ts eliot essays ancient and modern

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Essays ancient & modern

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Essays, ancient & modern

By t. s. eliot.

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Lancelot Andrewes -- John Bramhall -- Francis Herbert Bradley -- Baudelaire in our time -- The humanism of Irving Babbitt -- Religion and literature -- Catholicism and international order -- The Pensées of Pascal -- Modern education and the classics -- In memoriam

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Gallup, D.C. Eliot (rev. ed.), A31a Published in part, in 1928, under title: For Lancelot Andrewes. "First published in March 1936"--Verso of t.p.

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Essays Ancient And Modern Hardcover – January 1, 1936

• Language English
• Publisher Harcourt Brace and Company, NY
• Publication date January 1, 1936
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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0008564ES
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harcourt Brace and Company, NY (January 1, 1936)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1 pounds
• Best Sellers Rank: #5,548,693 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books )

About the author

T. s. eliot.

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri, and became a British subject in 1927. The acclaimed poet of The Waste Land, Four Quartets, and Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, among numerous other poems, prose, and works of drama, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. T.S. Eliot died in 1965 in London, England, and is buried in Westminster Abbey.

Photo by Lady Ottoline Morrell (1873–1938) derivative work: Octave.H [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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By T. S. Eliot

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T. S. Eliot

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

11 February 2014

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T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. He was educated first at Harvard University and then at Oxford University, with a break at the Sorbonne in Paris between his undergraduate and graduate degrees in Boston. He moved to England and began a strained marriage with Vivian Haigh-Wood in 1915. He supported himself by working at Lloyd's Bank in London from 1917-1925, then joined a publishing firm. In 1927, he became a British citizen and joined the Anglican Church. He was drawn to European fascism in the 1930s, but unlike Pound remained uninvolved in politics. His literary criticism, both on individual poets and on general principles of analysis, heavily influenced the American "New Critical" movement from the 1930s through the 1960s. His more general social criticism was more idiosyncratic; its Christian cultural commitments earned him an audience but its occasional anti-Semitism and severe conservatism isolated him from many readers. Eliot has a career that runs from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” through The Waste Land to Four Quartets . He had notable success with his verse plays, among them Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1949).

When The Waste Land first appeared in journals on both sides of the ocean in 1922, it evoked for many readers the ruined landscape left to them after the historically unique devastation of trench warfare and mass slaughter of the first world war. Its fragments mirrored a shattered world, and its allusions, however erudite, recalled a civilized culture many felt they had lost. Even its tendency to taunt readers with failed possibilities of spiritual rebirth, along with its glimpses of a religious route to joining the pieces of a dismembered god and a broken socius, struck a chord. Eliot was one of many major modernist writers to yearn for a mythic synthesis remaining out of reach. In a surprisingly short period of time, The Waste Land became the preeminent poem of modernism, the unquestioned symbol of what was actually a much more diverse movement. Eventually, as its shadow came to hide other kinds of modernism—from more decisively vernacular language to poems strongly identified with race or revolution— The Waste Land gathered a set of compensatory ambitions and resentments.

Bibliography

• T. S. Eliot Bibliography

Biographical Criticism

• Ronald Bush: On "T. S. Eliot's Life and Career"
• T. S. Eliot: Biographical Timeline

General Criticism

• Stephen Spender: On "General Statements on Eliot"
• J. Hillis Miller: On "General Statements on Eliot"

Other Writing by the Poet

• T. S. Eliot: On "Tradition and the Individual Talent"

Poet Details

Poet timeline, t. s. eliot is born. 26 september, 1888.

Thomas Sterns Eliot is born September 26, 1888. He is born in St. Louis, Missouri, to Henry Ware Eliot and Charlotte Champe Stearns. 

Eliot is a student at Smith Academy in St. Louis 1 January, 1898

Eliot attends milton academy in massachusetts 1 january, 1905, eliot's undergraduate years at harvard. reads symons’s the symbolist movement in literature and the poetry of laforgue. studies with george santayana and irving babbitt 1 january, 1906, eliot spends a year at the sorbonne in paris. in the summer of 1911, finishes a version of "the love song of j. alfred prufrock" 1 january, 1910, eliot returns to harvard to study philosophy as a graduate student. begins doctoral thesis on f.h. bradley. 1 january, 1911, t. s. eliot visits paris to attend paris university. 1 september, 1911.

·         In May 1910, Eliot had a suspected case of scarlet fever which almost prevented his graduation from Harvard University. In fall Eliot undertook a postgraduate year in Paris at the University of Paris. 

Eliot Goes To England on fellowship; meets Ezra Pound. 1 January, 1914

Eliot studies abroad in germany. 1 june, 1914.

·         Eliot spends the beginning of 1914’s summer studying at a seminar in Marburg, Germany. Eliot departs from Germany early due to the impending World War and goes to London around August, where he meets Ezra Pound. 

T. S. Eliot meets Ezra Pound. 1 August, 1914

Eliot travels with Conrad Aiken to London from Germany because of increasing war tensions. Here he meets Ezra Pound. Aiken shows Pound Eliot's poetry, which greatly impresses Pound. 

Eliot marries Vivien Haigh-Wood on June 26th; begins publishing poems that later appear in the Prufrock volume. 1 January, 1915

Eliot works as teacher at highgate junior school and as university extension lecturer 1 january, 1916, eliot publishes prufrock and other observations 1 january, 1917, eliot takes a position at lloyds bank in the colonial and foreign department. 1 january, 1917, eliot publishes ezra pound: his metric and poetry 1 january, 1918, eliot's "tradition and the individual talent" appears in the egoist. 1 january, 1919, eliot publishes poems 1 january, 1919, eliot publishes the sacred wood: essays on poetry and criticism 1 january, 1920.

The Sacred Wood is a collection of essays that Eliot wrote on many authors including Shakespeare, Dante, and William Blake.

Eliot Publishes Ara Vos Prec 1 January, 1920

Eliot takes leave from lloyds bank. recuperating at margate and lausanne, finishes the drafts of the waste land, which he then shows to pound. 1 january, 1921, eliot takes several months off to rest after a nervous breakdown. 1 june, 1921.

Eliot suffers a breakdown in the summer of 1921 as a result of his father's passing in 1919 and his wife Vivien's deteriorating health. After his breakdown, his physician recommends taking time off to recover. His physician recommended taking time off at the coast of Margate in England. Eliot's friend Bertrand Russell recommends a sanitarium in Lausanne Switzerland. Over the course of 3 months Eliot spends time at both where he finishes his writings on "The Waste Land".

Eliot Publishes The Waste Land 1 January, 1922

The Waste Land is a 434 line poem presented in five-parts, written by T. S. Eliot; considered by many to be one of the greatest poets in history. It is one of the most important writings of modernist poetry. The Waste Land loosely follows the legend of the Holy Grail and the Fisher King while including cultural shades from Western canon, Buddhism and Hindu Upanishads. The Waste Land is highly recommended for those who enjoy important poetic works and for those newly discovering the talent of T. S. Eliot.

Eliot Publishes Homage to John Dryden: Three Essays On Poetry Of The Seventeenth Century 1 January, 1924

Three essays on 17th century literature, with particular emphasis on Dryden's poetry and criticism

Eliot Publishes Poems 1909-1925 1 January, 1925

Eliot joins the publishing house of faber & gwyer, leaves lloyds bank 1 january, 1925, eliot delivers the clark lectures at cambridge university. 1 january, 1926.

·         Eliot delivers the Clark Lectures at Cambridge University in 1926. His speech was entitled “The metaphysical poetry of the 17th century”. His speech took place Friday, January 1st 1926 at 2 pm.

