C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot

At Prufrock this morning, there was a link to an article about the eventual friendship between T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis. Lewis detested Eliot's poetry and literary criticism but they did, finally, become good friends. From "C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot: A Tale of Two Critics."

The opening greeting, “My Dear Eliot,” from the pen of C.S. Lewis may not seem particularly notable, but that simple yet warm greeting from Lewis to Eliot in several letters from 1959 to 1960 was an achievement that took decades. Since the beginning of their respective careers there had been an entrenched coolness. But as they gathered in 1959, summoned by Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury, to serve on the Committee to Revise the Psalter, impressions changed, and old prejudices evaporated as both men found that they held much in common. It appears that while they worked on the committee to preserve much of the Coverdale translation, which they both loved deeply, the personal gulf between the men was bridged. Soon the men were meeting together with their wives over lunch. Lewis, ever the accumulator of friends that differed from him greatly, made his peace with Eliot, remarking to Walter Hooper, “You know that I never cared for Eliot’s poetry and criticism, but when we met I loved him at once.” There is no noted change in Lewis’s attitude toward Eliot’s work, but he did find the man behind the words and counted him in the end as a friend. ....

Suspicions faded and Lewis met the man not the critic. Lunches with wives took place, letters were sent with warm and kind greetings—gone were the days of aiming at the officers in an attack. Soon an opportunity would appear for Eliot to aid his friend. While serving as editor at Faber and Faber, Eliot received a manuscript under a pseudonym. Knowing his friend and the death of Lewis’s wife, Joy, Eliot easily guessed the author. He was deeply moved by the manuscript that would become A Grief Observed (1961). Eliot not only published it but offered suggestions for a different pseudonym to honor the author’s wish to remain anonymous. ....

Lewis, ever the charitable dissenter, seemed to collect friends for the art of debate and disagreement, but he took a long time to come around to Eliot. .... (more)

Jackson Greer, "C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot: A Tale of Two Critics," Front Porch Republic, Jan 7, 2026.

At the still point of the turning world.

I've never read Boethius (but I have read T.S. Eliot). Thomas Ward has read Boethius, and Rick Kennedy reviews his book in "The Wisdom of Hope in Boethian Times." From that review:

Our happiness lies in God, Boethius’s Philosophia ultimately argues: “In the sublimest and most difficult image of the whole Consolation, Lady Philosophy imagines God as the still center, or axis, of turning concentric circles.”

This image is the foil to the wheel of Lady Fortune—this “still center” is where the Consolation shows the Christian hope that can only come after Stoicism. Philosophia teaches that “We are creatures of the peripheries, invited to come closer to the center… We have the capacity, not only in thought but through the pursuit of virtue, to ‘seek the center of things.’” Ward then quotes from Lewis’ Perelandra: “We have come, last and best, / From the wide zone through dizzying circles hurled, / To that still centre where the spinning world / Sleeps on its axis, to the heart of rest.”

Boethius in Consolation, like Dante in Paradiso .... and Lewis in his books, teaches a further-up-and-further-in type of centering on the sovereign, loving, beautiful, and happy God of Christianity. Having transcended Stoicism, Augustine and Boethius stand at the foundations of an Age of Faith. ....

Ward wants his readers to think of the implications of the Consolation’s insistence that “God is happiness.” Seek God. Seek the center. Ultimately, Ward wants his readers to have a reason to pray. “When I pray,” he writes, “I sometimes realize that I am doing the best thing I know how to do, which is just what Jesus taught his disciples to do.” Indeed, the Consolation is an account of a thoughtful person at prayer. .... (more)

Rick Kennedy, "The Wisdom of Hope in Boethian Times," Mere Orthodoxy, May 30, 2025.

"Without being downcast or defeated..."

I've been a frequent visitor to a website called Mere Orthodoxy for some time. Mere Orthodoxy is also a magazine. I subscribed recently and received my first copy today. I am already pleased with my decision.

From "About Mere Orthodoxy":

We are a small group of Christians who since 2005 have been defending word count and nuance on the Internet while working out what our faith looks like in public.

Whether it is arts, movies, literature, politics, sexuality, or any other crevice of the human experience, we believe that the Gospel has something to say about it and that "something" really can be good news.

We take our cues from C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton, two of the most thoughtful, perceptive Christians of the twentieth century. One of them wrote Mere Christianity and the other wrote Orthodoxy, and we like those books so much we stapled their names together and took it as our own.

