T. S. ELIOT's Prufrock and Other Observations, his
first substantial collection of poetry, was published in 1917, the
same year as the poet Edward Thomas was killed at his gun
emplacement during the Battle of Arras. The contrast between Eliot,
the 23-year-old emerging urban Modernist, and the older writer, who
was bringing new realism to pastoral poetry, signalled a change of
direction in English literature.
For all the mechanised carnage of the global conflict, English
soldier-poets still rooted sacrifice in rural understanding. Rupert
Brooke forecast that if "I should die" it would be in a "corner of
a foreign field" that would be "for ever England". Wilfred Owen,
writing more deeply into the conflict, asked of the carnage in his
poem "Futility": "Was it for this the clay grew tall?"
Eliot's lines lack reference to overt war, but concede the
wounds of city life. His is not Wordsworth's celebration of
early-morning London, but a darker, more perplexed context.
Fifty years after Eliot's death, the place of a difficult and
often elusive writer, sometimes adopted warily within the Christian
tradition, is subject to inevitable reassessment. This will be
enhanced by Robert Crawford's new biography, Young Eliot,
and the publication of his graduate student papers on German
Issues raised could re-examine: the infusion of Christian belief
in Eliot's writing; his place as a modernist in post-modern, or
post-post-modern culture; whether his avowedly establishment voice
still resonates; and what a reader, half a century after his death,
makes of his literary and spiritual life.
THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT, poet, critic and dramatist, was born in
1888, and brought up in St Louis, Missouri. He was destined for
considerable geographical, literary, and spiritual journeys. When
he arrived in London in 1915, he came not as a poet, but as a
philosopher, having studied in France, Germany, and Oxford.
His parents hoped that he would return to Harvard as a
distinguished academic, but Merton College, Oxford, was succeeded
by Soho's more informal researches. Eliot's intellectual luggage
contained already considerable knowledge of French "modern" poetry,
particularly Jules Laforgue, seasoned with interest in English
metaphysical and Jacobean poets, including Donne and Webster.
Naming "Prufrock" after an American company showed a poet who
was still looking back across the Atlantic, yet ahead with the
encouragement of his fellow-American in London's bohemia, Ezra
His influence became international, from editing the influential
The Criterion to publishing emerging poets such as W. H.
Auden, Stephen Spender, and George Barker. He attracted Far Eastern
scholars, and large audiences. In 1956, he addressed 14,000 people
in a Minneapolis baseball stadium on "The Frontiers of
Eliot remains a paradoxical prophet: the esoteric "Pope of
Russell Square", who reviewed detective stories, and let off stink
bombs in a London hotel to amuse a nephew; the establishment banker
turned publisher, who reshaped English poetry; the radical author,
whose complete autobiography read: "Classicist in literature,
royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion". (Although he
added in 1961: "The mild-mannered man safely entrenched behind his
He could be obsessively private. It took him a year to announce
that he had been baptised as an Anglican. Two "godparents"
supported him in a locked Cotswold church on 29 June 1927. He was
confirmed the next day, in the Bishop of Oxford's private chapel.
His first wife, Vivien, was absent on each occasion.
Eliot's literary biographer, Craig Raine, a subsequent poetry
editor at Faber and Faber, argued that "the Buried Life, the idea
of a life not fully lived, is the central animating idea of Eliot's
SOME critics have suggested that Eliot's poetry, criticism, and
plays were his autobiography - that he intended the work to be his
life, in the manner of Yeats or Wordsworth. Certainly, it is
possible to read in Prufrock a proposal for spiritual
The poem begins with an assertive invitation: "Let us go then,
you and I," but immediately poses a question. Who is this "you and
I", Prufrock - whoever he may be - and the subject of his "love
song"? Or is Eliot, in disguise, inviting the ghost of the French
medical student Jean Verdenal, to whom the poem is dedicated, and
who died at the Dardenelles in 1915?
And once they are walking down "certain half-deserted streets",
under an evening sky "like a patient etherised upon a table" (an
image that so upset C. S. Lewis that he wrote a poem in response),
what is the "overwhelming question" to which the walk, and the
poem, is leading?
The question can only be discerned through personal
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.
