Can we conclude that T.S.Eliots ideas about culture are...

Eliot writes of culture as the way of life of a particular people living together in one place. That culture is made visible in their arts, in their social system, in their habits and customs, in their religion.(Milner, A (1994) Contemporary Cultural Theory: An Introduction. London: UCC Press.) A culture, then according to Eliot is one which is shared in common by a whole people, although he believed it was not shared equally between the people. Eliot divided the people into two groups, the elite and the masses and considered the elite to exhibit more marked differenciations of function amongst their members than the lower types. (Eliot, T. S. (1948) The Class and The Elite: Notes towards the Definition Of Culture. London: Faber †¦show more content†¦The poetry of the Realists chose words and images and arranged them ...to set up a complex criss-crossing of associations... and set up their poems as an ...endless maze. This seems quite an accurate description of the work of T.S. Eliot himself, in whose poetry frequent criss-crossing of references emerges. It appears that this movement and its followers, who have influenced Eliot so strongly (Especially Baudelaire and Laforgue.) may be partly responsible for the frequent obscurity which appears in Eliots work. This evidence throws doubt on the claim that Eliots work and views of culture are merely elitist, it seems that the poet and his work have more depth than simply a desire for elitism in his poetry. However, Eliots views on culture have been shadowed by the frequent obscurity of the language and allusions used in his work. Eliot considered culture to have three meanings. The term culture has different associations according to whether we have in mind the developments of an individual of a group or class or of a whole society. (Eliot, T.S. (1948) Notes towards the Definition of Culture. London: Faber Faber Ltd.) Eliot believed that the differences between the three senses of culture could be best understood ...by asking how far, in relation to the individual, the group and society as a whole the conscious aim to achieve culture has any meaning. In The Three senses of Culture, Eliot criticises Arnold (Culture and