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Notes Towards the Definition of Culture
Notes Towards the Definition of Culture is T. S. Eliot’s canonical essay on the culture of his time and place, and the notion of ‘culture’ itself.
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‘The term culture … includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people; Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, 19th-century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar. The reader can make his own list …’
In this famous essay T. S. Eliot examines the principal uses of the word, and the conditions in which culture itself can flourish.
‘So rich in ideas that it is difficult to select two or three of them for comment … it is a natural history of culture.’ Sunday Times
Thomas Stearns Eliot, poet, critic, publisher, was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He settled in England in 1915, where for a few years he worked in the foreign section of Lloyds Bank. His first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917. In 1922, he became editor of the literary journal, The Criterion, publishing The Waste Land in its first…
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