Eliot Publishes Sweeney Agonistes 1 January, 1926

Eliot enters the church of england and assumes british citizenship 1 january, 1927, eliot publishes shakespeare and the stoicism of seneca 1 january, 1927, eliot publishes journey of the magi 1 january, 1927, eliot publishes a song for simeon 1 january, 1928.

Contains a drawing by E. McKnight Kauffer

Eliot Publishes For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays On Style And Order 1 January, 1928

Eliot publishes dante 1 january, 1929, eliot publishes animula 1 january, 1929, eliot publishes ash-wednesday 1 january, 1930, eliot publishes marina 1 january, 1930, eliot publishes thoughts after lambeth 1 january, 1931, eliot publishes triumphal march 1 january, 1931, eliot publishes charles whibley: a memoir 1 january, 1931, eliot publishes selected essays 1917-1932 1 january, 1932, eliot publishes john dryden: the poet, the dramatist, the critic 1 january, 1932.

This study of the noted literary figure of the Restoration deals separately with his various roles as poet, dramatist and critic.

Eliot delivers the Norton Lectures at Harvard University. 1 January, 1932

·         Eliot delivers the Norton Lectures at Harvard University in 1932 and 1933. Eliot’s 1932-33 speech was entitled “The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England. This speech was later published by Harvard University Press.

Eliot’s 1932-33 Norton lectures at Harvard published under the title The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933). At the University of Virginia, he delivers the lectures later published as After Strange Gods (1934). Obtains legal separation from Viv 1 January, 1933

Eliot publishes the use of poetry and the use of criticism: studies in the relation of criticism to poetry in england 1 january, 1933.

Eliot begins with the appearance of poetry criticism in the age of Dryden, when poetry became the province of an intellectual aristocracy rather than part of the mind and popular tradition of a whole people. Wordsworth and Coleridge, in their attempt to revolutionize the language of poetry at the end of the eighteenth century, made exaggerated claims for poetry and the poet, culminating in Shelley's assertion that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind." And, in the doubt and decaying moral definitions of the nineteenth century, Arnold transformed poetry into a surrogate for religion.

By studying poetry and criticism in the context of its time, Eliot suggests that we can learn what is permanent about the nature of poetry, and makes a powerful case for both its autonomy and its pluralism in this century.

Eliot Publishes Words For Music 1 January, 1934

Eliot publishes after strange gods: a primer of modern heresy 1 january, 1934, eliot publishes the rock: a pageant play 1 january, 1934.

The choruses in this pageant play represent a new verse experiment on Mr. Eliot's part; and taken together make a sequence of verses about twice the length of "The Waste Land." Mr. Eliot has written the words; the scenario and design of the play were provided by a collaborator, and the purpose was to provide a pageant of the Church of England for presentation on a particular occasion. The action turns upon the efforts and difficulties of a group of London masons in building a church. Incidentally a number of historical scenes, illustrative of church-building, are introduced. The play, enthusiastically greeted, was first presented in England, at Sadler's Wells; the production included much pageantry, mimetic action, and ballet, with music by Dr. Martin Shaw.

Eliot Publishes Elizabethan Essays 1 January, 1934

Seeks to define and illustrate a point of view toward theElizabeth drama which is different from that of the nineteenth-century tradition.

Revised as Essays On Elizabethan Drama (1956)

Republished as Elizabethan Dramatists (1963)

Eliot Publishes Murder In The Cathedral 1 January, 1935

T. S. Eliot's verse dramatization of the murder of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The Archbishop Thomas Becket speaks fatal words before he is martyred in T. S. Eliot's best-known drama, based on the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1170. Praised for its poetically masterful handling of issues of faith, politics, and the common good, T. S. Eliot's play bolstered his reputation as the most significant poet of his time.

Eliot Publishes Essays Ancient & Modern 1 January, 1936

A collection of essays grappling with some of the most significant topics of our time, Essays Ancient and Modern reveals Eliot’s thoughts on his literary contemporaries and predecessors, the role of religion in a secular society, and the continuing tradition of the classics in modern education. Astute and erudite, here we see the inner thoughts of one of our greatest minds, articulated in some of his most eloquent and direct prose.

Eliot Publishes Collected Poems 1909-1935 1 January, 1936

Eliot publishes old possum's book of practical cats 1 january, 1939.

The basis for the musical phenomenon Cats, this collection of 14 inviting rhymes — the mixture of the real and the impossible, the familiar and the fantastic — make for a set of poems that no child or adult can possibly resist. 

Eliot Publishes The Idea Of A Christian Society 1 January, 1939

These three lectures by the renowned poet and playwright T. S. Eliot address the direction of religious thought toward criticism of political and economic systems. They were originally delivered in March 1939 at Corpus Christi College.

Republished in (1940)

Eliot Publishes The Family Reunion 1 January, 1939

A modern verse play dealing with the problem of man’s guilt and his need for expiation through his acceptance of responsibility for the sin of humanity. “What poets and playwrights have been fumbling at in their desire to put poetry into drama and drama into poetry has here been realized.... This is the finest verse play since the Elizabethans” (New York Times).

Eliot Publishes East Coker 1 January, 1940

Eliot publishes the dry salvages 1 january, 1941, eliot publishes burnt norton 1 january, 1941, eliot publishes points of view/ edited by john hayward 1 january, 1941, eliot publishes the classics and the man of letters 1 january, 1942, eliot publishes the music of poetry 1 january, 1942, eliot publishes little gidding 1 january, 1942, eliot publishes four quartets 1 january, 1943.

The last major verse written by Nobel laureate T. S. Eliot, considered by Eliot himself to be his finest work.

Four Quartets is a rich composition that expands the spiritual vision introduced in “The Waste Land.” Here, in four linked poems (“Burnt Norton,” “East Coker,” “The Dry Salvages,” and “Little Gidding”), spiritual, philosophical, and personal themes emerge through symbolic allusions and literary and religious references from both Eastern and Western thought. It is the culminating achievement by a man considered the greatest poet of the twentieth century and one of the seminal figures in the evolution of modernism.

Eliot Publishes Reunion By Destruction 1 January, 1943

Eliot publishes what is a classic 1 january, 1945, eliot publishes a practical possum 1 january, 1947, eliot's ex-wife, vivien eliot dies 1 january, 1947, eliot publishes on poetry 1 january, 1947, eliot publishes milton 1 january, 1947, eliot publishes selected poems 1 january, 1948.

Chosen by Eliot himself, the poems in this volume represent the poet’s most important work before Four Quartets. Included here is some of the most celebrated verse in modern literature-”The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Gerontion,” “The Waste Land,” “The Hollow Men,” and “Ash Wednesday”-as well as many other fine selections from Eliot’s early work.

Republished in (1967)

Eliot Publishes Notes Towards The Definition Of Culture 1 January, 1948

The word culture, in recent years, has been widely and erroneously employed in political, educational, and journalistic contexts. In helping to define a word so greatly misused, T. S. Eliot contradicts many of our popular assumptions about culture, reminding us that it is not the possession of a class but of a whole society and yet its preservation may depend on the continuance of a class system, and that a “classless” society may be a society in which culture has ceased to exist.

Surveying the contemporary scene, Mr. Eliot points out that our standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago, finds evidence of this decay in every department of human activity, and sees no reason why the decay of culture should not proceed much further. He suggests that culture and religion have a common root and that if one decays the other may die too. He reminds us that “the Russians have been the first modern people to practice the political direction of culture consciously, and to attack at every point the culture of any people whom they wish to dominate.” The appendix includes his broadcasts to Europe, ending with a plea to preserve the legacy of Greece, Rome, and Israel, and Europe’s legacy throughout the last 2,000 years.