The "overwhelming question" returns towards the end of the poem,
where it is re-set in the context of resurrection, and an equivocal
To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the
Come back to tell you all, I
shall tell you all" -
If one, settling a pillow by her
Should say: "That is not what I leant
That is not it, at all."
Religious references that season the poem, such as the mention
of John the Baptist's severed head, and the ironic "eternal
Footman" who "snickers" as he holds the author's coat, are set
within an atmosphere of insecurity. There are the mysterious rooms
where "the women" talk about Michelangelo.
Several references mention thinning hair; there are
insubstantial, frivolous menus; worries about fashion; and a
bit-part in Hamlet; and there is the "fear" of spiritual
involvement, the pilgrim's tentative exploration:
And I have seen the eternal footman
hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
FEAR, through failure and doubt, was no stranger to the Eliots.
The concrete Calvinist certainties of Andrew Eliot, who left East
Coker in Somerset for America
in the late 17th century, had apparently withered during his
reported time as a juror in the Salem witch trials.
Eliot's father, Henry Ware Eliot, became a prosperous brick
manufacturer in rapidly expanding St Louis. He lost his original
dream of being an artist, but continued to draw cats. Eliot's
mother, Charlotte, wrote poetry, on subjects including the agonies
of saints, but realised that even the early writing of her young
son was superior. Even when lionised, Eliot continued to worry
about whether his poetry was "any good", and to write about cats,
Eliot's Anglicanism became the destination in a search for
spiritual certainty. His grandfather, who spread a physical and
psychological shadow over his family, was a prominent Unitarian
minister and educationalist whose Smith Academy young Thomas
While still a schoolboy, Eliot brought out eight issues of his
own magazine, The Fireside, advertising "Fiction, Gossip,
Theatre, Jokes, and all interesting."
When Eliot published Poems 1909-1915 to mixed reviews,
the critic John Middleton Murray suggested that he should join the
Roman Catholic Church to resolve - as Eliot's biographer Peter
Ackroyd puts it - the contradictions of being "a nihilist who
espoused classical principles".
MAPPING Eliot's spiritual journey suggests that he grew
dissatisfied with the lack of structure and objectivity in
Unitarianism. His conversion was, in any case, a balance of the
doctrinal and the literary, or appreciating the doctrinal in the
literary, particularly through the poetry of Dante. Discernment
took a decade; Eliot used lines from Dante's Purgatorio as
a preface to Prufrock.
Ackroyd interprets Eliot's very English faith in a European
Christian context, following in the faithful literary footsteps of
Andrewes and Hooker, towards particular reverence for "prayer and
confession, balm and absolution for a soul deeply conscious of
He is ambivalent about the part played by faith in Eliot's
poetry, seeing no natural connection: "For in poetry, belief need
play no part; and within Eliot's own work, the structure of
orthodox faith and the language of devotion are broken apart in
order to make room for something much stranger and more tenuous,
like the sound of someone crying in an empty church."
Evidence against Ackroyd's bleak assessment appeared in August
1927 when Eliot published "Journey of the Magi". Starting with a
slightly revised version of the opening tothe sermon Lancelot
Andrewes preached before James I on Christmas Day 1622, this poem
can be read as a journey awarding spiritual realisation; and
perhaps as an antidote, or conclusion, to The Waste Land
While the urban setting of The Waste Land begins with
"The Burial of the Dead", "Magi" celebrates the discovery of birth.
And, while "Magi" ends with a personal prelude to the crucifixion -
"I should be glad of another death" - it is the realisation of
divine death as purpose, as continuing, and as completing the
journey of the Magi.
THIS was a time of more active involvement for Eliot in his
adopted society. In November 1927, he became a British citizen. "I
don't like being a squatter. I might as well take the full
responsibility," he said. The next year his attendance at the
eucharist became more regular, and he began to make his
While never an overt evangelist, Eliot's Christian beliefs
became arguments within his plays, notably the most popular, and
most accessible, Murder in the Cathedral. The emotional
pain within Becket's decision-making could have reflected Eliot's
own. His first, hasty marriage ended in emotional disaster after 18
years. Eliot himself had a nervous breakdown in 1921, while still
employed by Lloyds Bank.
