Post on 06-Apr-2023
Ritual and Resignation in The Waste Land
John Xiros Cooper
Department of English, UBC
(published Studies in Modern Literature, Ann Arbor, 1987: 41-50)
The bourgeois societies of the North Atlantic world in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were organized in a
form that C. B. Macpherson called ‘possessive market
society’ (53-56). Socioeconomic cohesion within such a
society is formally constituted by the relations of exchange
between individuals buying and selling commodities and
labour within a juridical framework based on the idea of
contractual obligation. But these relations are not so fully
installed that they erase all other possibilities.
Informally, such a society also carries over from pre-
capitalist ‘customary and status society’ (49-51) remnants,
not yet obliterated, of earlier forms of social cohesion.
These may exert quite a powerful hold on individuals even as
the new forces unleashed by the marketplace melt down the
old ties. These remnants of past social formations include
possessions of land as a mark of status and privilege rather
than land as commodity, the pre-eminence of group—clan,
family, guild—over the individual, and most typically, the
belief in a sacramentalized cosmos and the religious
1
legitimation of society, its divisions, and the rites of
passage that mark its boundaries.
Eliot’s mature conception of society, the ideal to
which his Christ Church lectures (The Idea of a Christian Society)
in 1939 pointed, resembles to some extent what Macpherson
has described as a society based on ‘custom’ and ‘status’.
Eliot’s fretting about the formation of a ‘national elite’
as a principal theme in all his social criticism derives
from his desire to rewrite for modernity the essentially
feudal conception of a ruling cast that governs by inherited
traditions and rituals. In this way he hoped to solve the
highly contentious problem of the distribution of power for
formally democratic societies where power remains not simply
the prize, but the very medium of the public sphere.
His thinking developed around the notion of a
hierarchical society that achieves consonance at all levels:
cosmology, institutional structure, individual psychology,
and concord in the means of expression (cf. Douglas 95).
Eliot’s own sense of this consonance, and its foundations,
comes early in The Idea of a Christian Society:
Thus, what I mean by a political philosophy is not merely even the
conscious formulation of the ideal aims of a people, but the
substratum of collective temperament, ways of behaviour and unconscious values which
provides the material for the formulation. What we are seeking is not a
programme for a party, but a way of life for a people: it is this
2
which totalitarianism has sought partly to revive, and partly to
impose by force upon its people.
(18, my emphasis)
We ought to notice that the customariness of a ‘way of life’
is made incontestable by grounding it in ‘collective
temperament’, and not in the region of politics, where ways
of life become products of historical processes and are
shaped by the volatilities of conflict and struggle.
This vision was not late in developing in Eliot’s
thinking. Indeed parts of it are already visible very early
in his career. His contact with French thought on these
matters in the winter of 1910-11 is crucial (Kojecky 58-69).
Reading the early French sociologists in 1913-14 provided
further grounds for future theorizing. Even in his early
literary criticism the notion of an ordered society (or lack
of it) underlay many of his literary judgments. The last two
chapters of The Sacred Wood, on Blake and Dante, do not
compare the two masters entirely on literary terms. Their
literary differences arise principally from differences in
intellectual and affective environments. A certain kind of
customary society must exist, Eliot implies, in order that a
talented poet might overcome the snares of his own genius
and produce a classic literature. Because Blake did not live
in a time when ‘philosophy’, for example, could be seen ‘as
part of an ordered world’ (170), he was condemned to remain
‘a poet of genius’ rather than a classic (158). Finally, his
3
sketch in the 1926 Clark Lectures of the cultural coherence
of trecento Italy prefigures the matured formulations in Idea.