Republished in (1949)

Eliot Publishes From Poe To Valéry 1 January, 1948

Eliot wins nobel prize in literature 1 january, 1948, eliot publishes a sermon 1 january, 1948, eliot publishes the undergraduate poems of t.s. eliot 1 january, 1949, eliot publishes the aims of poetic drama 1 january, 1949, eliot publishes the cocktail party 1 january, 1950.

A modern verse play about the search for meaning, in which a psychiatrist is the catalyst for the action. “An authentic modern masterpiece” (New York Post)

Eliot Publishes Poems Written In Early Youth 1 January, 1950

Republished in (1967) 

Eliot Wins Tony Award For Best Play: The Broadway Production of "The Cocktail Party" 1 January, 1950

Eliot publishes poetry and drama 1 january, 1951, eliot publishes the value and use of cathedrals in england today 1 january, 1952, eliot publishes an address to members of the london library 1 january, 1952.

Republished in (1953)

Eliot Publishes The Complete Poems And Plays 1 January, 1952

This omnibus collection includes all of the author’s early poetry as well as the Four Quartets, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, and the plays "Murder in the Cathedral", "The Family Reunion", and "The Cocktail Party".

Eliot Publishes American Literature And The American Language 1 January, 1953

Eliot publishes the three voices of poetry 1 january, 1953.

Republished in (1954)

Eliot Publishes The Confidential Clerk 1 January, 1954

The Confidential Clerk was first produced at the Edinburgh Festival in the summer of 1953.

'The dialogue of The Confidential Clerk has a precision and a lightly felt rhythm unmatched in the writing of any contemporary dramatist.' (Times Literary Supplement)

'A triumph of dramatic skill: the handling of the two levels of the play is masterly and Eliot's verse registers its greatest achievement on the stage - passages of great lyrical beauty are incorporated into the dialogue.' (Spectator)

Eliot Publishes Religious Drama: Mediaeval And Modern 1 January, 1954

Eliot publishes the cultivation of christmas trees 1 january, 1954.

Republished in (1956)

Eliot Publishes The Literature Of Politics 1 January, 1955

Foreword by Sir Anthony Eden. Text of a lecture delivered at a literary luncheon, organized by the London Conservative Union, at the Overseas League, London, April 19, 1955.

Eliot Publishes The Frontiers Of Criticism 1 January, 1956

Eliot publishes on poetry and poets 1 january, 1957.

T. S. Eliot was not only one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century—he was also one of the most acute writers on his craft. In On Poetry and Poets, which was first published in 1957, Eliot explores the different forms and purposes of poetry in essays such as "The Three Voices of Poetry," "Poetry and Drama," and "What Is Minor Poetry?" as well as the works of individual poets, including Virgil, Milton, Byron, Goethe, and Yeats. As he writes in "The Music of Poetry," "We must expect a time to come when poetry will have again to be recalled to speech. The same problems arise, and always in new forms; and poetry has always before it . . . an ‘endless adventure.'"

Eliot Marries Valerie Fletcher on January 10th 1 January, 1957

Eliot publishes the elder statesman 1 january, 1959.

One of Eliot's plays

Eliot Publishes Geoffrey Faber 1889-1961 1 January, 1961

Eliot publishes collected plays 1 january, 1962, eliot publishes george herbert 1 january, 1962.

T.S. Eliot considered Herbert's religious verse above John Donne's and placed him firmly in the ranks of the great English poets. Peter Porter's new introduction gives a fresh perspective on the poetry of Herbert and on Eliot's study itself.

Eliot Publishes Collected Poems 1909-1962 1 January, 1963

In this volume, one of the most distinguished poets of our century selected all of his poetry through 1962 that he wished to preserve. An event of major literary significance, Collected Poems 1909-1962 was published on T. S. Eliot's seventy-fifth birthday. It offers the complete text of Collected Poems 1909-1935, the full text of "Four Quartets", and several other poems. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, widely honored for his poetry, criticism, essays, and plays, T. S. Eliot exerted a profound influence on his contemporaries in the arts as well as on a great international audience of readers.

Eliot Publishes Knowledge And Experiences In The Philosophy Of F. H. Bradley 1 January, 1964

T. S. Elliot left Harvard during his third year of study in the department of philosophy and went to England. Forty-six years later he authorized the publication of his doctoral dissertation but the book is virtually impossible to find today.

Here we have a reprint of his sympathetic but not entirely uncritial study of the English idealist philosopher F. H. Bradley. Enthusiastic approval came to Eliot at the time from Harvard pragmatist Josiah Royce, who pronounced his writing of philosophy "the work of an expert."

Eliot's critical literary theory was deeply influenced by his early philosophical outlook. This rewarding book provides a potent refutation of the false but frequent claim that Eliot's poetic and critical intelligence had no philosophical writings, making this book indispensable to all literary critics and theorists.

Eliot Publishes To Criticize The Critic And Other Writings 1 January, 1965

These influential essay and lectures by T. S. Eliot span nearly a half century—from 1917, when he published The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, to 1961, four years before his death. With the luminosity and clarity of a first-rate intellect, Eliot considers the uses of literary criticism, the writers who had the greatest influence on his own work, and the importance of being truly educated.

T. S. Eliot dies. 4 January, 1965

T. S. Eliot dies January 4th, 1965. As per Eliot’s wishes his remains were interred at St. Michael’s church in East Coker, Somerset, England.

T. S. Eliots ashes are interred. 14 January, 1965

T. S. Eliot's ashes are interred at St. Michael's Church in East Coker.

Eliot Publishes The Waste Land: A Facsimile And Transcript Of The Original Drafts Including The Annotations Of Ezra Pound / edited by Valerie Eliot 1 January, 1971

Each facsimile page of the original manuscript is accompanied here by a typeset transcript on the facing page. This book shows how the original, which was much longer than the first published version, was edited through handwritten notes by Ezra Pound, by Eliot’s first wife, and by Eliot himself. Edited and with an Introduction by Valerie Eliot; Preface by Ezra Pound.

Eliot Publishes Selected Prose Of T.S. Eliot/edited by Frank Kermode 1 January, 1975

Thirty-one essays-categorized as “essays in generalization,” “appreciations of individual authors,” and “social and religious criticism”- written over a half century. This volume reveals Eliot’s original ideas, cogent conclusions, and skill and grace in language. Edited and with an Introduction by Frank Kermode; Index. Published jointly with Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Eliot Wins Two Tony Awards For His Poems Used In The Musical "Cats" 1 January, 1983

Eliot publishes the letters of t.s. eliot. vol. 1, 1898-1922/edited by valerie eliot 1 january, 1988.

Included her are all the significant extant letters Eliot wrote up to age 24 as well as many letters written to him by his family, friends, and contemporaries. There are insights into his struggle to earn a living, care for a wife who was frequently ill, edit a magazine, and become known as a critic and poet. And through the correspondence emerges a memorable view of the social and intellectual milieu before and after World War I.

Valerie Eliot has written a detailed introduction, provided annotations and commentary, and selected numerous photographs of Eliot and his world, many of which have never been shown publicly. All these elements combine to create an exceptional portrait of Eliot in the early years of his personal and professional development -- the closest approximation readers will ever have to an autobiography of the poet.

Eliot Publishes The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry: The Clark Lectures At Trinity College, Cambridge, 1926, And The Turnbull Lectures At The Johns Hopkins University, 1933/edited by Ronald Schuchard 1 January, 1993

Republished in (1994)

Eliot Publishes Inventions Of The March Hare: Poems 1909-1917/ edited by Christopher Ricks 1 January, 1996

This extraordinary trove of previously unpublished early works includes drafts of poems such as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” as well as ribald verse and other youthful curios. “Perhaps the most significant event in Eliot scholarship in the past twenty-five years” (New York Times Book Review). Edited by Christopher Ricks.

