THE RECUPERATION OF CHRISTIANITY IN THE POETRY OF CESAR VALLEJO AND T. S. ELIOT (PERU, BRITAIN)

This thesis is a study of the recuperative reaction to indeterminacy in the poetry and literary theories of Cesar Vallejo and T. S. Eliot. The intellectual challenges of the Modernist period to Christian theology created in the minds of Vallejo and Eliot an initial sense of indeterminacy, which, in turn, created doubt about the poet's ability to make valid claims about humanity and concrete existence that were anchored in the word of God. Both poets, in response to indeterminacy, sought to recuperate the Christian logos, but in different ways. So radically different on the surface, Vallejo's and Eliot's poetry share a Christian basis for recuperation.;Eliot, finding the present age chaotic and ignoble, attempts to address the problem of indeterminacy by embedding his poetry in the historical Christian scripture. The recuperative reaction of Vallejo brings that poet full circle, back to the Christian perspective that served as his poetic point of departure. Eliot, in contrast, consciously conceives of the present world only in terms of the religious, cultural, and literary unity he believed had been lost from the past. By their respective attempts at recuperation, though, both men stop at the frontier of modern indeterminacy.;Last, the thesis discusses the problematic aspects of each man's literary theory, and suggests that these difficulties derive in part from the manner in which each poet sought to reconstitute in his poetics the wholistic framework of the Christian logos.;Vallejo, having dismissed belief in the Christian God, nonetheless retains in Los heraldos negros the Christian definition of humanity and concrete existence, and the belief in the metaphorical dualism of reality. Whereas Los heraldos negros reflects the motif of abandonment and the indeterminacy of reality beyond these inherited Christian beliefs, Espana, aparta de m(')i este cal(')iz represents Vallejo's attempt to reconstruct metaphorically the Christian logos (the motif of protection) by grafting it onto Marxist theory.