Joseph S. O'Leary homepage

Eliot Lives On

THE INTERNATIONAL RECEPTION OF T. S. ELIOT. Edited by Elisabeth Däumer and Shyamal Bagchee. London and New York: Continuum, 2007.

 

Sometimes a great reputation is suddenly eclipsed; a star vanishes from the firmament and is heard of no more. Sometimes the reputation slumps, loses its magnetic power, and its bearer survives only in encyclopedia entries, embalmed in academia, venerated in small fan clubs that hope for the day when the world will once again recognize his or her greatness. I experienced this “twilight of the idols” in greater or lesser degree in the cases of G. K. Chesterton, Karl Rahner, Bernard Lonergan, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Karl Marx and all his clan, even Sigmund Freud and his. I expect the same phenomenon to overtake Samuel Beckett. Literature has many once great luminaries who can never expect to thrill people as they once did: Byron, Hugo, Dickens, D. H. Lawrence, whereas others glow with undiminished brilliance: Austen, James, Proust, Rilke, Yeats, Woolf, and some rather minor luminaries show a resilience, an ability to pop up brightly, that one would not have expected of them: Trollope, Forster – but no doubt the present constellation, too, is a temporary phenomenon, reflecting only the taste of our particular cultural moment.

The longest and most painful of these deflations has been suffered by T. S. Eliot, whose fame stood at the zenith fifty years ago, when he was seen as a poet of the first order, a critic whose every pronouncement was to be treasured, a sublime dramatist, and one whose career both as a poet and as a man represented an exemplary pilgrimage of Christian faith. Now he is likely to be seen as a poet of the second order, very much of his “period”, an erratic and often prejudiced critic, a fake dramatist, and in his personal life a rightist, a misogynist, an anti-Semite and Heaven knows what else. Building on his famous thesis that the new ‘individual talent’ reorganizes the previous landscape of literary history and establishes new hierarchies, Eliot was no respecter of reputations: he knocked the Romantics from their pedestals and did much damage to the standing of Milton, while raising the Metaphysical poets and the Jacobean dramatists to a lofty status they had not known before. In the days of Eliot’s austere domination, people breathed a sigh of relief on finding that he had deigned to confer his approval where they had feared he could only frown – on Tennyson for example, or on Kipling – and read with gratitude his second essay on Milton, in which he was pleased to recognize that Milton was a great poet after all, well worth reading. Now the toppler of reputations is himself tottering. Marjorie Perloff has tried to prop him up recently, but only as the avant-garde innovator of his early verse. Genuine enthusiasm for The Waste Land or Four Quartets, despite their anthology status, is regarded as the mark of an old-fashioned critic, just as was enthusiasm for Shelley in the heyday of the Eliot-influenced lit. crit.

But salvation for Eliot may come from an unexpected quarter. If he is a spectral presence in the English and American literary world, even in academic departments of English Literature, he is a spectral presence in another sense beyond the limits of this world, in the sense that the multiple trajectories of his influence in many countries open up a spectrum of fascinating images of Eliot, alter egos who have an exciting impact similar to the first impact of his verse in England long ago. It seems that to read The Waste Land as a living poem today one must resort to the translation of Eva Hesse, just as jaded Shakespearians resort to the classic German translation of Shakespeare. Elisabeth Däumer reveals that it brilliantly captures the variety of voices in the poem and its underlying passionate intensity, whereas the earlier translation of E. R. Curtius had tamed the poem to smooth its reception, imposing a leveling literary style that was also quite unidiomatic. Ironically, Grass’s translation evoked in Germany the same unease and hostility that had greeted the original in England. The professors rounded on Grass and continued to teach Eliot in the same conventional, deadening way, perhaps thwarting a new reception of Eliot as a living poet in Germany. (A precious detail: the line ‘In the mountains, there you feel free’ derives from the opening line of a Bavarian folksong composed in response to the death of Ludwig II: ‘Auf den Bergen wohnt die Freiheit’. Eliot would have learnt this from Marie Larisch – ‘Marie,/ Marie, hold on tight’ – who was intimate with Ludwig’s childhood friend the Empress Elizabeth.)