Eliot Publishes The Waste Land: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism 1 January, 2001

Eliot publishes the annotated waste land/edited by lawrence rainey 1 january, 2005.

Newly revised and in paperback for the first time, this definitive, annotated edition of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land includes as a bonus all the essays Eliot wrote as he was composing his masterpiece. Enriched with period photographs, a London map of cited locations, groundbreaking information on the origins of the work, and full annotations, the volume is itself a landmark in literary history.

Eliot Publishes The Letters Of T.S. Eliot. Vol.2, 1923-1925/edited by Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton 1 January, 2009

The volume offers 1,400 letters, charting Eliot's journey toward conversion to the Anglican faith, as well as his transformation from banker to publisher and his appointment as director of the new publishing house Faber & Gwyer. The prolific and various correspondence in this volume testifies to Eliot's growing influence as cultural commentator and editor.

1962 Oil Painting by Sir Gerald Kelly.

National Portrait Gallery. Smithsonian Institution,

Washington D.C.

Headstone for T. S. Eliot.

The quote reads: "In my beginning is my end, In my end is my beginning".

Of your charity

Pray for the repose

Of the soul of

THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT

26th. September 1888- 4th. January 1965

Wyndham Lewis -- "T. S. Eliot"

Durban Art Gallery, South Africa

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T.S. Eliot and Early Modern Literature

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This book, for the first time, considers the full imaginative and moral engagement of one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century, T.S. Eliot, with the Early Modern period of literature in English (1580–1630). This engagement haunted Eliot’s poetry and critical writing across his career, and would have a profound impact on subsequent poetry across the world, as well as upon academic literary criticism and wider cultural perceptions. To this end, the book elucidates and contextualizes several facets of Eliot’s thinking and its impact: through establishment of his original and eclectic understanding of the Early Modern period in relation to the literary and critical source materials available to him; through consideration of uncollected and archival materials, which suggest a need to reassess established readings of the poet’s career; and through attention to Eliot’s resonant formulations about the period in consequent literary, critical, and artistic arenas. To the end of his life, Eliot had to fend off the presumption that he had, in some way, ‘invented’ the Early Modern period for the modern age. Yet the presumption holds some force—it is famously and influentially an implication running through Eliot’s essays on that earlier period, and through his many references to its writings in his poetry, that the Early Modern period formed the most exact historical analogy for the apocalyptic events (and consequent social, cultural, and literary turmoil) of the first half of the twentieth century. ‘T.S. Eliot and Early Modern Literature’ gives a comprehensive sense of the vital engagement of this self-consciously modern poet with the earlier period he always declared to be his favourite.

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T. S. Eliot on Tradition, Orthodoxy, and Ancient Cheese

Someone said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know. ―“Tradition and the Individual Talent” [1]

“How can they whip cheese?” ― Death of a Salesman [2]

Speaking at a conference on “T. S. Eliot and the Literary Tradition” in Eliot’s centenary year (1988), the eminent critic Hugh Kenner discussed at some length A. L. Maycock’s Nicholas Ferrar of Little Gidding , regretting the fact that it was long out of print. [3] Little Gidding, the site of a small Anglican religious community founded by Ferrar in 1620 as an experiment in the devotional life, was visited by poets George Herbert and Richard Crashaw, and on three occasions by King Charles, the last alone at night after the Royalist defeat at Nasby. It became the site of spiritual pilgrimage and so continues today. Eliot visited in 1936 and made it the locale of his last major poem, the fourth of Four Quartets . After Kenner’s lecture, I was pleased to inform him that the book had recently been reprinted. [4] Tongue-in-cheek, he ventured that Eliot’s interest in Little Gidding was likely stimulated by its proximity to Stilton, the market town of one of his favorite English cheeses.

Seemingly irreverent—in view of the community’s renown for fostering devout religious observance and prayer, and Eliot’s interest in its role in English history and religious tradition—Kenner’s jest was actually more in keeping with the conference theme than it might first seem. There “where prayer has been valid,” and where “on a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel / History is now and England,” [5] Little Gidding represented for Eliot in literary and religious terms what England’s “Ancient Cheeses” (as he referred to them in a letter to the Times ) represented in the cultural life of society. [6] In a letter to another paper, he said that Canadian Trappist monks, makers of a Port Salut, “like their cheese, are the product of ‘a settled civilisation of long standing,’” but he feared that “there is little demand for either.” [7]

A Living Tradition

In Eliot’s view, literary traditions can suffer the same fate as the culturing of cheeses, and effort may be needed to revive them. But whereas in the case of the latter, “nothing less is required than the formation of a Society for the Preservation of Ancient Cheeses,” as he drolly wrote to the Times , revival of traditional literature—especially of poetry—will take a critical reappraisal of the concept of tradition itself.

His opening manifesto, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), set forth his idea of what a viable literary tradition consists of. It would also prove to be an apologia for the kind of poetry he was writing: poetry that shocked readers in its apparent defiance of every rule of poetic tradition, yet that—once the dust began to settle (a process not yet completed in the century since “The Waste Land” appeared in 1922)—was found to be rooted in that tradition, and in its method a protracted exercise in reviving it.

First, however, he cleared the ground of all-too-common misuses of the word, according to which “traditional” is either a term of censure of a poet’s work or at best “vaguely approbative, with the implication . . . of some pleasing archaeological reconstruction.” (Little has changed: in a recent syndicated crossword, “Traditional” was the clue for “Old School.”) Indeed, Eliot insists,

If the only form of tradition, of handing down [Latin trādere , “to hand over”], consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged. (3–4)

Awareness of a living tradition, he argues, is not evident in the poets of the generation prior to the Great War, whose “pleasing anthology pieces” were often sentimental, escapist, and static because unconnected to the poet’s greatest resource, the main current of European poetry. [8] This tradition, he insists, “cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.” It can be acquired only in a library by anyone aspiring to be a poet into adulthood. It involves what Eliot calls “the historical sense,” the perception of the existing monuments of literature as “an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. . . . [It is a] conformity between the old and the new.” This sense is not for the timid: it “compels” the poet, the individual talent,

to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. [9]

Consciousness of the presence of the past—“not of what is dead, but of what is already living” (11)—is what makes a writer traditional. Its corollary is the awareness that new works must be judged in relation to the standard exemplified in works of past writers, a measurement of the new by the old and vice-versa—not of better or worse, for “art never improves,” but of what “conforms,” what belongs , and what does not.

Willie Loman—the forlorn salesman of a past for whom and for which, he discovers, the present has little demand—senses that the whipped cheese his wife bought does not conform, that it portends the passing not only of the cheese he had naively assumed was a permanent product of a “settled civilisation” but (more ominously) of that civilization itself. The analogy of poet and peasant—for Willie is an urban hand-to-mouth peasant—wears thin at this point, for he is a consumer , not a maker of the cheese whose imminent demise he foresees, whereas a poet (Greek “maker”) is the creator of poems. Yet both function as discerning critics in their respective traditions; whether as creators or consumers, they employ the historical sense in the task of evaluation.

“Criticism,” Eliot says in “The Function of Criticism” (1923), “must always profess an end in view, . . . the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste.” [10] The tools available to poet-critic and critical reader are the same: comparison and contrast, and “a very highly developed sense of fact,” a qualification that develops slowly and whose “complete development means perhaps the very pinnacle of civilisation” (19). Eliot’s early criticism put these tools to work revolutionizing the literary scene and giving rise to what developed, particularly in America, into the “New Criticism,” a school whose founding was credited to him, somewhat to his embarrassment.