Their thoughtfulness wasn't abstract: it was rooted in the challenges and struggles that England was facing in their time, and their mission was to demonstrate how a classically minded, creedally centered orthodox Christianity was an attractive and persuasive alternative to the ideologies of their day.

And they did their work with words, with essays, poems, and stories.

Here's what we hope you will discover in our writing:

We are scripturally rooted and creedally informed. We know that it's not enough to simply say the Apostle's Creed and that the further we get from it, the more we'll disagree on the particulars of how Christianity should play out in public. But we also think that getting to the Apostle's Creed is a pretty good start for most Christians in our era, so that's where we'll put our baseline. ....

On the first page inside the front cover T.S. Eliot is quoted:

I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

The first article immediately caught my attention: "We Are All George Smiley Now."

Mere Orthodoxy magazine.

Being a Christian means something definite

Jake Meador exited the church he grew up in at age seventeen, "angry and confused." Reading Sheldon Vanauken's A Severe Mercy helped him come back, not to that church, but to the faith.

...[T]he Vanaukens, both before and after their conversion, knew that being a Christian meant something definite—most of all it meant a definite affirmation of the resurrection of Christ. But other Christians across time would remind us as well that it meant a definite resolve to submit to Christ, no matter the consequences. This seriousness meant the materialistic "Christianity" I so often encountered as a child was best rendered in scare quotes and must be strictly distinguished from the real thing. More recently, it also strikes me that a seriousness about Christianity inherently excludes the sort of utilitarian or consequentialist reasoning so ascendant in our own unhappy day. Jesus did not attach conditions to our discipleship. He knew nothing of conditions under which hatred of enemies could be allowed, for instance. So neither should we. ....

Vanauken was seeing where a life of moral seriousness and quiet devotion to the good could lead one–and it enthralled him. More than that, it told him what he was meant for—not perfectly or completely because it was still lacking the ultimately necessary reality of Christ. But it showed him something true and real nonetheless.

These qualities, of course, aren't the essence of catholic Christianity—the essence, I think, is found in the Scriptures, the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, the decalogue, and the common practices of the Christian church, carried on down through the centuries. You can have a kind of seriousness without catholicity. But the package that Vanauken encountered at Oxford and that I encountered in Vanauken and which, though I didn't realize it at the time, permanently defined my intellectual trajectory, can't be had without catholic Christianity, I think, for the lofty thing we ultimately are meant for is Christ himself, of course, and we voyage toward him through a life of moral and intellectual seriousness and find in him the spaciousness that so captivated the Vanaukens. At one point they speak of realizing what precisely Eliot meant when he described the Christian life as one of "complete simplicity / costing not less than everything." What they learned from Eliot, I learned from them.

When I first opened A Severe Mercy nearly 20 years ago I had needed a vision of Christian faith that was unapologetically devoted to Christian doctrine without being materialistic, more American than Christian, and completely uprooted from history. .... (more)

Jake Meador, "Constructing Toward Catholicity," Mere Orthodoxy, Dec 2, 2024.

When things fall apart

Every Sunday at The Free Press Douglas Murray writes about "Things Worth Remembering." This Sunday his choice is from T.S. Eliot's play, Murder in the Cathedral:

.... In the time between its first staging, in 1935, and the completion of The Waste Land in 1922, Eliot had recovered somewhat from the fragmented mindset that had defined his early work—though he would spend the rest of his life periodically confronting despair. His personal revival was in large part, or perhaps entirely, due to a personal religious revival. He converted to Anglican Christianity in 1927.

Murder in the Cathedral is shot through with the struggle against hopelessness. It is a dramatization of the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, who was the archbishop of Canterbury in the twelfth century. History tells us that he clashed with England’s reigning king, Henry II, as church and state so often do. Many suspect that it was at the orders of the monarch that Becket was assassinated in 1170—in Canterbury Cathedral. ....

Murder in the Cathedral has lines as memorable as the most memorable lines of his poetry. The soon-to-be martyred Becket receives this warning, for instance, from a narrator, known as one of the Tempters, who come along to test him:

The last temptation is the greatest treason:
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

These lines require some thinking about.