Co-ordination and coherence of a type that Eliot might
find comfortable, were not salient features of the
thoroughly dissonant, ceaselessly dynamic ‘possessive market
society’ in which Eliot found himself in 1922, even though
the older orderliness and coherence, especially in matters
of culture and personal psychology, still persisted in those
social enclaves not yet penetrated by modernity. The new
veiled but did not entirely overlap and obscure the old. The
liberal or Whig view of this state of affairs emphasized the
struggle of old and new, stressing the historical necessity
of a social evolution aimed at the increase of individual
freedom and responsibility. Eliot’s view is rather
different. All societies have an ‘ideal’ form grounded on
the ‘facts’ of human nature and religion (For Lancelot Andrewes
50-52) to which we should all resign ourselves. His reading
of the early anthropologists on so-called ‘primitive’
cultures seemed to him to confirm these ‘facts’.
Societies in a healthy state display or express in
their particular historical forms their proximity to the
ideal. Societies that do not reflect it are entangled in a
hallucinatory state of continuous and, ultimately,
meaningless mutation. Nourished by their own nervous
energies, such societies adapt themselves ‘to an independent
life of atmospheric nourishment’, hence the ‘morbidity’ of
4
Swinburne’s language (Sacred Wood 149). In post-Great War
England the social ideal had not ‘ceased to exist’; it had
been submerged in the ‘hallucination of meaning’ inherited
from the humanism of the liberal Victorians. English society
was living through a period when the reigning liberal
humanism had ‘lost its cogency for behaviour’, though it was
still the only discourse ‘in which public speech [could] be
framed’ (Idea 20). But it was a speech that had grown
irredeemably incoherent. Everywhere, and not only in the
political arena but across the whole of human life, it was
reduced to stammers, charlatanism, and silence. This
dismissal includes the humanist discourse of inwardness,
what Eliot calls ‘the inner voice’, or the voice of
‘Whiggery’ (Selected Essays 18). ‘The possessors’ of this voice
‘ride ten in a compartment to a football match in Swansea,
listening to the inner voice, which breathes the eternal
message of vanity, fear, and lust’ (16).
The din of this corrupted inwardness is what we hear in
a great many parts of The Waste Land. Madame Sosostris, the
clerk, the typist, Sweeney all express the same ‘eternal
message’. The exhausted despair of the Thames-daughters at
the end of ‘The Fire Sermon’ permits us to hear in the
nihilism of the culminating word—‘Nothing’—the consequences
of what for Eliot amounted to the Whig-liberal deception of
the Sweeneys of this world.
5
‘Trams and dusty trees,
Highbury bore me, Richmond and Kew
Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees’
Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.’
‘My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart
Under my feet. After the event
He wept. He promised ‘a new start’
I made no comment. What should I resent?
‘On Margate Sands
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken fingernails of dirty hands.
My people humble people who expect
Nothing.’
la la
To Carthage then I came
Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest
burning
(Collected Poems 74)
In ‘The Thames-daughters’ Song’ (ll. 292-306) two literary
allusions stand out. Eliot himself draws attention to
Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung in his notes to the passage.
The second allusion, in the sonnet form of the Song, is not
as obvious. Eliot’s intimate friend John Hayward supplements
6
these literary connections with the necessary social
positioning of the singers. Highbury, where the first is
born, is, Hayward tells us, ‘a dreary, lower middle class
suburb’ in northeast London, chosen as a contrast with the
socially superior Richmond and Kew. The second singer he
tentatively identifies as a ‘typist’, like her counterpart
in the seduction fragment, is little more than a common
‘slut’ (Draft Notes to The Waste Land 4-5). Margate, he reports,
is a tacky seaside town frequented by ‘humble people’,
namely City clerks and their families.
The religious resonance of the phrase ‘humble people’,
like the allusions to Wagner and Elizabethan poetry,
functions as a sardonic diminution of the three singers and
the paltry inwardness that they embody. The Thames-daughters
are unable to position present experience in a wider,
external context that transforms inwardness into something
more vital and significant. The carefully chosen literary
and religious allusions contrast with the exhausted lyricism
of the ‘inner voice’. The optimistic humanist injunction to
self-exploration and self-knowledge leads, once the
resources of mere personality have been spent, to nihilism.
