Eliot’s Centaurs

Abstract The statement that Eliot insisted should accompany the release of the Emily Hale letters in 2021 records two crises of the heart, one romantic and the other vocational. This chapter interfolds them, seeing the PhD Eliot wrote in London in 1915 as a thinking through and enactment of long-term passions whose place in his future life had become tenuous. Among the vehicles of this thinking is a cast of fantasy creatures, including the centaur of my title. The centaur, in addition to being fantastical, is doubly hypothetical, belonging as he does to a novel never written and to a PhD no longer intended as the first step in Eliot’s academic career. The dissertation is written in two intellectually and tonally incompatible voices: the British Idealist and famously abstract FH Bradley and Bertrand Russell, an emerging star of the philosophy scene at the time who was known for his lucidity, wit, and pragmatism. Russell was also then laying the foundations of analytic philosophy, which in its mature form would discredit British idealism and specifically Bradley’s contribution and even his prose style. The thesis is also threaded through with references to Emily Hale. The Harvard committee who passed the PhD were not reading it as literature, and even if they had been could not have picked up on jokes that relied for their power on information only known to a select few. One of these jokes has to do with an unreal yet robustly ‘possible’ centaur.