But there is one passage from Murder in the Cathedral that I often think about, and sometimes say to myself. It is spoken by Becket, in a meeting with another of his Tempters. And although it may seem bleak, it is, to my mind, somewhat consoling:

We do not know very much of the future
Except that from generation to generation
The same things happen again and again.
Men learn little from others’ experience.
But in the life of one man, never
The same time returns. Sever
the cord, shed the scale. Only
The fool, fixed in his folly, may think
He can turn the wheel on which he turns.

We always live in tumultuous times. That seems to me to be the nature of things. As Eliot’s fellow convert, C.S. Lewis, said—in another speech I have quoted in this series—even the historical eras that seem most placid turn out, on closer inspection, to have been filled with alarms and crises. .... (more)

Douglas Murray, "Things Worth Remembering: T.S. Eliot Put His World Back Together Again," The Free Press, Oct. 27, 2024.

“I enjoy monotony”

I'm tempted, but it seems rather expensive. From a review, "Of mice and men and Magdalen: C.S. Lewis’s Oxford by Simon Horobin":

The life of a dedicated Oxford don and literary figure is bound to contain few opportunities for drama, glamour, or adventure. “I enjoy monotony,” C.S. Lewis once admitted to a questioner, and that was surely a fortunate trait, given that he spent 30 years teaching at Oxford, mainly in undergraduate tutorials, before he finally moved to a non-teaching post at Cambridge.

Yet such is the fascination that many have with the author of the Screwtape Letters (1942), the Narnia Chronicles (1949-54), and the autobiographical Surprised by Joy (1955), that many readers will relish the details of his Oxford life revealed in this sympathetic and atmospheric biography.

Simon Horobin records that Lewis typically taught 24 hours of tutorials a week, a huge burden over the three Oxford terms, which then as now consisted of eight intense weeks (the standard stint of a teaching fellow in Classics today, which tutors find taxing enough, is eight hours a week). When he was finally appointed to a chair at Cambridge in 1954, Lewis commented in a letter: “29 years of pupils’ essays is enough, bless ’em” and some years later wrote delightedly to his lifelong friend Arthur Greeves, “I’ve never been so under-worked since I first went to school.” ....

“Friendship was key to Lewis’s life,” writes Horobin. “His ideal evening was staying up late in a friend’s college room, ‘talking nonsense, poetry, theology, metaphysics over beer, tea, and pipes’.” Lewis was eventually persuaded by his old friend J.R.R. Tolkien that he would still be able to live at The Kilns if he took the chair. By the time he arrived in Cambridge he was already a literary celebrity (his relationship with other literary stars such as Tolkien, T.S. Eliot and particularly John Betjeman was not entirely happy).

He correctly recognised that a large part of the success of the Narnia books was due to the marvelous illustrations by Pauline Baynes. When she wrote to congratulate him on the award of the Carnegie Medal for The Last Battle, Lewis generously responded saying that it was “our medal”: the pictures were bound to have been a factor. He was similarly generous in his letters to Dorothy Sayers, though the statement that “Lewis’s long friendship with Dorothy L. Sayers contradicts the suggestion that he sought out only members of his own sex” strikes an unduly defensive note. .... (more)

8/21/2024  I'm not very good at resisting temptation. My copy arrived today. 

Armand D’Angour, "Of mice and men and Magdalen," The Critic, July 2024.

“There are no lost causes..."

About a book I first read in the '60s:

By reason of longevity alone, The Conservative Mind, as of 2023 a septuagenarian, is a classic. But “maturity” is more than a chronological marker. It describes a quality of mind, a force of habit, a disposition and refinement of what Kirk, following Burke, would not have been too shy to call “prejudice.” By that standard, The Conservative Mind is like some lexical Athena. It was born mature, fully-armed and ready for battle. ....

The philosopher Roger Scruton once observed that Kirk showed that conservatism is fundamentally not an economic but a cultural outlook, and that conservatism “would have no future if reduced merely to the philosophy of profit. Put bluntly,” Scruton said, “conservatism is not about profit but about loss: it survives and flourishes because people are in the habit of mourning their losses, and resolving to safeguard against them.” I think that is correct. ....

Kirk’s book helped restore conservatism’s patent of intellectual respectability. A brief introduction outlines the six touchstones of Kirk’s conservative vision: “belief in a transcendent order”; “affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence”; a commitment to ordered liberty; a recognition that “freedom and property are closely linked”; faith in prescription against the putative expertise of the “sophisters, calculators, and economists” that Burke memorably anathematized in Reflections on the Revolution in France; and the understanding that change is not synonymous with improvement (Kirk would have liked Lord Falkland’s observation that “when it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change”). ....