Our salvation, it seems, does not mean getting to know
ourselves, but incorporation into a customary culture whose
rooted orderliness and organic affective life make sense of
the inner chaos. One might say that individuality, the
individual, is not the source of culture, but a site or
7
occasion for culture to happen. The individual self is a
flimsy, transient thing that cannot thrive without a
traditional society to sustain it. The modernist emphasis on
objectivity derives from this sense that a great art cannot
be founded on a fragile foundation.
In this respect, the Thames-daughters (and Madame
Sosostris and the ‘young man carbuncular’) represent a
clapped-out finale of the ‘genius’ of a William Blake. They
become a hundred years later, the disappointed and cringing
consumers of ‘the sublime at popular prices’, as Flaubert
put it in Sentimental Education (50). England under the ethical
sway of ‘Whiggery’ had never been able to provide the
intersubjective or common intuitive resources (this will be
real theme of The Idea of a Christian Society) that saved the
Sweeneys or the Dorises or the Thames-daughters from
personal meainglessness and social anomie. The placing
contrast in the early 1920s, for Eliot, was England under
the first Elizabeth, after that tradition had been rescued
in The Sacred Wood from the critical grasp of Swinburne and
the Swinburnians. Later in the mid-1920s he would look for
the same values in trecento Italy, the culture of Dante and
Cavalcanti (the Clark Lectures 1926 passim). The Waste Land,
however, looks back to the sixteenth century as a measure of
value.
To create a form is not merely to invent a shape, a rhyme or
rhythm. It is also the realization of the whole appropriate
8
content of this rhyme or rhythm. The sonnet of Shakespeare is not
merely such and such pattern, but a precise way of thinking and
feeling. The framework which was provided for the Elizabethan
dramatist was not merely blank verse and the five-act play and the
Elizabethan playhouse; it was not merely the—for the poets
incorporated, remodelled, adapted or invented, as occasion
suggested. It was also the half-formed ὐλή, the ‘temper of the
age’ (an unsatisfactory age phrase), a preparedness, a habit on
the part of the public, to respond to particular stimuli. There is
a book to be written on the commonplaces of any great dramatic
period, the handling of Fate or Death, the recurrence of mood,
tone, situation. We should see then just how little each poet had to
do; only so much as would make a play his, only what was really
essential to make it different from anyone else’s. When there is
this economy of effort it is possible to have several, even many,
good poets at once. The great ages did not perhaps produce much
more talent than ours; but less talent was wasted.
(Sacred Wood 63-64)
In the context of this important observation Eliot might not
have been entirely averse to considering The Waste Land as
precisely that ‘waste ‘ of talent which ‘a formless age’
(64) forces on the artist.
Nevertheless, it is interesting to note how the lessons
that Eliot, as a practicing poet (cf. Selected Essays 18),
offers on cultural matters, especially on the relation
between artist and environment, although the essays in The
Sacred Wood are often not perceived as practical guides to
Eliot’s own particular poetic aims and procedures. A. D.
9
Moody, for example, seems to have forgotten Eliot’s
observations about Elizabethan culture when he reminds us
that the ‘Song’ of the Thames-daughters in ‘The Fire Sermon’
constitutes a sonnet. Eliot, he writes, is putting
‘immediate life into the traditional verse form’ (95 and see
Harris 112-13). The strophes, Moody writes, are ‘simple and
natural as speech can be, an inevitably right order of words
bearing the common stress and emphasis’. This use of the
Elizabethan form he reads as a renewal, as the bracingly
direct reunification of dissociated sensibility. Granted—
the fourteen lines he marks (ll. 292-305) are the same
number as we find in a sonnet; but how are we to interpret
the serious irregularities of the form? After all, it is a
sonnet only in length and through the use of mixed
Shakespearean and Petrarchan rhyme schemes.