E. R. Curtius, as J. H. Copley shows, was no stalwart ambassador of Eliot’s fame in Germany. After World War II, when Eliot was admired as a playwright in Germany, his poetry having been lost to view during the years of Nazism, Curtius had the temerity to declare that Eliot was a great minor poet, whose plays lacked ‘the indefinable aura of life’ (p. 248) and whose standing as a critic was largely due to his ‘superior and reserved way of speaking’ and the ‘studied modesty’ of his style which masked dogmatism and deep-seated arrogance (p. 250). I don’t see why this should be considered as ‘ad hominem attacks motivated by personal bias rather than critical and literary judgement’ (p. 248). Curtius was irritated at Eliot’s condescending attitude to Goethe – a touchy subject with Germans who made Goethe a refuge from Nazism and after the war presented him as the true glory of their nation. Eliot blandly declared in Harvard in 1932 that Goethe ‘dabbled in both philosophy and poetry and made no great success of either’ (p. 250). Curtius saw that Eliot himself had only dabbled in Goethe and was speaking beyond his competence. Since Eliot did not detect the faults in Curtius’s translation of The Waste Land and did not suggest improvements, his knowledge of German cannot have been very deep. In fact, an ‘illuminating sample of Eliot’s German, shrewdly omitted from the first volume of his correspondence,… shows that there were serious deficiencies in his knowledge of basic grammar’ (p. 256). Rather hurtfully, Curtius did not reciprocate Eliot’s admiring friendship, or was prepared to sacrifice it ‘for the sake of national pride’ (p. 252), believing that Eliot was advocating ‘the formal exclusion of Goethe from Europe; but also the exclusion of Germany, her language and her culture… His judgment shows that literature can also be the expression of politics’ (p. 253). He refused countless appeals from Eliot to contribute to The Criterion. J. H. Copley attempts to convict Eliot of ‘Germanophobia’ with arguments reminiscent of those used by Anthony Julius in alleging anti-Semitism (p. 254). After the war, Eliot struck up a warmer relationship with Germany. He daringly advocated ‘the unity of European culture’ to a German radio audience in 1946; his talks became a school textbook; and ‘he took various steps to invite German scholars to Britain to build cultural bridges between the two countries’ (p. 256); his lecture, ‘Goethe as the Sage’, on reception of the Goethe Prize in 1954, ‘was probably addressed to Curtius more than anyone else’ (p. 257) – but none of this sufficed to restore the warmth of their friendship. Copley draws the melodramatic conclusion that Curtius was guilty of betrayal ‘like Judas’s’ (p. 259); ‘instead of showing gratitude, Curtius stabbed a good friend in the back’ , and may be imagined now to languish in ‘the worst place in hell, reserved for those who betrayed their masters and benefactors’ (p. 258). If Eliot held that ‘even the harshest criticism could never bring an end to a long-standing friendship’ , it was because ‘he never fully understood the extent of, or the reasons for, his friend’s betrayal’ (p. 259). It is surely unnecessary to be so paranoid and vindictive on behalf of Eliot, who, as a sharp-tongued critic himself, and a good self-critic, no doubt respected the freedom and appreciated the astuteness of his friend’s critical views.

The bulk of the essays are business-like surveys of the reception of Eliot in individual countries. In Italy there are striking similarities, as Stefano Maria Casella notes, with Eugenio Montale, though ‘no direct influence can be demonstrated’ (p. 131). The most striking conjunction is between ‘Eliot’s famous short poem “Silence” (1910)’ and ‘a no less famous lyric’ of Montale. I must confess I had not heard of Eliot’s ‘famous’ poem (in Inventions of the March Hare) of which Casella manages to quote fourteen words ; all contributors seem heavily inhibited from quoting Eliot, no doubt because of the expensive fees charged by the Eliot estate, and this limits the intelligibility of the book for those who do not know Eliot by heart. Another poet, Mario Luzi, wrote ‘countermelodies’ to Eliot’s poems, which at first glance look like pastiche: ‘Here I am, a person in a room./ a man at the bottom of a house, I listen/ to the sputtering of the flame’  (compare ‘Gerontion’). In Spain before the Civil War, Eliot was seen as a Romantic, the successor of Wordsworth and Coleridge; during the Franco dictatorship he was prized as a conservative religious voice; more recently the radical innovativeness of ‘Prufrock’ has taken the ascendant. Juan Ramon Jiménez was his foremost admirer and translator, though critical of his poetic ‘tricks’ and contemptuous of his conservative politics. Two leftist homosexual poets, Luis Cernuda and Jaime Gil de Biedma, drew on the urban, demotic, decadent side of Eliot. Cernuda, displeased at Eliot’s unfavourable review of Edmund Wilson’s translations of his verse, panned Eliot’s provincial attitude to Goethe and put it down to religious prejudice. In Iceland, K. E. Andrésson’s pioneering 1949 essay on Eliot identifies as the basic element of his verse the ‘centrepiece of the bourgeois world view nowadays, fear of life’ (p. 110).