Kirk was almost Chestertonian in his fondness for paradox. One of my favorite Kirkian observations is that he was a conservative because he was a liberal. What goes under the banner of “liberalism” today has so thoroughly cut itself off from such traditional animating liberal imperatives as free speech, disinterested inquiry, and advancement according to merit that it is easy to regard Kirk’s declaration as merely paradoxical. But it was not paradoxical so much as it was admonitory, recalling us to springs of freedom that only an embrace of tradition can nourish. .... (more)

Roger Kimball, "The Conservative Mind at 70," University Bookman, November 12, 2023.

The times we are in

Alan Jacobs responding to criticism by someone who thinks he doesn't know "what time it is":

.... But I think I do know. It’s time to do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with our God. It’s time to seek the good of the city in which we live as pilgrims. It’s time to preach the Gospel in season and out of season. All these metaphors of disaster are just distractions from our undramatic daily calling. “The rest is not our business.”

Alan Jacobs, "absolutizing (slight return)," The Homebound Symphony, June 14, 2023.

"There is only the trying"

Responding to critics who find conservatism futile, Alan Jacobs:

.... And can we really “no longer conserve”? To conserve is surely to inherit or discover something of value and then attempt (a) keep it in good condition when you can, (b) repair it when it needs repair, and (c) pass it along to the next generation. I’ve been doing that my entire adult life, in a thousand ways. I’ve tried to teach my son the manners, morals, and convictions that I learned from the family I married into. I hope he’ll teach them to his children. I have taught and written in defense and celebration of the great books that previous generations preserved for me; of certain strenuous but also illuminating and life-giving ways of reading; of the rich inheritance of liturgy and hymnody that the churches in my life have introduced me to; of the world-centering and world-transforming story of Jesus Christ. I hope that those I have taught will receive all this as their inheritance and in their turn preserve and transmit it. Many, many others I know have done the same work. Is this not conserving? ....

Are our circumstances difficult? In some ways, sure. I’m sympathetic with T.S. Eliot’s view:

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

But at many points in the history of the traditions I have gratefully received, the conditions seemed (indeed were) even less propitious. And yet the faithfulness of those who loved those traditions was not exercised in vain.

Alan Jacobs, "absolutizing and abstraction, conservation," The Homebound Symphony, June 12, 2023

"Cultural" Christianity

Kevin Williamson, who writes primarily at The Dispatch, is always worth my time (and perhaps yours, subscribe here). Williamson today:

.... People who take an instrumental and political view of Christianity, however well-meaning...sometimes argue that only “Judeo-Christian religion”...provides a possible basis for a sound moral life, including the moral basis of national political life. This is, of course, what T.S. Eliot called the “dangerous inversion,” i.e., the argument that we should accept the supernatural claims of Christianity because they are useful for fortifying a moral sensibility when we should, instead, derive our moral sensibility from the truth of Christianity, if we believe it to be true, or from something else that we believe to be true rather than merely convenient. In a sense, the non-believer who sympathizes with Christianity is more of an enemy than is the frank atheist who hates Christianity—because the “cultural Christian” trivializes Christianity. The cultural Christian believes that Christianity is false and that this does not matter, while an evangelical atheist such as the late Christopher Hitchens believes that Christianity is false and that this does matter—that it matters a great deal. In that much, I am with Hitchens: Better to have a cruel and unforgiving society founded on the truth than to practice kindness based on a lie. ....

For all the talk (often fatuous) of Jesus as a “great moral teacher,” it was His supernatural claims, not His moral advice, that was distinctive: He was not crucified for saying that we should love one another, or for pointing out that the man with lust in his heart is an adulterer in spirit if not in fact, or for saying that we should forgive one another as we hope to be forgiven, or for any of that—He was crucified for claiming to be the Son of God and the Messiah of prophecy. These are religious rather than moral claims.

Of course, the religious claims of Christianity must necessarily transform its moral sensibility. And thank God it does—there is almost nothing in this world as insipid as Christian solicitousness divorced from the brutal facts of Christianity itself. ....

