Notes Towards A Definition Of Culture

'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 Author Biography: Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He settled in England in 1915 and published his first book of poems in 1917. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Eliot died in 1965.