philosophers . . . [ones] whose writings, lectures, and personality will arouse the imagination as Bergson, for instance, aroused it forty years ago" (1952b: 11). As a student in Paris in 1910-1911, Eliot read Bergson's books, attended his lectures, and experienced what he would later call a "temporary conversion to Bergsonism" (1948: 5). As suggested by the term "conversion," his initial attraction was at once personal and doctrinal. The personal element, repeatedly dramatized in the early poems, including "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," was a bifurcation of the self, a gap between intellect and feeling and between mind and body. The doctrinal was Bergson's claim to have resolved these antinomies. The collapse of Eliot's enthusiasm is evident in "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" and other poems written during and shortly after his encounter with Bergson. The sudden despair, registered in "Rhapsody" as "the last twist of the knife," is an expression of the pain inherent in the realization that the chasm could not be bridged. Eliot's disillusionment led him to return to Harvard and begin a serious study of philosophy, in the course of which disappointment was replaced by analysis and dissent. In philosophical papers written in 1913-1914, he rejected Bergson's main ideas.
Eliot's dialectical swing from enchantment to disillusionment was followed by decades of mixed comments on Bergson, some favorable, some derogatory. He admired his prose, and in a 1916 review of G. V. Cunningham's study of Bergson, chided the author for neglecting "the many pregnant aperçus which make the reading of Bergson a delight. " At the same time, he agreed with Cunningham's view that Bergson's account of intelligence and intuition is inherently contradictory (2014: 425, 427). Similarly, in a debate on Romanticism and Classicism in the Criterion, Eliot conceded that although intuition "must have its place," it "must always be tested" by experience (1927: 342). In later life, he made a number of inconsistent statements about Bergson's influence. On one hand, he claimed that while writing his first important poems, including "Prufrock," he had been "entirely a Bergsonian" (1945); on the other, he insisted that "Bergson had no influence on either my...