After these external, and superficial, features—‘merely
such and such a pattern’—how is it a sonnet? Metrically,
it’s a pasticcio, no doubt tasty but, in terms of form, a
ruin. It displays none of the internal developmental
dynamics of theme and figure that is the entire life of the
Elizabethan original. Indeed the poem as poem is dead,
static thematically and figuratively, getting nowhere, even
as the Thames-daughters drift downriver. The ‘sonnet’ here
is stillborn. Rather than renewing an Elizabethan form, it
seems moribund. Its ‘simple and natural’ speech is also
rather suspect. After all in terms of a ‘lower middle class’
10
sociolect, ‘supine’ sticks out like a sore thumb, a fact
Moody acknowledges. And it is doubtful that the ‘common’
speech typically lapses into the sort of Angst that can push
up from its depths ‘I can connect / Nothing with nothing’.
The social sound that the sentence makes resembles more the
anxieties of the bourgeois couple in ‘A Game of Chess’
‘. . . What is the wind doing?
Nothing again nothing.
(Collected Poems 67)
than it does the kind of remark (if such a one could be
conceived at all) that strikes so sharply to the bare
essentials of existence that it transcends the determination
of the voice of place and intention. ‘The song [of the
daughters] expresses a state of being,’ Moody insists, a
state of being ‘as it is actually and immediately known. …
The Thames-daughters are really suffering the failure and
breakdown of sensual passion, and … the poet has placed
himself (and his readers) inside their suffering. Judgment
is consumed in a sympathy such as Dante feels for certain
souls in Hell and Purgatory: a recognition that one is or
might be as the other is. The Thames-daughters sing a common
predicament, a permanent human state’ (94-95).
That we are meant to feel sympathy for the deceived
Thames-daughters is seriously misguided, astonishingly wide
of the mark if we take into account the earlier treatment
11
people of the same social class, such as clerk and typist
earlier in the same section of the poem. Also, if John
Hayward’s notes on the poem when he was in intimate contact
with Eliot can be relied on to key the emotional response
intended, then to believe that Eliot sympathizes with the
Thames-daughters ‘predicament’ or offers them to us as
emblems of a ‘permanent human state’, when they are clearly
the products of a transient and debased Whiggery, becomes
very difficult indeed. Eliot was never that sympathetic to
those in the lower depths of society unless they knew their
place and could show their gratitude for the benevolence of
their upper middle class and aristocratic betters.
In an important sense, the sedated agonies of the
Thames-daughters do not even belong to them. They have been
hoodwinked by a liberal humanist ethic that Eliot believes
is not only misguided but, as he will explain in the 1930s,
the prelude to totalitarianism. Their struggles are simply
the exhaustions of an artificial inwardness that has finally
collapsed which is why they will turn to the magnetism of a
charismatic Führer like moths to the heat of an open flame.
The quiet despair into which the women passively subside is
as false as the sexual pleasure they want to continue to
believe they have enjoyed. There is no salvation on the
other side of degradation; there is simply more degradation.
‘Gerontion’ ought to be our guide in these ethical
latitudes. Renewal for the Thames-daughters, as for all the
12
lower orders, does not lie further inward toward some
redemptive human essence but in escape from the suffocations
of a feeble human subjectivity they can never understand.
Trying to claim the sonnet for a more hopeful view of human
affairs through a submerged ‘sympathy’, which Eliot intends
us to feel for ‘these people’, is simply a critic’s response
to his own embarrassment in the face of Eliot’s punishingly
severe attitudes towards the nameless Thames-daughters,
laconically and remorsefully suffering sexual humiliation
(cf. Drain 44). Eliot was no humanist and we must beware of
hoping against hope that he was.
