Desire and the Ascetic Ideal

"T.S. Eliot was crucially influenced by his early engagement with Indian texts, and when analyzed through this lens, his poems reveal a criticism of the attachments of human desire and the suggestion that asceticism might hold out the possibility that desire can be cultivated toward a metaphysical absolute. Centering his study of sources from ancient India, this new book offers a rereading of the poet's work, analyzing his unpublished graduate school notebooks on Indian philosophy and exploring Eliot's connection with Buddhist thought"--