As Elijah did not quite put it: If the Lord is God, then follow Him, but if Baal or Ron DeSantis or good public order is what you really care about, then you know what to do. In any case, you should stop fooling yourself—you aren’t fooling anybody else. But if you are an atheist who is pro-life, who prefers a traditional model of marriage and family life, who believes that Western civilization is superior to its competitors, that hedonic consumerism is not the highest good, etc., then you might ask yourself why you believe these things and upon what basis your beliefs stand. Maybe it is because you grew up in a (still barely) Christian civilization, or in something that was one until very recently, and you think that what this has produced is good—which only leads you back to the first question. If your answer is “culture”—culture only, and not one step farther—then you’re looking at turtles all the way down.

Kevin D. Williamson, "Who Are These ‘Cultural Christians’?," The Dispatch, Feb. 27, 2023.

The need for roots

Andrew Wilson:

A few years ago I noticed how many of my favourite authors were writing during or immediately after World War II. ....

Their works are...marked by a deep awareness of radical evil, which is hardly surprising given the times in which they lived. It gives their essays an urgency, and their poetry and fiction a cosmic drama that few writers before or since have achieved: think of Big Brother and Room 101, Sauron and Saruman, Lord of the Flies, the White Witch, Animal Farm, and the role of sin and the devil in Graham Greene’s novels.

So it is fascinating how often their responses to radical evil involve an appeal to history. Sometimes this comes as a direct address to the reader, like James Baldwin’s writings on race, Hannah Arendt‘s on revolution, Leszek Kołakowski’s on communism, Isaiah Berlin’s on liberalism, or Dorothy Sayers’s Creed or Chaos. T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden do it through their numerous references and allusions. Greene and Flannery O’Connor draw on their Catholicism. C.S. Lewis makes the point through essays on why we should read old books, and by skewering chronological snobbery at every opportunity, from That Hideous Strength to the fates of Uncle Andrew and King Miraz in the Narnia stories.

J.R.R. Tolkien does it through his medieval language and setting, his complex prehistories, and his plot: remember Sam on the edge of Mount Doom, reminiscing about the Shire and reminding Frodo of the old stories long before totalitarian evil seized the world. Simone Weil’s greatest work is entitled L’Enracinement, usually translated The Need for Roots. Most powerfully of all, George Orwell creates worlds where nobody remembers the past, and where those in power, from the pigs in Animal Farm to the Party in 1984, are free to manipulate it for their own purposes, throwing unwanted recollections down the memory hole. “History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” All of these writers had witnessed the near-collapse of the West in recent memory, and they knew the dangers of losing their history, and the importance of not allowing it. .... (more)

Not a bad reading list.

Andrew Wilson, "The Need for Roots," Think, Oct. 12, 2022.

"A very dangerous inversion"

This morning, discussing today's religious right, Kevin Williamson quotes from T.S. Eliot's 1939 The Idea of a Christian Society:

...[W]hat is worst of all is to advocate Christianity, not because it is true, but because it might be beneficial.... [We] experienced a wave of revivalism which should teach us that folly is not the prerogative of any one political party or any one religious communion, and that hysteria is not the privilege of the uneducated. The Christianity expressed has been vague, the religious fervor has been a fervor for democracy. It may engender nothing better than a disguised and peculiarly sanctimonious nationalism, accelerating our progress towards the paganism which we say we abhor.

To justify Christianity because it provides a foundation of morality, instead of showing the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Christianity, is a very dangerous inversion; and we may reflect, that a good deal of the attention of totalitarian states has been devoted, with a steadiness of purpose not always found in democracies, to providing their national life with a foundation of morality — the wrong kind perhaps, but a good deal more of it. It is not enthusiasm, but dogma, that differentiates a Christian from a pagan society. ....

T.S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society, 1939.

Respectability

On the anniversary of Roger Scruton's death in 2020, Patrick Kurp:

In England: An Elegy (2001), Sir Roger Scruton aligns himself with one of the summits of the English conservative tradition. If such a tradition were a church, Johnson would number among its saints. ....

Johnson’s life represents a mingling of poverty-induced bohemianism (“the shabbiest of English eccentrics”) and a dignified respect for traditional norms. Scruton identifies an “anti-bohemian respectability” strain among such modern writers as T.S. Eliot, Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, and such composers as Vaughan Williams and Edmund Rubbra:

—all of them respectable citizens, often with conservative, even reactionary, opinions, upholders of the moral order, and unassuming members of the long-suffering middle class. This anti-bohemian respectability was not a novel feature of the national culture. The leading artistic spirits among Englishmen have almost always been prepared not only to belong to the respectable classes, but also to defend the values which make respectability respectable.

(more)

"The Values Which Make Respectability Respectable," Anecdotal Evidence, January 12, 2022.