Among modernist Israeli poets of the 1950s and 1960s T. Carmi drew on the ‘mythical method’ of Ulysses and The Waste Land, to reveal ‘the Bible’s early Near Eastern, idol-worshipping and magically oriented cultural origins’ (Leonore Gerstein, p. 75) in The Brass Serpent (the title refers to Numbers 21). Critic Ruth Nevo explored the presence of the Hebrew Bible in The Waste Land, yet Israeli poets had no interest in the biblical resonances in Eliot. Gerstein sees ‘the lacunae in the Israeli construction of Eliot not as an insufficiency, but rather as a system of interesting, culturally-specific filters’ (p. 85). In China we find pastiches of the following type: ‘Man bears too much reality/ And sometimes cannot find its meaning./ The cold wind withers our hopes,/ withering them like flowers’ (p. 165). In Japan, where, as Shunichi Takayanagi reports, a key role was played by the meteoric passage of the Scottish poet G. S. Fraser in 1950, an academic Eliot industry flourished in the 1970s, but there has been a slump since. Eliot pastiche is found here too: ‘This Ash-Wednesday afternoon, I saw off/ A march of so many corpses, / And asked you to go with me to eat peaches, /And we walked an endless monotonous street’ (Tachihara Masaaki, quoted, p. 191). Oe Kenzaburo’s 2005 novel,　さようなら、私の本よ is steeped in quotations from Eliot as it ruminates on old age and human destructiveness – which does not sound like a promising basis for novelistic inspiration.

Others contributors study Eliot’s influence on individual authors such as Czeslaw Milosz, the Bengali poet Bishnu Dey and the Canadian poet A. J. M Smith. The last two, rather weak, essays in the volume are subjective memoirs on how it felt to read Eliot in Bengal and in Australia respectively. The latter, by Sean Pryor, contains a fine observation: ‘Eliot’s poetry anticipates its own alienation in time, place and language. It courts the fate of old stones that cannot be deciphered’ (p. 288).

This book takes us on a giddying tour of the planet, and reveals how the voice or voices of Eliot continue to percolate throughout world literature. While over-exposure of his not very voluminous poetic work has made Eliot an influence to flee from in the English-speaking world, its resurfacing in the dialects of other tribes is a great triumph for this half-forgotten ‘dead master’ , ‘both intimate and unfamiliar’, who has now indeed become a ‘compound ghost’ (‘Little Gidding’).

T. S. Eliot and the Gîtâ’s Spirituality of Action

‘In my beginning is my end’ (East Coker I). Mary, Queen of Scots’s motto, adopted by T. S. Eliot with reference to his collateral ancestor Sir Thomas Elyot (c. 1490-1546), encourages us to seek in Eliot’s Unitarian origins the seeds of his later spiritual vision. Grandson of William Greenleaf Eliot (1811-1887), who founded Washington University and helped found the First Unitarian Church in St. Louis, and son of Charlotte Stearns Eliot, who was both a poet and involved in community activities, he ended as an ornament of the Church of England. But the broad and questioning character of his religious vision, especially as expressed in Four Quartets, may reflect his Unitarian origins and may contain dimensions that most readers of Eliot have missed.

To his Unitarian background also he owes his lifelong concern with responsible action: ‘The standard of conduct was that which my grandfather had set; our moral judgments, our decisions between duty and self-indulgence, were taken as if, like Moses, he had brought down the tables of the Law, any deviation from which would be sinful. Not the least of these laws, which included injunctions still more than prohibitions, was the law of Public Service: it is no doubt owing to the impress of this law upon my infant mind that, like other members of my family, I have felt, ever since I passed beyond my early irresponsible years, an uncomfortable and very inconvenient obligation to serve upon committees (T. S. Eliot, To Criticize the Critic, Faber, 1978, p. 44).

.

Eliot’s Indic Studies

On the long journey between ‘beginning’ and ‘end,’ Eliot made many a wide swerve. His exploration of Indian religion and philosophy had a precedent among Unitarians, in Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was minister of the Second Church in Boston from 1829 to 1832, who was very inspired by the Bhagavad-Gîtâ: ‘I owed – my friend and I owed – a magnificent day to the Bhagavat Geeta. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spake to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us’ (Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. E. W. Emerson and W. E. Forbes, Boston, 1909-1914, VII, pp. 241-42). The best-known fruit of this inspiration is the 1956 poem, ‘Brahma’:

.

If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.

.

Compare Gîtâ 2.19: ‘He who thinks that this slays or he who thinks that this is slain; both of them fail to perceive the truth; this one neither slays nor is slain.’ (trans. S. Radhakrishnan). For Eliot, the Gîtâ would be ‘the next greatest philosophical poem to the Divine Comedy within my experience’ (Selected Essays, Faber, 1932, p. 258).