In the end their nerveless, flat songs falter on one
word—‘Nothing’—in a world that has lost its moorings. But
even as the sonnet seems to collapse into whimsical madness
—‘la la’—and silence, the ancient moorings are glimpsed
again in the quotations from St.Augustine’s Confessions and
the Buddha’s Fire Sermon. Clearly we are meant to register
the contrasts and juxtapositions by which the text proceeds:
the splendour of Elizabeth and Leicester on the Thames set
against the contemporary river of ‘Oil and tar’, Wagner’s
Rheintöchter set against the Thames-daughters, the descent
through lust to nihilism set against purification in Eastern
and Western asceticism. It would be disappointing if Eliot’s
intention in so carefully pointing these contrasts were
simply to choose up sides: the good guys—Elizabeth,
Leicester, Wagner, Augustine, Buddha—against the ‘dreary
13
lower middle class’, who, hailing from Highbury, toil in
Moorgate, and idle away bank holidays at Margate Sands.
Much of the critical literature hears Eliot asking us
to do little more than make the proper assignments of value,
in short, stand up for the Buddha against the masses
lounging on the beach at Margate, or, in another section of
the poem, Philomel and Ophelia against Lil and modern
sterility.
In “A Game of Chess” jewels and rich surroundings mask a sterility
and desperation which may seem only modern but which recall the
rape of Philomel. The difference is ‘. . . there the nightingale /
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice’. Against the cruelty
of the past there was at least an ideal which transcended time and
was acknowledged. We have retained the physical but lost the
ideal; our cruelty is naked. Lil’s sterility and denial of life
recall Ophelia’s rejection and death but lack her grace and
gentleness.
(Gish 56)
As criticism this is just too easy; it operates through
cliché and wishful thinking. There can’t possibly be any
verifiable meaning behind the comment that ‘we have retained
the physical but lost the ideal; our cruelty is naked’, as
if being raped by a king is somehow more ennobling then
being raped by, say, a house-agent’s clerk, or that sexual
passion was necessarily more vitally experienced among
Elizabethan aristocrats than among contemporary inhabitants
14
of London. If all that Eliot intended was that we root for
Ophelia against Lil, that we line up aristocrats, saints,
and artists against the drudges of modern life, then The
Waste Land was certainly a waste of his talent.
But he clearly did not. The situation of the reader in
The Waste Land is slightly more complex than that of a
spectator at a football match. If we need an analogy for the
reader in the poem, then we would do well to think of a
spectator at a bullfight. The bullfight is not a competition
between man and animal; it is a ritual sacrifice, and we
take the same pleasure in it as we might take in the
celebration of a Mass, not as an isolated spectator on the
sidelines, but as a kind of participant. We let the primal
form of the event be the framework in which the inevitable
death of the bull is simply the culminating episode in a
ritual drama. The pleasure we are meant to take derives from
the satisfaction of a properly completed rite and in the
final, unambiguous affirmation of the values, embodied as
myth, that underlie the visible celebration. The death of
the beast is not an act of cruelty, but an act of closure to
which the myth assigns a kind of redemptive force. To hope
that the bull at the end might somehow escape the sword in
his heart is analogous to the hope that Pontius Pilate might
be able to talk Jesus Christ into getting himself a good
lawyer.
15
Ophelia and Philomel die because in a tragedy they
must, not because they misjudge circumstances and leave
themselves vulnerable to the brutalities of Hamlet and
Tereus. Neither are they redeemed by our sympathy, nor
Shakespeare’s, nor Ovid’s. Their deaths complete the rites
to which they belong and in which they play a necessary
part. Philomel’s metamorphosis into a nightingale is not her
reward for being a good person who has had the bad luck of
falling into the clutches of a nasty brute. The nightingale
affirms the values—say, of retributive justice—that her myth
embodies, and it functions as a re-enactment and sign of
their perpetual presence in history and nature. It was the
inchoate humanism of Ovid, and his Renaissance admirers,
that led them to want to hear the personalism of Philomel’s
melancholy in the song of the bird. Eliot’s studies in the
early anthropologists of ancient cultures led him to a more
serious and secure understanding of myth than that which was
available in either Ovid or Bullfinch.