His Christian writing and thinking were always within, never
separate from, his other work. In 1939 alone, for example, The
Family Reunion was first performed; he published The Idea
of a Christian Society from lectures given at Cambridge; and
he publishedOld Possum's Book of Practical Cats, gleefully
adopting the mischievous title that Pound had awarded him.
FOUR QUARTETS is the workby Eliot most often
quoted in churches. Written between 1935 and 1942, these poems
track Eliot's overriding Christian questions and answers.
Each is a poem of place, set primarily out of doors. "Burnt
Norton" maps a quest through a meditation on time that advances
from a "still point of the turning world" to energy and movementin
the children's concluding cries. The city - London - is reduced to
gazetteer, but when we meet Christ, he is dynamic, resisting
temptation in the wilderness, his "Waste Land".
"East Coker" (1940) echoes Ecclesiastes in its mingling of
autobiographical and cosmic analysis - a half-life reviewed "in the
middle way", with the pulse of God quickening.
"The Dry Salvages" (1941) reaches back further, to Eliot's
childhood holidays in New England, set against an Atlantic
panorama. Through his past, Eliot reviews ageing, his prayer-life,
and hopes for a future made more profound through thought and
emotion than in the "unattended moment".
And right action is freedom
From past and future also.
In accelerating creativity, "Little Gidding" (1942), taking
reference from a religious community, celebrates the resurrection
season, and purpose:
. . . You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.
Time and place are (re-) united:
Here, the intersection of the
Is England and nowhere. Never and
Eliot's recurring main themes, culminating in redeemed time that
is eternal, are here reconciled.
ELIOT remains contemporary. In the honest, if often complex,
narration of his Christian search within a perceptively darkening
society, he encourages contemporary spiritual honesty and its
profound expression. Ackroyd discerned "a Calvinist or per-
haps even a gnostic in Anglican clothing", but Eliot's faith was
illuminated from many directions - not least in his appreciation of
other world faiths, particularly Buddhism.
In this, he was prophetic, just as his mingling of classical and
demotic references arguably anticipated post-modernity. For an
uncertain contemporary Church, cautious of intellectual engagement,
Eliot's continuing influence is an encouragement to a faith of
In the end, Eliot followed Edward Thomas into the countryside.
He died on 4 January 1965, and his ashes were interred at East
Coker, from where his ancestor hadmoved to America. His faith and
family journey came full circle. Amid the tributes were eight lines
written by John Masefield, then Poet Laureate, and published in
The elegy "East Coker", for an American-born Nobel Laureate,
ended with mentions of what was English, in a garden - a restored
Eden, perhaps, all the way from expanding St Louis to rural
May many an English flower andlittle
(Primrose and robin redbreast
Gladden this garden where his rest is
And Christmas song respond, and
Martyn Halsall's new collection of poetry, Sanctuary, is published by Canterbury
Church Times January 8,
THE obituary tribute to T. S. Eliot from a
fellow-poet, Mr. Norman Nicholson, in our columns to-day is
eloquent of the debt owed by the practitioners of the art of poetry
to this original and most stimulating genius. It may be predicted
with confidence that in times to come the historians of English
literature will be compelled to recognise in Eliot the same kind of
transforming influence on the development of poetry which
Wordsworth, in his own very different way, exercised on his
contemporaries a century and more before.
But that is by no means the full extent of Eliot's true
greatness. He was a Christian interpreter and prophet as well as a
poet. He once quoted with approval Maritain's dictum that "it is a
deadly error to expect poetry to provide the super- substantial
food of man," and he himself knew well, and proved by his practice
of faithful Churchmanship that he knew, where that food is alone to
be found. But he used his art to give man the appetite for heavenly
things and to commend his faith without ever descending to the
slightest hint of lecture-room condescension. As was observed in
the Church Times fifteen years ago of The Cocktail
Party, Eliot could carry the reader from the inane depths of
social triviality to a vision of the heights of the mystery of the
Atonement and enlighten modern man's dark discontents with the
peace which passes understanding. It is an astonishing achievement
for one who was justly the hero of the intellectuals in an age when
the intellect has so conspicuously rebelled against the truth of
The Church of England, with all Christendom, mourns the passing
of a great and loyal son of the Church. May he rest in the peace of
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