The HyperTexts
Thomas Stearns Eliot
An Early Re-assessment for the New Century
by Joe M. Ruggier
A prolific, hardworking author who witnessed, whatever his labours were, to the
traditional value of working till you drop — plagued, also, by neurotic
disorders which he handled by becoming active as an athlete — T. S. Eliot did
not, by comparison to the sheer extent of his professional labours, write much
original poetry and, as a matter of fact, published only one slim volume of
major, selected poems. Yet his
selected poems display Housman’s unerring sense of when to write, and when
enough had been said. Eliot knew
precisely when his inspiration was in flight and when it was that it said,
“you have said enough”. Besides,
like the fine, outspoken critic that he was, he was not altogether prone to
vanity, knowing clearly that others had rights to criticize him just as he did
them, and his criticism conveys an exemplary feeling of clean-breasted honesty. Again, his attempt to revive English drama displays much pluck, bravery
and courage, and bears witness to the Spanish saying that “God loves a
courageous soul”. Yet his plays
are not on the whole as memorable as his serious poetry.
At this point, I cannot help recalling the following passage, taken out
of his famous essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent", which sums up
certain major aspects of his poetic creed:
Yet if the only form
of tradition, of handing down, consisted of following the ways of the
immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes,
"tradition" should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty
is better than repetition. Tradition
is a matter of much wider significance. It
cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it with great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we call
nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his
twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not
only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense
compels a man 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. This historical sense, which is
a sense of the timeless as well as of the timeless and of the temporal together,
is what makes a writer traditional. And
it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place
in time, of his own contemporaneity.
As profoundly truthful, and as
positively moving, as I find this teaching to be, I cannot help feeling that,
unlike Homer, whose brilliant mind, at the dawn of Time, was singularly
uncluttered, Eliot, like the rest of us today who are sensitive at all, suffered
psychologically from being required to toe the line to all the great minds, all
the great discoveries of all time, and his mind, like ours, was overpowered by
the clutter of the ages — a psychiatric phenomenon of which his poem "The
Waste Land" is such a powerful correlative. What is positively miraculous is that out of this waste land
of thought and feeling he managed so powerfully to "construct something
upon which to rejoice” that out
of the freest of his free form we are always overpowered, compelled and thrilled
by the astonishing emergence of unique craft and profoundly interesting
structure.
T. S. Eliot worked stupendously as a magnificent technical innovator and
re-invigorator of language who approximated poetry to conversation using a
striking free form technique. In
spite of this apparent freedom of form, however, Eliot worked beautifully in
rhyme and metre also as displayed internally within all his free form from his
earliest (Prufrock) to his maturest (the four Quartets) …
Read as one long poem with the various parts marking distinct stages upon
a spiritual journey, the entire corpus of Eliot’s selected poems reads like a
continuous uninterrupted account of one man’s spiritual growth and journey
from the 20th Century ennui and angst of Prufrock to the heights of
mystical, Christian contemplation. We
start in a valley, a deep ravine or abyss, and finish on a mountaintop, amid the
breathtaking heights of spiritual ecstasy and consolation. We see in his work the face of the proverbial, bored and unhappy
professor, in search of the Peace and Joy of the Gospel — (just as we see this
face also in Rex Hudson’s work, in Hopkins’s and in Jacque Maritain’s) —
and we are comforted by the unique example he gives us that such a priceless
blessing is not unattainable, having, to a certain degree, attained it himself
and shown us how. And reading him
we are blessed by the feeling that there is, indeed, hope for everyone. Each poem in the sequence provides a gorgeous objective correlative for
an interior state of mind, heart and soul. The sense of profound interior structure and relational sequence is
paramount and Eliot’s work conscientiously exemplifies the truth that to be
great, one must always heed one’s Conscience and what the Divine Spirit is
trying to say at every point in the journey, in guidance …
Eliot, however, is a striking example of the
truth that far too much
fame and popularity is not good for you in your own lifetime, for the simple
reason that the reaction against you will settle in, and Heaven defend you,
then, from the crushing insults which readers who have been oversold about you
will surely raise. The alternative to this type of acclaim, which in Eliot’s
case was decidedly spontaneous and unforced, is renown which gathers slowly,
gently, and which does not come all at once, but stays with you after death, and
grows with time, like the proverbial waters which, although still, run deep.
Too much fame, perhaps, with all of its unholy pressures, is what
prevented Eliot from becoming an orthodox Catholic like Dante, or like Thomas
Merton, or like Jacques Maritain. If
he had done so Eliot could easily have been declared a Christian Saint and even
Doctor of the Church. He was great
enough for these honours in a myriad ways and his fortunes with posterity would
have been enhanced and assured. The
only reason that so many Saints and inspired Authors feel that the arts are a
false or spurious honour is precisely and in all simplicity because audiences
are always tempted to discuss the arts in a spirit of idle talk and boastful
vainglory and not in a spirit of prayer to the Divine Author Himself of all
valid inspiration …
A
lifelong practitioner of the unswerving, the uncompromising, the conscientious,
and the exemplary, T. S. Eliot, perhaps, made one last-minute concession to idle
talk, to vainglory even, (like the foolish women talking of MichaelAngelo in
"The
Waste Land"), and this one lapse sadly cost him securer and far more glorious
honours. One wishes that, just as
audiences are inspired, often quite spontaneously, to say that an author is as
great as Eliot, they ought to feel equally inspired, while contemplating an
author like T. S. Eliot, to pray as if everything depended upon their prayers
…
Bearing in mind my qualified reverence and lifelong admiration of Thomas
Stearns Eliot, I shall herewith desist entirely from questioning and probing his
integrity any further. I endorse
without question the astute, priceless discernment and the brilliant simplicity
of St. Augustine’s sentence … “Many who seem without are within” … and I shall conclude this
reassessment with a story drawn from experience. As a University student in Malta I was, in many respects, naïve
and vulnerable. Because my staunch
Catholicism positively aroused resentment in my classmates, even as my high
grades aroused their envy, I endured many harsh, unkind criticisms, and I was
badly in need of emotional protection. I
found this protection in the work and gorgeous poetic effects of T. S. Eliot.
I was very happy with the arrangement … a great Anglo-Catholic
emotionally protecting and rescuing an inexperienced Roman Catholic: capital! It could not be better. I
positively used to reply to all the unkind criticism I was enduring with
well-chosen quotations out of my great Mentor’s books in such a way that no
one could tell me that either myself or my sources were narrow-minded. I shall never, in short, forget
just how truly the shining Spirit of Eliot asserted and reasserted me, affirmed
and reaffirmed my poor, naïve, vulnerable spirit in those days of inexperienced
Youth, and it is for these reasons that I insist, always, that I owe this Poet a
debt of gratitude. It would be
sacrilege for me to cast a shadow on his motives and intentions. I shall never forget just what spiritual comfort, moral solace, and
emotional reassurance I derived, extracted and earnt myself, in those days,
between the lines of all of Eliot’s pages, and I positively feel for this
lesser
poet what Dante felt for Virgil:
“tu duca, tu segnore, e tu Maestro.”
(“you are Guide, you are Lord, and you the Master.”)
Copyright © Joe
M. Ruggier
October 2004