His practice of the aesthetic criticism he first advocated is best illustrated in his first collection of essays, The Sacred Wood (1920), in which he addressed “the problem of the integrity of poetry, with the repeated assertion that when we are considering poetry we must consider it primarily as poetry and not another thing.” [11] Thus his insistence that when we read, we first of all bring to bear a discerning grasp of the poetry of the living past—the “existing monuments”—and the “sense of fact” that pays close attention to the text, elucidating rather than interpreting it as a document of the author’s personality and biography, as his contemporary readers and critics tended to do.

An illustration of Eliot’s critical method applied to the culinary rather than the literary arts is found in his evaluation of an actual cheese. Kenner relates in whimsical detail an occasion when the poet-critic ordered Stilton for a dinner guest at the Garrick Club, prefacing the account with his admonition on the use of critical tools, written about the same time as the “Tradition” essay:

(“Analysis and comparison, methodically, with sensitiveness, intelligence, curiosity, intensity of passion, and infinite knowledge: all these are necessary to the great critic.”) With the side of his knife blade he commenced tapping the circumference of the cheese, rotating it, his head cocked in a listening posture. . . . He then tapped the inner walls of the crater. He then dug about with the point of his knife amid the fragments contained by the crater. He then said, “Rather past its prime. I am afraid I cannot recommend it.” [12]

The Stilton conformed to tradition but proved the victim of time, as all farm products may.

Poems too may suffer from uncritical reading or neglect, but, unlike spoiled foods, they can be rescued by reading such as Eliot urged. Some will be seen in new relations to the existing monuments; some unknown works will be welcomed as belonging. As with poems, so with cheese: “There cannot be too many kinds of cheese”—his letters mention eighteen—“and variety is as important with cheese as with anything else. . . . [P]art of the reason for living is the discovery of new cheeses.” [13]

An Extra-Human Measure

Eliot’s argument thus far is largely an aesthetic one. In “The Function of Criticism,” he says that the literature of the world, of Europe, of a country, is not to be seen as “a collection of the writings of individuals, but as ‘organic wholes,’ as systems in relation to which . . . individual works of literary art, and the works of individual artists, have their significance. There is accordingly something outside of the artist to which he owes allegiance, a devotion to which he must surrender and sacrifice himself” if he aspires to new creation. Literary tradition, we have seen, stands as the “something outside.” [14] But in this essay, he introduces a new note.

In a disputation with his lifelong literary-religious antagonist and friend John Middleton Murry on the subject of Classicism and Ro­­­manticism, Eliot responds to Murry’s attack on the former and upon the religion Eliot was then in the course of embracing. “Catholicism,” Murry says in derogation, “stands for the principle of unquestioned authority outside the individual; that is also the principle of Classicism in literature,” a description in which Eliot concurs. But writers, Murry goes on, “inherit no rules from their forebears; they inherit only this: a sense that in the last resort they must depend upon the inner voice. . . . The man who truly interrogates himself will ultimately hear the voice of God” (15–16).

Eliot no doubt heard in Murry’s profession of faith in the “inner voice” an echo of the Unitarianism in which he had been raised—“outside the Christian Fold,” as he put it—and from which he had drifted away, first toward Buddhism, then toward Anglo-Catholicism. Declaring himself deaf to the inner voice, Eliot says that those who support Classicism “believe that men cannot get on without giving allegiance to something outside themselves,” something “which may provisionally be called truth” (15, 22). He later wrote,

The issue is really between those who . . . make man the measure of all things , and those who would find an extra-human measure. There are those who find this measure in a revealed religion, and those who . . . look for it without pretending to have found it. [15]

The Complication of Belief

Paramount among the literary monuments for which Eliot early developed deep admiration was the poetry of Dante, a devotion that raised the thorny question of the poet’s religious and philosophical beliefs. While Dante emerged for him as “the most universal of poets in the modern languages,” his reading of the Divine Comedy with a translation while he was a Harvard undergraduate was prominent among the influences leading him toward Christianity. Having begun by assigning “the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer” onward as required reading for poet, critic, and discerning reader, in “Dante” (1929) he wrestled with the fact that what Dante meant to him was not only a matter of aesthetics, important though that was. For the medieval philosophy Dante believed and made use of—particularly that of Aquinas—struck him as the truth, and Beatrice’s statement, “ la sua voluntade è nostra pace ” (“in his will is our peace,” Par. 3.85), seemed to him to be “ literally true.” Acknowledging that his appreciation of Dante was enhanced by his sharing the beliefs of the poet, he also attempted (by invoking Coleridge’s “suspension of disbelief”) to affirm the nonbeliever’s ability to understand and appreciate it too:

My point is that you cannot afford to ignore Dante’s philosophical and theological beliefs . . . but that on the other hand you are not called upon to believe them yourself. . . . For there is a difference . . . between philosophical belief and poetical assent . . . . If you can read poetry as poetry, you will “believe” in Dante’s theology exactly as you believe in the physical reality of his journey; that is, you suspend both belief and disbelief. [16]

The problem with this approach to the question of belief is that it resembles I. A. Richards’s psychological theory of value, which holds that—unlike science, whose statements are matters of truth or error—poetry consists of “pseudo-statements” and that questions of its truth or falsity are irrelevant, its sole purpose being the efficient organization of our conflicting interests by means of “provisional acceptances.” Eliot rejected Richards’s claim that in “The Waste Land” he effected “a complete severance between his poetry and all beliefs,” and pilloried his claim that the poetry of pseudo-statements is, as Matthew Arnold before him had hoped, “capable of saving us.” This, Eliot maintained, is tantamount to saying that “the wall-paper will save us when the walls have crumbled.”

Yet, wary as he was of Richards’s “poetry of unbelief,” according to which “the difference between Good and Evil becomes . . . only the ‘difference between free and wasteful organization,’” [17] he insisted that “if you deny the theory that full poetic appreciation is possible without belief in what the poet believed, you deny the existence of ‘poetry’ as well as ‘criticism.’” Pushed to their extremes, he admits, both this theory and the contradictory view that “full understanding must identify itself with belief” are heretical. “Orthodoxy can only be found in such contradictions, though it must be remembered that a pair of contradictions may both be false, and that not all pairs of contradictions make up a truth.” [18]

Orthodoxy and a Dual Theory of Value

The general concept of orthodoxy Eliot advanced in “Dante” to come to grips with what he called “the complication of belief” was not invented for the purpose; in fact, it had been evolving in his thinking since he studied under Irving Babbitt at Harvard. Babbitt proposed a unipolar model of adherence to a central truth, centripetal movement toward which constitutes orthodoxy, and centrifugal movement from which is heresy. In Eliot’s model, truth is elliptical, having two poles with plausible but contradictory ideas, propositions, or allegiances held in necessary tension. Either of them taken too far becomes heretical. Thus, for example, Classicism and Romanticism may coexist, each checking the other’s tendencies to excess in a productive balance. But far from being Eliot’s invention, the model is one of ancient theological standing.

In its church councils, Western Christianity dealt with heresies concerning the natures of Christ, affirming that he is both God and man, with a divine nature and a human nature, each distinct yet unified. This affirmation has constituted christological orthodoxy for centuries and surely underlies Eliot’s concept, which he employed in various contexts in addition to literary criticism—religion, history, politics, and social theory. Broadly speaking, we might say that for Eliot, “orthodoxy” was a neutral term for the formal structure of thought about any topic; “tradition”—secular, religious, or in some combination—his term for substantive content under scrutiny.