Eliot guessed, and rightly so, that the most
uncomfortable, and even in-your-face offensive, thing for a
liberal humanist reader to be shown was a vision of the
world from which the personal integrity of the individual,
the redemptive potential of intimacy, including sexual
intimacy, free choice, and instrumental rationality have
disappeared. And this applies as much to Queen Elizabeth and
St. Augustine as it does to Mrs. Porter’s daughter. Value,
16
vitality, and, therefore, freedom lie in the proper sort of
resignation, not as the endless entanglements of a freedom
defined as the exercise of personal will. Elizabeth, like
Ophelia, is resigned to the part she plays in the visible
drama and narrative, shaped to an ancient and sacred pattern
untouched by history, in short, a myth. Of course, a sceptic
might say that it is easier for a monarch to ‘resign’
herself to being top dog than an Ophelia who must drown in a
pool at the bottom of the garden. And Eliot would retort
that yes, a sceptic would say that, living in ‘a formless
age’ bent on calculation and self-interest. But Queens and
courtiers aside, a Mrs. Porter or a Sweeney, regular folks,
must also eventually resign themselves to the
meaninglessness at the end of lust, when the signifying
power of myth—as objective authority—has been suppressed by
‘Whiggery’, and the blandishments of the inner voice.
As Eliot always insisted, The Waste Land was not simply
an attempt to mirror post-Great War European society, nor
was it an attempt to express the disillusionment of a
generation (Selected Essays 324). It was an attempt to knock
liberal-humanist sentimentality and weakness (cf. For Lancelot
Andrewes 51-52), the inner voice, right out of his readers’
heads, especially the middle- and upper middle-class
intellectual and artistic elites who were his principal
audience in the 1920s. He did not express the
disillusionment of a generation, because the disillusionment
17
in the cogency of the privileged discourse had already set
in. He wrote in order to bring these readers back from
disillusionment—or the illusion of being disillusioned—to
what he believed was a higher-minded, uncompromising ethical
and spiritual programme.
Before his reception into the Church of England, this
return could only be expressed in the metaphorical language
of myth, not Bullfinch’s quaint tales, but myth as
understood by the anthropologists who, in Eliot’s day, were
transforming the study of ancient and what they called
‘primitive’ cultures. If a viable religious institution, a
national church, was not psychologically available to him in
1922 as the medium of these aims, then the sometimes cruel,
hierarchical, but sacred, worlds we glimpse in the ancient
mythic narratives would provide the signifying contrasts for
the task of making the liberal-humanist ethos listen to its
own uninspired gibberish. If the way back from anomie,
personal despair and the disasters of freedom meant
acceptance, for example, of cruelty, of blowing ‘the gaff on
human nature’ (For Lancelot Andrewes 51), and of a hundred other
refusals to embrace the ‘belief in Divine Grace’ (50), or as
he put it in 1923, the modern refusal to accept ‘Outside
Authority’ (Selected Essays 17), then we should all have the
courage to stare the truth in the face, and not flinch.
This ‘truth’, when all was said and done, was not
particularly difficult to discern or understand. Christendom
18
had believed it, fought over it, and even come to pay lip
service to it for two millennia. Its sacred texts were still
nominally venerated though they had lost, for many, their
prestige as guides to knowledge and conduct since the
Enlightenment. Not the least important element of this old
‘truth’ was belief in Original Sin (For Lancelot Andrewes 49,
Gardner 88, cf. Yadav 120-23). Eliot himself certainly
believed in this Christian metaphor of the human origin of
ethical knowledge and, more surprisingly, believed it
literally and accepted its explanatory relevance for the
present day.
