SOURCE: McLuhan, Marshall. “Empedocles and T. S. Eliot.” In Empodocles, by Helle Lambridis, pp. vi-xv. University, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 1976.

In the following essay, originally written in 1975, McLuhan explores Empedocles's influence on poets T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats, particularly in the preference for auditory imagery and “double truths.”

The vision of Empedocles may have made its entrée into English literature via Lewis Carroll rather than Matthew Arnold, in the image of Humpty Dumpty (the Sphairos) rather than the haggard suicide of Mount Aetna (Empedocles on Aetna). Lewis Carroll, the non-Euclidean geometer, was a more suitable person than Her Majesty's Superintendant of Schools to bring Empedocles and the Sphairos to the British public. The playful mathematician was better qualified than the Victorian moralist to bring the space-time vision of Empedocles to English literature and to the rocking-horse world of the nursery. The nursery world...