Gradually, his thinking about tradition was modified by this structure. Under the influence of his friend Paul Elmer More’s insistence on a moral critique of literature, and in reaction to Richards’s purely psychological theory of value, Eliot began to see that a strictly aesthetic model of tradition was potentially heretical, and that it must be balanced by a moral theory of value, one which in his mind must be rooted in sound theology. [19] In a climate of secularism, the aesthetic model, pushed as far as Arnold and Richards had, results in a substitute for religion, a religion of art. On the other hand, a moral theory severed from traditional literary norms, in an age also characterized by a retreat from theology, results in pietistical religious moralism that scorns innovation, is scandalized by exploration of the dark side of human experience, and condemns whatever does not conform to conventional morality, making a travesty of literary taste.

In the lectures published as After Strange Gods (1934), he used the bipolar criterion of orthodoxy in approbation of the creedal theology (and of the church espousing it) that held to the mystery of the dual natures of Christ—this in the face of liberalism’s abandonment of it. In the words of William Palmer, a conservative theologian Eliot quotes, liberals “were eager to eliminate from the Prayer-book the belief in the Scriptures, the Creeds, the Atonement, the worship of Christ.” They would, he said, “reduce the Articles [of Religion] to a deistic formulary. . . . Christianity, as it had existed for eighteen centuries, was unrepresented in this turmoil.” [20] For resisting liberal heresy, conservative theology merits Eliot’s designation of “orthodox”; and although this antithesis undergirds his critique of modern literature, he cautions that confusion will occur if terms like “orthodoxy” and “heresy” are taken to be synonymous in all fields of discourse: “You cannot treat on the same footing the maintenance of religious and literary principles.” [21] Eliot’s model of orthodoxy requires that discourses be kept distinct in order that there might be a relationship between them. Blurring the distinction results, among other heresies, in the religion of art championed by Arnold and Richards.

Reading in an Age of Secularization

Implicit in the doctrines Palmer censured liberalism for abolishing is that of the fall, to modernity’s repudiation of which Eliot traces the superficiality of modern literature, in that with the disappearance of the idea of Original Sin, with the disappearance of the idea of intense moral struggle, the human beings presented to us both in poetry and in fiction today . . . tend to become less and less real. It is in fact in moments of moral and spiritual struggle depending upon spiritual sanctions . . . that men and women come nearest to being real. If you do away with this struggle . . . you must expect human beings to become more and more vaporous. (45–46)

Eliot cites D. H. Lawrence’s story “The Shadow in the Rose Garden” as evidence of an “alarming strain of cruelty in modern literature,” and finds in the relations of his characters

an absence of any moral or social sense. . . . [T]he characters themselves, who are supposed to be recognisably human beings, betray no respect for, or even awareness of, moral obligations, and seem to be unfurnished with even the most commonplace kind of conscience. (39–40)

Finding Lawrence “an almost perfect example of the heretic,” he offers James Joyce’s story “The Dead” as exemplifying “orthodoxy of sensibility and . . . the sense of tradition” in its portrayal of the human qualities suppressed by Lawrence (40–41). At the end of After Strange Gods , Eliot cites the dangers for writers and readers of modern literature, among them the thirst for novelty:

In an age of unsettled beliefs and enfeebled tradition the man of letters, the poet, and the novelist, are in a situation dangerous for themselves and for their readers. . . . Tradition by itself is not enough; it must be perpetually criticised and brought up to date under the supervision of what I call orthodoxy. . . . Where there is no external test of the validity of a writer’s work, we fail to distinguish between the truth of his view of life and the personality which makes it plausible; so that in our reading, we may be simply yielding ourselves to one seductive personality after another. (67–68)

Holding literary works to critical standards—“an extra-human measure”— “might help to render them safer and more profitable for us” by mitigating the enticements of novelty and personality.

“Religion and Literature” (1935) begins where After Strange Gods ended, with an even more emphatic statement of Eliot’s convictions on the reader’s need of solid religious criteria:

Literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint. In so far as in any age there is common agreement on ethical and theological matters, so far can literary criticism be substantive. In ages like our own, in which there is no such common agreement, it is the more necessary for Christian readers to scrutinize their reading, especially of works of imagination, with explicit ethical and theological standards. [22]

He hastens to add that only literary criteria can determine the genuineness and greatness of literature, be it religious or secular. But in an age dominated by secularization, when Christianity is regarded as “an anachronism,” we must bring to bear a dual critique of what we read. This secularization is most evident in the novel, which, because we cannot help but be influenced by the author’s attitude toward the behavior of his characters, is of special concern: “The author . . . is trying to affect us wholly, as human beings . . . and we are affected . . . whether we intend to be or not” (348). Lest we fall captive to any author, we must use critical tools of comparison and contrast in our “wide and increasingly discriminating reading” (349).

This is especially true of what we call reading for pleasure, because it can have “the easiest and most insidious influence upon us. Hence it is that the influence of popular novelists . . . requires to be scrutinized most closely,” because, although some prominent individual writers can be beneficial, “contemporary literature as a whole tends to be degrading.” The reader at home among the monuments of tradition, exposed to “the influence of diverse and contradictory personalities,” is immune to seductions of literary fashion, whereas the reader who knows only the literature of the present is “hopelessly exposed to the influence of his own time” (350–52).

Eliot concludes “Religion and Literature” by challenging readers to take responsibility for what they read and how they respond:

It is our business, as Christians, as well as readers of literature, to know what we ought to like. . . . What I believe to be incumbent upon all Christians is the duty of maintaining consciously certain standards and criteria of criticism over and above those applied by the rest of the world; and that by these criteria and standards everything that we read must be tested. . . . We shall certainly continue to read the best of its kind, of what our time provides; but we must tirelessly criticize it according to our own principles, and not merely according to the principles admitted by the writers and by the critics who discuss it in the public press. (353–54)

“What we ought to like.” Eliot’s phrase may prompt an unintended echo, “What we ought not to like,” and perhaps the specter of censorship. But Eliot was a vigorous opponent of any official censorship and defended the publication of works such as Joyce’s Ulysses and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

As for knowing what we ought and ought not to like, he would no doubt suggest a nutritional analogy: some foods are simply better for one’s health and longevity than others, and more delectable, as those who enjoy them know from experience—not only one’s own, but also that of one’s forebears, handed down in the cuisine of a settled culture. No food guru’s crash diet will do; no magic-bullet cure but leads the perplexed astray.

To us as readers, Eliot offers no checklist, no CliffsNotes on tradition and orthodoxy. What he would require of us is the labor of encountering the tradition one monument at a time, a labor that becomes its own reward as we acquire a taste for literary greatness. The goal is not vast erudition but the ongoing education of our taste. Also, as Christians, we must keep our theological powder dry, ready for employment in assessing the moral qualities of what we read. A lifelong reading list—from Homer to Dante, from Shakespeare to James Joyce—is a moral engagement commensurate with the other dimensions of our spiritual lives. These precepts attest to the importance Eliot attaches to our reading and the discipline required for beneficial encounters with modern literature.

“All Shall Be Well”

The rhetorical tone of Eliot’s argument summarized here is necessarily rather solemn. In his search for a critical standpoint adequate to the literary and cultural crisis of modernity, he may seem to have paid little attention to the enjoyment provided by the best of our time and of other times. But we should recall that, having once defined poetry as “a superior amusement,” Eliot typically emphasized the pleasures of reading in his analyses of particular works, an aspect of his criticism beyond the scope of this essay.

Our focus has been on his decades-long pursuit of a theory that claims for modern literature a place among the ideal order of existing monuments and provides both critics and readers a basis for “the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste.” The pursuit was necessitated by what he (and other postwar writers) saw as the decay of a civilization that rejected its traditions—the decay at which Willy Loman, in his humble but perceptive way, took alarm upon discovering the ersatz whipped cheese. When Eliot lamented the possible demise of the great English cheeses, it was because, as a poet and reader of poetry, he saw them as symbolic of threatened cultural and artistic traditions that must be defended if the pleasures they afford are to survive.