Eliot, writing in the Athenaeum in 1919 declared that Emerson was not ‘a real observer of the moral life’ and that his essays were ‘already an encumbrance’ (see Dal-Ying Kim, Puritan Sensibility in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry, New York: Peter Lang, 1994, p. 54). ‘For Eliot, spiritual indecision, inaction are the most serious disease of modern human beings’ (p. 56). Emerson would be numbered among those who took evil too lightly to be able to convey a strong doctrine of moral action. Yet Emerson may be another part of the abandoned Unitarian heritage that would continue to shed its perfume in his thought.

As a boy Eliot devoured Sir Edwin Arnold’s poem The Light of Asia (1879), a version of the life of the Buddha. He does not seem to have read Arnold’s rendering of the Bhagavad-Gîtâ, The Song Celestial (1885). As a graduate student at Harvard from 1911 to 1914 one third of the courses he followed concerned Eastern religions. Charles Rockwell Lanman, James Haughton Woods and Masaharu Anesaki. Eliot read and annotated the Gîtâ at this time (see Lyndall Gordon, Eliot’s New Life, Oxford UP, 1988, p. 121). Another of Eliot’s admired Harvard teachers, Irving Babbitt, had a clear and sensible understanding of early Buddhism, which helped Eliot to see beyond the blind spots of Hegel and Schopenhauer and to participate in what was a major breakthrough in the understanding of Indian religion.

Eliot’s absorption in Bradley may have had something to do with the analogies between the dialectics of Nagarjuna, proving all dharmas to be empty and to break down when they lay claim to substantive identity, and Bradley’s deconstruction of such categories as time, space, relation, self. It is perhaps a pity that Eliot’s thesis, Knowledge and Experience in the philosophy of F. H. Bradley, published in 1964, has determined our impression of Eliot’s youthful philosophical studies for so long. The thesis is subtle, but profoundly obscure. In fact it is a monument of Eliot’s failure as a philosopher, his inability to distil from his abundant thoughts a coherent philosophical vision. He saw too many sides of every question and became increasingly disengaged from the challenge of constructing a strong personal outlook as a philosopher. He wrote to J. H. Woods in January, 1915: ‘I find that I take so much keener enjoyment in criticism than in construction that I propose making a virtue of a vice and recasting my thesis with a mind to this limitation… I had great difficulty, even agony, with the first draft, owing to my attempt to reach a positive conclusion; and so I should like to turn it into a criticism and valuation of the Bradleian metaphysics – for it seems to me that those best qualified for such tasks are those who have held a doctrine and no longer hold it’ (The Letters of T. S. Eliot, ed. V. Eliot, Faber, 1988, p. 84).

But Manju Jain’s packed and absorbing book, T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy: The Harvard Years (Cambridge UP, 2004) reveals another Eliot - the brilliant graduate student who could engage critically with the leading intellectuals of his time, both his Harvard mentors, including James and Royce, and contemporary French and German luminaries. On topics that have enthralled academia in recent decades – pluralism, historicity, skepticism, non-foundationalism, relativism – Eliot was impressively expert as a young man. These topics have been particularly aired in the field of religious studies. Eliot’s critical engagement with the philosophers of his time fed into and was fed by his religious studies. Jain has traced many fugitive publications in obscure journals and many manuscripts not published at all, in order to bring out the full range of Eliot’s mind. When will the Library of America undertake to give us an edition of Eliot’s complete prose writings?

.

The Human Context

Eliot’s interest in Eastern religion was not merely academic. Alienated from his Unitarian upbringing, he found in the East a language for the great personal stresses he experienced. James Miller’s fascinating biography, T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet, 1888-1922 (Pennsylvania State UP, 2005) shows that his youth was intense and privileged, a crisscross of stimuli shaping a great poet, who here more than ever is seen as the product of American soil. There are Frostian ‘roads not taken’ and Jamesian ‘jolly corners’ on every side and one could project from this biography a hundred possible Eliots.

.

What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation. (Burnt Norton I)

.

If Henry James dwelt on the unlived life, and John Marcher, protagonist of ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ is brought to face the ‘sounded void’ of his existence, Eliot’s theme is rather the failure to act, or to act rightly. The Thunder promises not a fuller life but a capacity for action. Craig Raine, in his T. S. Eliot (Oxford UP, 2007), has exaggerated the theme of the ‘unlived life’ and underestimated Eliot’s concern with righteous living. ‘Raine assumes that a complete life can be described in psychological terms, since therapists help their patients to live more abundantly, form richer friendships and see the world in a new light… But… Eliot insisted that religious belief and practice constitute the essential commitment in a serious life. Mundane therapy is not enough. Raine doesn’t warm to this assertion, and prefers to deflect it by putting it in secular and psychological terms, where it becomes compatible with Emersonian individualism, a system of values Eliot could not have approved’ (Denis Donoghue, The London Review of Books, 25 January 2007, p. 24).

