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Eliot 's Argument For Moral Judgement

Decent Essays

In order to fully understand Eliot’s statement, it would be helpful to locate the statement in Eliot’s essay and then speculate its meaning within its context. Right before the quoted passage, Eliot writes, “if were agreed as to what we meant by wisdom, by the good life for the individual and for society, we should apply moral judgements to poetry as confidently as did Johnson” (Eliot 212). It seems Eliot implies that Johnson is confident about his moral judgement because there is a consensus in society on what is right and what is wrong. Consequently, when Johnson reads a text, it is relatively easy for him to judge the morality of this work, whereas Eliot’s time is “an age in which no two writers need agree about anything” (Eliot 212). For this reason, Eliot laments that readers in his age must endeavor to “discount [the] attraction or repulsion” of “the ideas, as well as the personality of the author” (Eliot 212). Yet in Johnson’s age, the relatively homogenous value system, Eliot believes, frees Johnson from the struggle to dissociate the work from the author’s idea. Johnson can simply disregard the author and weighs the text against the commonly accepted value, as Eliot says, “what interests Johnson is the edifying power of the poem, rather than the deliberate intention of the poet” (Eliot, 212). In other words, Eliot portrays Johnson as an disinterested critic who is only interested in how a text reflects the commonly accepted morality. In this sense, Johnson is able

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