Having had the good fortune to “partake” (Eliot’s word) of such cheeses—including a Stilton in prime condition—at an Eliot exhibit at the Oxford and Cambridge Club, I can say there is reason for hope. Having joined other pilgrims for worship in the Ferrars’ secluded chapel, I believe as did Eliot when despite the terrors of the Blitz encountered on his nightly fire patrol, he ended “Little Gidding” with words of the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich.

All shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well. [23]

David Huisman (PhD, University of Michigan) is professor emeritus of English at Grand Valley State University. He served as secretary of the T. S. Eliot Society and has presented his slide show “‘If You Came this Way’: Landscapes of the Heart in Four Quartets ” at Eliot conferences and at Little Gidding. His current project is an examination of a neglected passage in “The Waste Land.”

David Huisman

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T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis on September 26, 1888, and lived there during the first eighteen years of his life. He attended Harvard University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in three years and contributed several poems to the Harvard Advocate . From 1910–11, he studied at the Sorbonne, then returned to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in philosophy. After graduating, he moved back to Europe and settled in England in 1914. The following year, he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and began working in London, first as a teacher, and later for Lloyd’s Bank.

It was in London that Eliot came under the influence of his contemporary Ezra Pound , who recognized his poetic genius at once, and assisted in the publication of his work in a number of magazines, most notably “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which appeared in Poetry  magazine in 1915. Eliot’s first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations , was published in London in 1917 by The Egoist, and immediately established him as a leading poet of the avant-garde. With the publication of The Waste Land  (Boni & Liveright) in 1922, now considered by many to be the single most influential poetic work of the twentieth century, Eliot’s reputation began to grow to nearly mythic proportions. By 1930, and for the next thirty years, he was the most dominant figure in poetry and literary criticism in the English-speaking world.

As a poet, Eliot transmuted his affinity for the English metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century (notably,  John Donne ) and the nineteenth-century French Symbolist poets (including Charles  Baudelaire and Jules Laforgue) into radical innovations in poetic technique and subject matter. His poems, in many respects, articulated the disillusionment of a younger post-World War I generation with the values and conventions—both literary and social—of the Victorian era. As a critic, he had an enormous impact on contemporary literary taste, propounding views that, after his conversion to orthodox Christianity in the late 1930s, were increasingly based in social and religious conservatism. His major later poetry publications include  Four Quartets (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1943) and Ash Wednesday (Faber & Faber, 1930). His books of literary and social criticism include  Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1949);  After Strange Gods (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1934);  The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1933); and The Sacred Wood (Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1920). Eliot was also an important playwright, whose verse dramas include the comedy  The Cocktail Party (Faber & Faber, 1950); The Family Reunion  (Faber & Faber, 1939), a drama written partly in blank verse and influenced by Greek tragedy; and  Murder in the Cathedral  (Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1935).

Eliot became a British citizen in 1927. In 1948, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Long associated with the publishing house of Faber & Faber, he published many younger poets, and eventually became director of the firm. After a notoriously unhappy first marriage, Eliot separated from his first wife in 1933 and married Valerie Fletcher in 1956.

T. S. Eliot died in London on January 4, 1965.

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by Anthony Domestico and Pericles Lewis

For many readers, T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) is synonymous with modernism.  Everything about his poetry bespeaks high modernism: its use of myth to undergird and order atomized modern experience; its collage-like juxtaposition of different voices, traditions, and discourses; and its focus on form as the carrier of meaning.  His critical prose set the aesthetic standards for the New Criticism, and his journal Criterion was one of the primary arbiters of taste throughout the 1920’s and 1930’s.  Eliot’s wide-ranging but relatively small corpus of work  – the precocious “ The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock ” ( 1915 ), the seminal The Waste Land ( 1922 ), and the later Four Quartets (1943), which Eliot considered his masterpiece – has made him the primary figure of modernist poetry both for his peers and for subsequent generations.

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri to a wealthy Unitarian family with roots in Massachusetts.  Studying first at Smith Academy from 1898 to 1905 and then at Harvard College from 1906 to 1909 , Eliot learned Greek, Latin, French, and German, developing philological skills and gaining familiarity with varying philosophical traditions.  While at Harvard, Eliot became interested in French symbolist poetry, finding himself particularly drawn to Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Laforgue.  These poets would prove influential for Ezra Pound as well.

In 1911 , Eliot enrolled as a doctoral student at Harvard, reading deeply in Buddhism and learning Sanskrit.  Having studied in Germany and at Oxford, Eliot settled in England after the outbreak of the First World War, working as a teacher and, famously, as a banker.  Eliot’s Anglophilia was lasting: he was a leading figure in the London artistic scene along with Pound, Wyndham Lewis , and others, became a British subject in 1927 , and converted to Anglicanism around the same time. Soon afterwards, he encapsulated his views as “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion.”

Eliot had married Vivienne Haigh-Wood in 1915 .  The marriage was not successful: the two separated in 1933 and Eliot eventually committed Vivienne (still legally his wife) to a mental hospital in 1938.  In 1957, Eliot married Esmé Valerie Fletcher, his former secretary at Faber and Faber.  The two were happy together until Eliot’s death in 1965; his poem “A Dedication to My Wife” is a rare public declaration of the deep affection he felt for his second wife.

Eliot’s first truly mature piece of verse, “ The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock ,” written mostly when Eliot was only twenty-two, was pioneering in its use of interior monologue, in its fragmented structure, and in its startling figurative language (“Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table”).  It amazed Ezra Pound, three years Eliot’s senior, by its modernity, which Eliot had achieved without any direct contact with avant-garde movements.  Pound, who met Eliot during the second month of the war, arranged to have “Prufrock” published in Poetry in June of 1915. With the publication of the volume Prufrock and Other Observations by The Egoist Press in 1917 , Eliot was heralded as the most important of modern poets. He also became the most influential critical voice of the movement, arguing for example that, in modern civilization, “the poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language to his meaning.”

In 1922, his status was confirmed by the publication of The Waste Land .  Appearing as it did in the same year as James Joyce ’s Ulysses , the 434-line poem helped mark 1922 as a magical year in high modernism.  Allusive, musical, and formally and linguistically complex, The Waste Land both diagnosed the chaos of modernity and provided an example of how art could order this experience; it expressed a widespread feeling of exhaustion and cultural crisis in the aftermath of the First World War.  Like Ulysses , it mimicked and mined the different voices of urban life to create a bewildering and complex polyphony, and like Joyce’s novel it used recursive patterning and mythic parallels to provide some semblance of organic harmony.

Eliot continued to publish poetry, drama, and critical prose for the next four decades.  His 1925 The Hollow Men was a despairing work symptomatic of a generation scarred by war, but also pointed towards his later conversion, while the essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) discusses the inextricable link between present and past poetry and contains Eliot’s famous formulation of the impersonal nature of poetic creation.  After Eliot’s conversion to Anglicanism, his poetry took on a more theological bent, as he wrestled with issues of temporality and eternity, poetry as inevitable failure and as ungraspable ideal, in Four Quartets .

Having written one expressionist-influenced play, Sweeney Agonistes , in 1926 – 1927 (first performed in 1933), Eliot turned after his conversion to a very different sort of ritualized drama, the pageant play.  His Murder in the Cathedral, first performed at the Chapter House of Catnerbury Cathedral in 1935, tells the story of the martyrdom of Thomas a Becket, Achrbishop of Canterbury.  Eliot envisioned drama as the “ideal medium” for verse and “the most direct means of social ‘usefulness’ for poetry.”  His later plays, however, became increasingly indistinguishable from the commercial theater whose conventions they were intended to recast.