The appeal of Original Sin lay in opposing, in all its
spiky irreducibility, the meliorist optimism of liberal,
utilitarian ethics which had displaced in the popular mind
older Christian doctrines in the nineteenth century. This
ethical meliorism has become the conventional account of the
moral and spiritual life in the bourgeois era, even though
it had been fiercely opposed by the Oxford Tractarians in
the nineteenth century. Original Sin became, then, the
conservative vandal’s handful of dust tossed in the gearbox
of liberal theology. It is clear that Eliot came to accept
this ancient Christian doctrine very early in his life so
that The Waste Land does not labour to gain this knowledge.
The poem opens with what the poem knows already intact.
Eliot certainly believed in Original Sin, but he lived in a
time when hardly anyone else did. After all as a poet, he
19
faced the unenviable task of writing a poem that seemed to
rest on embarrassingly unfashionable theological clichés
that he knew sceptics, like Bertrand Russell, were going to
read.
He knew very well that it was not a question of writing
tracts disguised as poems that simply and earnestly, in a
Christian spirit, made a case for his beliefs. After all, a
mind that could also believe that Flaubert’s Sentimental
Education was perhaps the greatest novel of the nineteenth
century (Sacred Wood 65, 68) no doubt had a profound
understanding of the tolerances of the bourgeois mind and
the notional baggage under which it laboured. The point was
to disturb his readers’ intellectual complacencies,
including their now unconscious reliance on a certain kind
of instrumental rationality and the empiricist epistemology
on which it rested. In that epistemological orbit, the
explanatory power of religious discourse had dwindled to
zero.
It was necessary to undermine the sufficiency of the
dominant and privileged rationality and to show, at least to
the elites that mattered, that it was no longer
intelligible, that its reason, its ethics, its pallid
inwardness lay in ruins. And that the confident voices of
the nineteenth century—the voices of the scientist, the
engineer, the liberal theologian, the social reformer, and
the Romantic poet—in the wreckage of post-Great War Europe,
20
had been reduced to gibbers, when they had not acquired the
oily fluency of the charlatan (Collected Poems 64-65, ll. 43-
59). Beneath these ruins could be heard, if one listened
closely enough, the more efficacious coherences of ‘the
substratum of collective temperament’, the medium for the
operation of primal myths. At that level also it might be
possible to re-energize the old religious metaphors, like
Original Sin, and experience them again as vision and
feeling, rather than essentially contestable propositions.
As Eliot always insisted, it was the special power of poetry
not to replace philosophy and theology, but to ‘see it, as
part of the ordered world’ (Sacred Wood 170, mss. Clark
Lectures 1926 173-77). Poetry, he once told an audience at
Reading University in 1943, shows us what it feels like to
believe a particular philosophy (mss. ‘Poetic and Prosaic
Use of Words’ 4). Thus, it was not important or useful to
merely convince someone that the notion of Original Sin was
correct, but that intellect and feeling might turn with the
inevitability of gravity, like a stone falling from a high
tower, to a felt knowledge of the sacred ‘truths’.
What remains to be explained is how a poet whose work
championed a set of quixotic ideas that had so little chance
of general acceptance in an age of secular materialism could
have achieved such celebrity in his lifetime and exercised a
widespread literary authority on two continents and over two
generations?
21
WORKS CITED
Douglas, Mary. Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. 1970; rpt.
Penguin Books, 1978.
Drain, Richard. ‘The Waste Land: the Prison and the Key’. In
The Waste Land in Different Voices. Ed. A. D. Moody. London:
Edward Arnold, 1974, 29-45.
Eliot, T. S. Collected Poems: 1909-1962. 1963; rpt. London:
Faber, 1969.
---------, For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order. 1928; rpt.
London: Faber, 1970.
---------, The Idea of a Christian Society. London: Faber, 1939.
---------, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. 1920; rpt.
London: Methuen, 1928.
---------, Selected Essays: New Edition. 1932; rpt. New York:
Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964.
---------, ‘Lectures on the Metaphysical Poetry of the
Seventeenth Century with special reference to Donne,
Crashaw and Cowley’. Clark Lectures. Trinity College,
Cambridge, 1926. Ts. in the Eliot Collection, King’s
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