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

College Library, Cambridge.

---------, ‘Poetic and Prosaic Use of Words’. Public

Lecture, Reading Universaity, 1943. Ts. in the Eliot

Collection, King’s College Library, Cambridge.

22

Flaubert, Gustave. Sentimental Education (1869). Trans. with

intro. Robert Baldick. Penguin Books, 1964.

Gardner, Helen. The Art of T. S. Eliot. New York: Dutton, 1959.

Gish, Nancy. Time in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot: A Study in Structure and

Theme. London: Macmillan, 1981.

Harris, Bernard. ‘This music crept by me: Shakespeare and

Wagner’. In The Waste Land in Different Voices. Ed. A. D.

Moody. London: Edward Arnold, 1974, 105-16.

Hayward, John. ‘Draft of extra notes to The Waste Land’. Ts.

Eliot Collection. King’s College Library, Cambridge,

[1947].

Kojecky, Roger. T. S. Eliot’s Social Criticism. London: Faber, 1971.

Macpherson, C. B. The Political Theory of Possessive Indivdiualism: Hobbes

and Locke. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973.

Moody, A. D. Thomas Stearns Eliot, Poet. Cambridge University

Press, 1979.

Yadav, Ram A. ‘Politics and Original Sin: Some Notes on T.

S. Eliot’s Political Philosophy (1939-1961)’. Journal of

English 7 (Sana’a University), 1980: 120-33.

23