Miller illuminates the puzzles of Eliot’s sexuality by filling in the social context in Bostonian Bohemia (which gave Eliot a rather bad reputation among his Harvard elders, who linked him with the flamboyant George Santayana). He had trouble loving, let alone falling in love with, women: ‘I should find it very stimulating to have several women fall in love with me – several, because that makes the practical side less evident.’ Pacing city streets at night, he was tormented by restless urges, often perverse and obscene. Eliot’s impulsive, unconsummated and catastrophic marriage might be thought of as the mutual gravitation of two radically conflicted people who imagined that they understood one another and could each be the other’s salvation – ‘the awful daring of a moment’s surrender’ made possible only by not giving themselves time to think. Suffering, and poetic inspiration, came to Eliot from erroneous action and its long train of consequences. The protagonists of his plays tend to be detached characters, who are described as not needing other people (Becket, Harry, Colby), and without marital entanglements Eliot might have been an aloof philosopher, devoted to a life of thought rather than action.

Action was a central preoccupation of Eliot’s verse from the start. He did not quite know what to do with himself. Forsaking an academic career he worked in a bank, an ‘occupation’ that did not match his tastes or talents, and that gave him insight into the alienated aspects of a working life – all those clerks and businessmen in The Waste Land. Eliot’s first collection, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) centers on a romantic but impotent subjectivity, dramatized most memorably in the figure of Prufrock. He is unable to act:

.

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse...

.

Hamletian indecision goes hand in hand with an inability to live comfortably in time, or to seize the present moment. But his indecision has not the grandeur of Hamlet’s (‘No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be’); indeed his grandiosity is another aspect of his weakness.

.

           I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,

           And in short, I was afraid…

.

In later works Eliot will invoke other grandiose figures of threatened or thwarted action: Parsifal, Becket, Arjuna. The scepticism, flexibility and sense of relativity that marked Eliot as a philosopher show their debilitating existential aspect in this poetry.

Eliot’s second collection of 1920 abandons the subjective speaker and offers instead a series of objectified dramatic monologues exploring registers of disgust in language that is sometimes anti-Semitic (drawing on Marlowe and Shakespeare), racist. misogynistic, and homophobic. This is of a piece with Eliot’s practice of private ribald and scabrous versifying. ‘The ribald verses constitute part of the story of the poet’s transition from the Laforguean velleities of 1917 to the Corbièresque bluntnesses, such as Sweeney Erect, of 1920’ (Christopher Ricks, Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917 by T. S. Eliot, Faber., 1996, p. xvi). This side of Eliot’s imagination, rather adolescent and scarcely felt to be as offensive then as it may be now, has drawn on him rather heavy-handed strictures from the archons of political correctness, foremort of whom is Anthony Julius, author of T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form (Cambridge UP, 1995).

In The Waste Land (1922) the subjective lyrical intensity of the first collection and the ironic dramatizations of the second fuse; in an early poem ‘the floors of memory’ ‘dissolve’ (‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’); here it is as if the floor of consciousness has dissolved and the individual ego is replaced by a Babel of voices giving utterance from a variety of contexts and angles the agony of the contemporary world. Eliot’s own ego is now figured in the androgynous seer Tiresias, appearing at the centre of the poem, who has ‘foresuffered all’ the sordid experiences of its various personae. In the drafts of The Waste Land (V. Eliot, ed. The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Edition, Faber, 1971, pp. 100-1), we find Eliot quoting a passage of the Bhagavad Gîtâ to vehiculate his sense of undergoing death and a possible resurrection, and also the breaking open of the boundaries of his selfhood. ‘I am the ritual action, I am the sacrifice, I am the ancestral oblation, I am the (medicinal) herb, I am the (sacred) hymn, I am also the melted butter, I am the fire and I am the offering’ (Gîtâ 9.16). He quotes the oldest Upanishad as the voice of the Thunder at the end of The Waste Land: ‘Datta, dayadhvam, damyata (Give, sympathise, control). The fable of the meaning of the Thunder is found in the Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad, 5, 1’ (Eliot’s note). Giving and control represent the poles of attachment and detachment necessary for effective action.

After this amazing poem Eliot could go no further on the path of the naked image. He navigates toward a poetry of statement, with Dante as controlling model, beginning with The Hollow Men (1925) in which the agony is focused as paralysis, and the remedy begins to be profiled as some form of Right Action:

.

           Shape without form, shade without colour,

           Paralysed force, gesture without motion…

.

           Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

.

The refrain from the Lord’s Prayer is a first indication that the path of restoration will be a Christian one. Five years pass before the next substantial utterance of Eliot’s taciturn muse, Ash Wednesday (1930), where amid images of a Dantesque paradise, an elusive realm of joy, the speaker broods on right action. It begins with the renunciation of illusory longings and impure motives:

.

Because I do not hope to turn again

Because I do not hope

Because I do not hope to turn

Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope

I no longer strive to strive towards such things…

.

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly

But merely vans to beat the air

The air which is now thoroughly small and dry

Smaller and dryer than the will

Teach us to care and not to care

Teach us to sit still

.

The tone of sadness here, of a grim renunciant self-dedication to daily duty, actually masks a new serenity and confidence. Eliot, who thought he had nothing more to say after The Hollow Men, has found his voice as a religious poet.

Eliot must have found satisfaction in achieving a goal that eluded Henry James, in becoming a successful London playwright. He began with the choruses for The Rock (1934), which contain advance drafts of ideas more subtly phrased in Four Quartets:

.

Then came, at a predetermined moment, a moment in time and of time,

A moment not out of time, but in time, in what we call history: transecting, bisecting the world of time, a moment in time but not like a moment of time,

A moment in time but time was made through that moment: for without the meaning there is no time, and that moment of time gave the meaning. (VII)

.

Interestingly, the role of the ‘Higher Religions’ in preparing that moment of the Incarnation is defined as a limited one: ‘Prayer wheels, worship of the dead, denial of this world, affirmation of rites with forgotten meanings… Waste and void’ (VII). This is all rather jejune. The more private musings of the Quartets will open a more convincing space of reflection.

Murder in the Cathedral (1935) introduces a more Oriental mystique of time, notably in the last lines of Fourth Tempter in Act I:

.

           You do and do not know, what it is to act or suffer.

You know and do not know, that action is suffering,

And suffering action. Neither does the agent suffer

Nor the patient act. But both are fixed

In an eternal action, an eternal patience

To which all must consent that it may be willed

And which all must suffer that they may will it,

That the pattern may subsist, that the wheel may turn and still

Be forever still. (Act I)

.

Perhaps the Gîtâ’s teaching on the impossibility of not acting lies in the background here: ‘For no one can remain even for a moment without doing work; every one is made to act helplessly by the impulses born of nature’ (3.5). This bondage to work is a condition to be borne patiently; right action is a way of undergoing this passion.

Eliot’s modern plays, The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1949), The Confidential Clerk (1953) and The Elder Statesman (1958) are odd products, period pieces, oblivious of new trends such as the Theater of the Absurd and of the social classes that would be prominent in the drama of the Angry Young Men; indeed, they are pervaded by the snobbery of the faux Englishman, with their Sir Claudes, Lady Elizabeths, and Lord Clavertons. Their brittle plots and characterization owe less to real life than to other plays – ancient Greek ones and modern ‘well-made plays,’ of which they are a brilliant self-conscious pastiche. Their grasp of psychology and society is inferior to that of Somerset Maugham. The riot of identifications of long-lost infants in The Confidential Clerk outdoes Beaumarchais and Wilde in this creakiest of plot-devices. Frederick Knott’s Dial M for Murder (1952; filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1954) leaves a clear mark on the dialogue between Lord Claverton and his quasi-blackmailing schoolfriend in the first act of The Elder Statesman.

The plays turn on decision and action – Becket opts for martyrdom in a drama that almost becomes a ritual, Harry, pursued by the Eumenides in The Family Reunion atones not only his own guilt but that of his father by going off on a solitary mission, as does Celia in The Cocktail Party (1949), while its married protagonists dedicate themselves to the prosaic duties of their mediocre state in life.

.

LAVINIA

Then what can we do

When we can go neither back nor forward? Edward!

What can we do?

REILLY

You have answered your own question,

Though you do not know the meaning of what you have said.

EDWARD

Lavinia, we must make the best of a bad job.

That is what he means. (Act II)

.

Despite the daring injection of highflown Sophoclean and Euripidean myth into the conventional theatrical fabric, these dramas have a lasting value because of the firmness with which they grasp the problem of human action in time (though The Family Reunion is quite muddled). The protagonists are brought to a moment of decisive action, but it is an action in the mournful key of renunciation of illusion. Repentance is the chief action of the eponymous Elder Statesman which the eponymous Confidential Clerk finds his vocation as a church organist (destined ultimately for the ministry). The moral murk that they have to deal with recalls Arjuna’s qualms at the beginning of the Gîtâ, qualms that the mystic assurances of Krishna seem to dispel by magic incantation rather than rational argument (see J. S. O’Leary, ‘Moral Qualms and Mystic Claims,’ in: C. Cornille, ed. Song Divine: Christian Commentaries on the Bhagavad-Gîtâ, Leuven, 2006). The Family Reunion resorts to mystic rituals that scarcely address the issues of guilt and responsibility in a convincing way. The rather clinical Buddhist analyses of The Cocktail Party show Oriental religion as demystifying rather than mystificatory.