Deliberate discipleship

From "In 2022, Let’s Take T.S. Eliot’s Advice":

.... “The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without,” Eliot said. So, how are we building? ....

In this state of communal disrepair, Eliot advised, “The good man is the builder, if he build what is good.” His words echo James 2’s contention that faith without works is dead (v. 26), that it’s possible to have right beliefs without acting in service to God and others. Eliot warns us against relying on the work of past generations and doing nothing to shore it up.

Eliot says we can learn to build well from “things that are now being done, / And some of the things that were long ago done,” and from “the work of the humble.” ....

As for things “long ago done,” church history is a wealth of wisdom and warning. One hopeful evangelical trend is renewed interest in the liturgical calendar. ....

Other things built long ago that would aid our building: formalized catechism, memorization of Scripture, and habits of Sabbath. With so many other claims on our attention, we can’t expect to “be made new in the attitude of [our] minds” by social osmosis (Eph. 4:23). We need to dust off these tools of deliberate discipleship for new use. .... (more)

"In 2022, Let’s Take T.S. Eliot’s Advice," Christianity Today, Nov. 22, 2021.

Evil incarnate in someone else

This morning Kevin Williamson quotes a very good passage from T.S. Eliot's The Idea of a Christian Society. Eliot:

It ought not to be necessary for me to insist that the final aims of the churchman, and the aims of the secular reformer, are very different. So far as the aims of the latter are for true social justice, they ought to be comprehended in those of the former. But one reason why the lot of the secular reformer or revolutionist seems to me to be the easier is this: that for the most part he conceives of the evils of the world as something external to himself. They are thought of either as completely impersonal, so that there is nothing to alter but machinery; or if there is evil incarnate, it is always incarnate in the other people — a class, a race, the politicians, the bankers, the armament makers, and so forth — never in oneself. There are individual exceptions: but so far as a man sees the need for converting himself as well as the World, he is approximating to the religious point of view. But for most people, to be able to simplify issues so as to see only the definite external enemy, is extremely exhilarating, and brings about the bright eye and the springy step that go so well with the political uniform. This is an exhilaration that the Christian must deny himself. It comes from an artificial stimulant bound to have bad aftereffects. It causes pride, either individual or collective, and pride brings its own doom. For only in humility, charity and purity — and most of all perhaps humility — can we be prepared to receive the grace of God without which human operations are vain.

T.S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society, 1940

A vision held aloft

From "Why T.S. Eliot still matters" by Douglas Murray:

I remember the exact words with which I was first introduced to “The Waste Land” while still at school. “This isn’t a poem you read. It is a poem you will live with.” Everything in the years since has proved those words true. And not just with that work, but with all of T.S. Eliot—the Four Quartets above all. It seems to be the same for many people. He is the modern poet whose lines come to mind most often. The one we reach for when we wish to find sense in things. And certainly the first non-scriptural place we call when we consider the purpose or end of life.

His contemporaries, by contrast, all seem to have grown smaller. W.H. Auden has perhaps three-quarters of his reputation still. But most of the other figures who dominated English poetry in the last century look diminished in the rear-view mirror. Which makes it even more striking that Eliot seems to grow. To consider why that should be is to consider something not just about our time, or his, but something about the nature of time, and the purpose of culture.

It is often thought that great artists in some way reflect or sum-up their age. And it is true that from “Prufrock” (1915) onwards Eliot seemed to speak to the particular, fractured nature of modern life. But many of Eliot’s contemporaries, including Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, managed that too. There must be reasons why Eliot continues to be read and they are not. One is that through the course of his poetic career Eliot did not merely reflect his times, but showed a way out of them. Indeed a way out of all time.

He didn’t write like other poets. And it wasn’t just that he wrote less frequently. Where others poured the stuff out, Eliot seemed to keep everything down, erupting only when it could not be suppressed any longer. Where did “The Hollow Men” or “Choruses from the Rock” come from but that deep fundament? ....

While other artists showed how culture could be either shown off, strewn about or destroyed utterly, Eliot demonstrated how it could be reclaimed. He showed how the remnants could become seedlings and sprout again, in another time or place. While repeatedly proving that he had a great artist’s ability to innovate, he also performed that second function of the great artist and demonstrated how culture can be transmitted. He didn’t just show the fire; he showed his readers how things could be saved from it. ....

