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영어

"Ash-Wednesday" often reads as a text portraying the conflict of the speaker`s spiritual salvation and human desire. Eliot`s use of Christian imagery and allusions, in relation to his own conversion to Anglican Church in 1927, contributes to the poetic effects of the text as a confessional religious work. In fact, the unity of consciousness resulting from the choice of the single voice of one speaker, compared with the multiple perspectives in The Waste Land, and the lyric style similar to those of "The Love Song J. Alfred Prufrock" and "Gerontion", seem to make "Ash-Wednesday" as a confessional text. But both Eliot`s use of images of multiple connotations, in particular that of the Lady suggesting three feminine types at the same time, and his paradoxical statements reveal that "Ash-Wednesday" does not represent a simple two-dimensional poetic world. Rather, the text conveys indefinitely suggestive meanings in it precise images to the readers. It is noticeable that the images` indefinite associations in consequence of the poet`s unique treatment of his imagery in indefinite suggestive ways prove that Eliot`s own cognitive method was rooted in F.H. Bradley`s epistemology. Above all Bradley`s "immediate experience"(/"feeling") plays a key role in our understanding of Eliot`s poetic ideal, "unification of sensibility" which means the combination of thought and sense, and Bradley "immediate experience" which indicates the primary experience in which the distinction of subject and object does not exist, reflect their common monistic epistemology. In conclusion, the ambiguity of Eliot`s poetic world derives from his monistic epistemology, which shows the influence of Bradley on Eliot`s poetics.