.

Krishna in The Dry Salvages

Cleo McNelly Kearns has thrown a flood of light on Eliot’s engagement with Indic traditions in her T. S. Eliot and Indic Traditions (Cambridge UP, 1987). In her reading of Four Quartets she shows how Eliot, in wartime, exposes himself to the abysses of the unknown, drawing on Indic as well as Christian traditions, and deliberately rehearsing older traditions in an ‘off’ style to make us sense how they fail before the abyss. The much contested third Quartet (The Dry Salvages) is vindicated as drawing on Eliot’s earliest roots – the Mississippi seen with the eyes of Whitman and blended with the Ganges. As Eliot wrote, in To Critiize the Critic (p. 54): ‘The Mississippi of Mark Twain is… the universal river of human life – more universal, indeed, than the Congo of Joseph Conrad. For Twain’s readers anywhere, the Mississippi is the river. There is in Twain, I think, a great unconscious depth, which gives to Huckleberry Finn this symbolic value.’

Many of us first met the name ‘Krishna’ in the following enigmatic lines from The Dry Salvages III:

.

I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant –

Among other things – or one way of putting the same thing:

That the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavender spray

Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,

Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened.

And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.

You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,

That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.

.

The initial response of Dame Helen Gardner was that the arcane reference to Krishna, like a pistol shot in a concert hall, just would not fit in, unlike the discreet ‘Chinese vase’ of Burnt Norton V; other critics, back in 1943, judged that ‘his Christianity is sapped by Indian ideas; and yet he does not have the Indian wisdom either’ (Paul Goodman, in G. Clarke, ed., T. S. Eliot: Critical Assessments, London: Helm, 1990, III, p. 93). What none realized is that his Indian wisdom was as familiar to the poet as the Christian images that had become so prominent in his verse. Yet today the allusion seems to help save the poem from a churchy enclosure; the rather muddled Hindu-Buddhist surmises fit well the persona of the speaker, seen not as an oracle but as tentative seeker.

The wisdom he gropes after here is to the effect that past agonies are not healed, future aspirations are mere nostalgia without a real object, and only the present is the place of ‘right action’ and of salvation – the place where we ‘consider the future/And the past with an equal mind’ (DS III). Paul Murray notes that the Buddhist phrase in the lines, ‘And right action is freedom/From past and future also’ (DS V) ‘expresses in code, or in shorthand, Eliot’s own private debt of gratitude to the Eastern tradition’ (T. S. Eliot and Mysticism, London: Macmillan, 1991, p. 141). The equal mind, or equality (samatâ) is a major theme of the Gîtâ: ‘Fixed in yoga, do thy work, O Winner of wealth (Arjuna), abandoning attachment, with an even mind in success and failure, for evenness of mind (samatvam) is called yoga’ (2.48). ‘Treating alike pleasure and pain, gain and loss, victory and defeat, then get ready for battle. Thus thou shall not incur sin. This is the wisdom of the Sâmkhya given to thee, O Pârtha (Arjuna). Listen now to the wisdom of the Yoga. If your intelligence accepts it, thou shalt cast away the bondage of works’ (2.38-9).

.

At the moment which is not of action or inaction

You can receive this: ‘on whatever sphere of being

The mind of a man may be intent
At the time of death’ – that is the one action

(And the time of death is every moment)

Which shall fructify in the lives of others:

And do not think of the fruit of action. (DS III)

.

Eliot steers this toward a paschal understanding of action, action that fructifies not in one’s next life but in the life of others. A Christian sense of sacrifice gives new color to desireless action, while the Indian language adds spice to the Christian theme. Perhaps it does ‘sap’ or show up the conventionalism of some of Eliot’s Christian language, or perhaps such passages as the oft-derided lyric, ‘The wounded surgeon plies the steel…’ (EC IV), are already self-consciously conventional, as if the poet is saying ‘here is the story we Christians tell ourselves,’ turning then to Krishna for a modern, existential transposition of the paschal theme.

‘Do not consider the fruit of action’ summarizes Eliot’s conception of the purification of motive, the cleansing of the will, of the springs of action. He recurs to this doctrine in ‘To the Indians who Died in Africa’ (1943): 

.