As editor at Faber and Faber, Eliot promoted the work of many younger writers, including W.H. Auden  and Djuna Barnes, although his conservative politics, expressed most bizarrely in  After Strange Gods (1934), were at odds with the views of leading younger writers of the 1930’s. After the Second World War, Eliot, now an influential literary editor, left lyric poetry behind in order to write increasingly mainstream drama. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948.

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• Sept. 13, 1936

MR. ELIOT'S 1928 edition of his essays "For Lancelot Andrewes" (now out of print) gave rise to one of the famous phrases of contemporary criticism. The essays were perhaps not much read, but every one seems to have heard of the preface in which Mr. Eliot stated his general position as "classicist in literature, royalist in politics and Anglo-Catholic in religion." View Full Article in Timesmachine »

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Home › Literature › Analysis of T.S. Eliot’s Religion and Literature

Analysis of T.S. Eliot’s Religion and Literature

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 5, 2020 • ( 1 )

Another essay from that period in Eliot’s career as a social and literary critic when he was staking out the parameters of his conservative views, Religion and Literature was originally from a lecture organized by the Reverend V. A. Demant and published in the volume Faith That Illuminates. Subsequently, in 1936, Eliot himself collected the essay in his Essays Ancient and Modern, a somewhat revised version of his own earlier collection, For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order, from 1928.

Eliot’s apparent aim for the essay is not to prove who is and who is not failing to meet the bar that he sets for dealing with spiritual matters or matters of belief in literature, so much as to establish which “explicit ethical and theological standards” can be properly brought to bear in the realm of contemporary literature. He makes this case because he feels that literary criticism requires “a definite ethical and theological standpoint.” His further, and more urgent, point is that in our own time, there is no agreement on what that standpoint should be, making it all that much more imperative that individuals scrutinize their reading accordingly, particularly since the “greatness” of literature “cannot be determined solely by literary standards.”

In the immediate context of his remarks, Eliot specifically identifies these individuals as Christians, given the further fact that, in his view, he was as much fighting a holding action for asserting the Christian basis to European culture as attempting to resolve this particular critical conundrum. Eliot is correct in pointing out the obvious: “[M]oral judgements of literary works are made only according to the moral code accepted by each generation, whether it lives according to that code or not.” The point is indisputable: Whatever its source, however it may categorize itself or be categorized, a moral code directs our judgments of human behavior, including behavior that is manifested or explicated in works of literature.

The operating principle that he establishes as he commences his actual process of analysis is that his concern will be not religious literature, “but with the application of our religion to the criticism of any literature.” He does not get down to doing that, however, until he establishes the three senses in which one might refer to religious literature in the first place. One is in the same way as “we speak of ‘historical literarture’ or of ‘scientific literature,’ ” and that would constitute works that are well written and delightful to read, but whose primary claim to any reader’s attention is their significance in regard to the field of endeavor or study or interest that is being addressed. Another sense is as what is called “devotional poetry.” This often suggests the limitation, however, that that sort poetry is minor poetry. At the very least, Christian poetry in English, Eliot believes, “has been limited . . . almost exclusively to minor poetry.” The third sense in which one might refer to “religious literature” is in regard to works that advance some specific religious viewpoint. These kinds of works do not interest Eliot in his present critical effort because he wants, he says, a “literature which should be unconsciously, rather than deliberately and defiantly, Christian.”

Now Eliot is ready to get down to critical issues raised by the dual topics of religion and literature. The primary one is that “we fail to realize how completely, and yet how irrationally, we separate our literary from our religious judgements.” Using the 19th-century English novel for his case in point, he divides the development of this separation between religion and literature into three phases. In the first, faith was omitted entirely from “the picture of life” that these novels portrayed. In the second, faith was “doubted, worried about, or contested.” It is the third phase, the one “in which we are living,” that causes Eliot the most concern. From this concern of his, only the Irish novelist James Joyce is excepted, and it is that by now “the Christian Faith [is not] spoken of as anything but an anachronism.”

The absence of the notion of a viable and living religion from contemporary literature is a serious problem because, in Eliot’s view, “what we read does not concern merely something called our literary taste, but . . . affects directly, though only amongst many other influences, the whole of what we are.” Omitting religion from literature as anything other than as an anachronism clearly also omits it, for the contemporary reader who has no way of knowing any better, from that very “whole of what we are.”

The entire matter of literature’s more unconscious and unintended effects upon a reader’s total sensibilities, including the continuing formation of his or her moral and theological standards, is at the heart of Eliot’s message. “The relation of what I have been saying to the subject announced should now be a little more apparent,” he is now finally able to declare. He continues: “Though we may read literature merely for pleasure, of ‘entertainment’ or of ‘aesthetic enjoyment,’ this reading never affects simply a sort of special sense: it affects us as entire human beings; it affects our moral and religious existence.”

Eliot does not blame or condemn the individual writer and his or her values and beliefs either, such as they are. “[W]hat a writer does to people is not necessarily what he intends to do.” Indeed, Eliot can confess, quite honestly, one must imagine, that “I am not even sure that I have not had some pernicious influence myself.” So, then, it is not so important to describe and define the relationship between religion and literature as to admit, and accept, that there always is one. While it is “our business, as readers of literature, to know what we like,” for Christian readers, it is “our business . . . to know what we ought to like.”

Modern literature, Eliot concludes, is neither amoral nor immoral, although the implication is that it would be more suitable if it were because then those attitudes would be out in the open. Rather, the problem is that it either “repudiates, or is wholly ignorant of, our most fundamental and important beliefs,” thereby “encourag[ing] its readers to get what they can out of life while it lasts.” That sort of a hedonistic approach toward human existence, without any reference to the soul or eternity, is well within the realm of possible reasons given for living at any time, but Eliot’s cavil is with the apparently acceptable reality that, in our time, such a view is so prevalent a one as to seem to the typically unwary consumer of contemporary literature to be the only reasonable view.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY

For the decade or more preceding “Religion and Literature,” Eliot’s prose writing had been forking off in two separate but complementary directions. In the one case, he was investigating the constituents of what he regarded as effective poetry and dramatic verse in essays on such subjects as Elizabethan drama and dramatists and English metaphysical poetry, as well as on major literary figures such as William Shakespeare and Dante Alighieri. On the other hand, and in a parallel vein, he was engaging in a quasi-literary debate dealing with the limits of secular humanism as an evolving, atheistic intellectual posture and contemporary ameliorative for social ills. These two areas of inquiry and critical opinion often merged in the matter of the spiritual or religious nature of human experience as an aspect of literary endeavor.

Thus, Eliot was often raising and addressing questions related to the effective communication of thought and of feeling, the connections between poetry and belief and between poetry and philosophy, and the proper intellectual and historical foundations for assessing and maintaining moral and spiritual order and action. In “Religion and Literature,” Eliot is less contentious and more analytical with regard to the topic at hand, but he is still a Christian apologist.

As Eliot sees it, there is only one solution to the culture and society’s increasing secularization of matters formerly left to religion, and it is a practical and practicable solution: Those with a view toward obtaining a religious view of life from contemporary works of literature must work “tirelessly [to] criticize it according to our own principles, and not merely according to the principles admitted by the writers and by the critics who discuss it in the public press.” There is always present in the culture a relation between religion and literature because they are two critical components of any human culture of any time. In our own time, Eliot believes, that necessary relation must be safeguarded, even if only for themselves, by individuals who care not what the moment may bring, but what eternity may.

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