It seems to me that the final answer lies in the direction of the journey Eliot accomplished from the earliest poems to the conclusion of the Four Quartets, by then, with phrases that resonate as forcefully as the opening of St. John’s gospel. What is clear now is the extent to which Eliot not only stared into the abyss or stood over it, but how he managed to cross through it: through the howling fire that threatened to galvanise him, as it does everyone. Even after the conversion to the Anglican church it is not as though Eliot’s path was carefree or smooth. .... He remains nearly unique among artists in the last century for having managed not just to walk through that century but, with occasional slips, extraordinary poise and a great deal of bravery, emerged at the other side of the fire-walk with a vision held aloft. (more)

Why T.S. Eliot still matters | Douglas Murray | Standpoint

Originality

From Anecdotal Evidence this morning:

It takes a singular individual, one who is unfashionably non-aligned, to acknowledge his dependence on the work of others. .... Originality is a pernicious myth. Something truly original would be a horrifying blank, or chaos. We all come from somewhere.... Simon Leys writes in “The Experience of Literary Translation” (The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays, 2013):

“String together all the pages that you have copied out over the course of your readings and, without there being a single line by you, the ensemble may turn out to be the most accurate portrait of your mind and your heart. Such mosaics of quotations resemble pictorial ‘collages’: all the elements are borrowed, but together they form original pictures.”

I'm pretty sure I've never had an original thought.

Anecdotal Evidence: 'Accurate Portrait of Your Mind and Your Heart'

"Hoping for the wrong thing"

N.T. Wright quoted at Christianity Today:

.... Citing T.S. Eliot (in “East Coker,” the second of Eliot’s Four Quartets), Wright speaks about “hoping for the wrong thing.”

I asked Wright how might we better think about hope.

The point is that we all too quickly hope for “our heart’s desire” without thinking that perhaps we need to let God do quite a job of reordering our hearts. In my tradition we have an old prayer which asks that God would so enable us “to love what you command, and desire what you promise.” Far too much of modernity, including would-be Christian modernity, is wanting God to command what we already love, and promise what we already desire. Eliot, (echoing St. John of the Cross) is challenging that and suggesting we might have to wait on God’s fresh leading before we know what we should really be hoping for.

The prayer:

Almighty God, who alone can bring order to the unruly wills and passions of sinful humanity: give your people grace so to love what you command and to desire what you promise, that, among the many changes of this world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. (BCP)

N. T. Wright: We Mourned Our Alleluias on Easter | Christianity Today

"A tradition is a living thing"

From a good long essay by Roger Scruton, "T.S. Eliot as Conservative Mentor":

.... One other essay in The Sacred Wood deserves mention—"Tradition and the Individual Talent," in which Eliot introduces the term which best summarizes his contribution to the political consciousness of the twentieth century: tradition. In this essay Eliot argues that true originality is possible only within a tradition—and further, that every tradition must be remade by the genuine artist, in the very act of creating something new. A tradition is a living thing, and just as each writer is judged in terms of those who went before, so does the meaning of the tradition change as new works are added to it. It was this literary idea of a living tradition that was gradually to permeate Eliot’s thinking, and to form the core of his social and political philosophy.

Prufrock and The Sacred Wood already help us to understand the paradox of T.S. Eliot—that our greatest literary modernist should also be our greatest modern conservative. The man who overthrew the nineteenth century in literature and inaugurated the age of free verse, alienation, and experiment was also the man who, in 1928, was to describe himself as “classical in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion.” This seeming paradox contains a clue to Eliot’s greatness as a social and political thinker. For Eliot recognized that it is precisely in modern conditions—conditions of fragmentation, heresy, and unbelief—that the conservative project acquires its sense. Conservatism is itself a modernism, and in this fact lies the secret of its success. What distinguishes Burke from the French revolutionaries is not his attachment to things past, but rather his desire to live fully in the concrete present, to understand the present in all its imperfections, and to accept the present as the only reality that is offered to us. Like Burke, Eliot recognized the distinction between a backward-looking nostalgia, which is but another form of modern sentimentality, and a genuine tradition, which grants us the courage and the vision with which to live in the modern world. .... (much more, worth reading if you value Eliot)

T.S. Eliot as Conservative Mentor ~ The Imaginative Conservative

T.S. Eliot

I came across this BBC series about T.S. Eliot this afternoon. It is a time commitment, about an hour and a half, but very well done, and if you are interested in the subject, well worth your time.