“The ivory men make company between us”:
 Rethinking subject and object roles in the poetry of T.S. Eliot

Celebration of Undergraduate Excellence (2013)While metaphysical turmoil is the essential human problem in T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Preludes,” traditional criticism of the poems relegates the physical world to a merely rhetorical role. This thesis argues that Eliot’s use of objects in his poetry suggests they are active in the construction of experience and subjectivity. By using previous critical analysis, object-oriented philosophy and theory, and Eliot’s prose and poetry, I explore how Eliot’s poems present a distinct model of subject-object relations that is relevant both to modern critical questions and to the study of 20th-century literature