“You must not deny the body”: T. S. Eliot’s Poetics of Embodiment, Flesh, and Corporeal Relations

This thesis examines the significance of the body across T. S. Eliot’s major and minor works, including his published and unedited poetry, drama, and criticism. In light of the significant expansion of the materials available to scholars and of a renewed interest in Eliot generated by innovative methodological approaches, this study offers the first full-length exploration of Eliot’s corporeal poetics. Contrary to previous frameworks that have emphasised the poet’s impersonality and objectivity, this thesis foregrounds Eliot’s interest in embodiment, flesh, and corporeal relations. By analysing works that have received extensive critical attention alongside less-known and overlooked texts, it charts Eliot’s interest in the bodily sphere across different phases of his prolific career, from his juvenilia to his later writings. Considering the body as both a catalyst for experience and a fundamental medium between the self and the world, each chapter reveals a paradigmatic dimension of embodied life and, simultaneously, of Eliot’s poetics. The five chapters are thus devoted to perception, gender and sexuality, illness, the non-human, and mystical transcendence – all central concerns in Eliot’s works and key domains that reaffirm his creative debt to the body. In addition to mapping representations of embodiment in Eliot’s corpus, this thesis reflects on the biographical, historical, and literary contexts that shaped his understanding of the body and informed his sustained effort to weave physicality into his texts.