Let those who go home tell the same story of you:

Of action with a common purpose, action

None the less fruitful if neither you nor we

Know, until the judgement after death,

What is the fruit of action.

.

(see K. S. Narayana Rao, T. S. Eliot and the Bhagavad-Gita, American Quarterly 15, 1963, pp. 572-8; 16,1964, pp. 102-3). The doctrine pervades the Indian poem: ‘To action alone hast thou a right and never at all to its fruits; let not the fruits of action be thy motive; neither let there be in thee any attachment to inaction’ (2.47). ‘What they call renunciation, that know to be disciplined activity, O Pândava (Arjuna), for no one becomes a yogin who has not renounced his (selfish) purpose’ (6.2). ‘When one does not get attached to the objects of sense or to works, and has renounced all purposes (samkalpa), then, he is said to have attained to yoga’ (6.4).

‘This yoga declared by you to be of the nature of equality (evenness of mind), O Madhusûdana (Krsna), I see no stable foundation for, on account of restlessness. For the mind is verily fickle O Krsna, it is impetuous, strong and obstinate. I think that it is as difficult to control as the wind’ (6.33-4). Krishna urges that it can be controlled through abhyâsya and vairâgya (6.35). This doctrine, very central to the Yoga Sûtras as well, may underlie Ash Wednesday. Control and renunciation are key Eliot themes. Mircea Eliade has a rich discussion of them in Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (Princeton UP, 1969). The dyad of detachment and practice is taken up by Vedântins in their critical appropriation of the Yoga tradition: ‘To master the mind, Gaudapâda favors a double method (upâya): 1) detachment (vairâgya), in recalling, at a useful time, that “all is suffering” (duhkham sarvam); 2) the assiduous practice of knowledge (jnânâbhyâsa) on the following theme: “All is non-born” (ajam sarvam)’ (Christian Bouy, Les Nâtha-yogin et les Upanisads, Paris: Collège de France, 1994, p. 59).

‘The renunciation of works and their unselfish performance both lead to the soul’s salvation. But of the two, the unselfish performance of works (karmayoga) is better than their renunciation (samnyâsa)’ (5.2). The core of Eliot’s spirituality is the unselfish performance of works. His contemplative glimpses of a world of ecstasy allow him to imagine the vocation of contemplative renunciation, but it is not the path he himself will travel. Like the Gîtâ, Eliot’s poetry has another side, in mystical outlooks that alternate with the moralizing reflections. Baffling paradox is the mode of this utterance. But ‘the unread wisdom in the higher dream’ (Ash Wednesday IV) remains a tantalizing vision just around the corner, and the core of Eliot’s conviction and of what he wants to say concerns the life of action.

‘He who neither loathes nor desires should be known as one who has ever the spirit of renunciation; for free from dualities (nirdvandvo) he is released easily’ (5.3). Loathing and desire are the passions prevalent in Eliot’s verse, but his later verse gains its strength from being precisely the disciplining of these emotions. The struggle is more tense in Ash Wednesday than in Burnt Norton, where one may feel that the poet has acquired a too serene superiority to the world of loathing and desire:

.

Here is a place of disaffection…

Tumid apathy with no concentration (BN III)

.

Concentration is the achievement of that discipline of mind which the Gîtâ calls buddhiyoga: ‘Far inferior indeed is mere action to the discipline of intelligence (buddhiyoga), O Winner of wealth (Arjuna), seek refuge in intelligence. Pitiful are those who seek for the fruits (of their action). One who has yoked his intelligence (with the Divine) (or is established in his intelligence) casts away even here both good and evil’ (2.49-50). Eliot is not inclined to step beyond good and evil, yet he overcomes dualisms and discriminations in the reconciliation he effects between attachment and detachment, time and eternity, and the opposing sides in the Civil War, ‘United in the strife which divided them’ (LG III).

‘The status which is obtained by men of renunciation is reached by men of action also. He who sees that the ways of renunciation (sâmkhya) and action (yoga) are one, he sees (truly)’ (5.5). The words here do not refer to the homonymous later philosophical schools, of which only the germs are found in the Gîtâ. Eliot tells us in After Strange Gods (New York, 1934, p. 43) that he was left in a state of ‘enlightened mystification’ by his study of Patanjali’s Yoga Sûtras as translated by James Woods (J. H. Woods, The Yoga-Sutras of Patanjali, Harvard Oriental Series, 1914). In the Gîtâ he would find only laconic allusions to such topics as ‘practice’ (abhyâsa), ‘non-attachment’ (vairâgya), and yoga as a practice, which are discussed systematically in Patanjali. ‘In the Gîtâ we have like the Upanishads, unarranged, non-systematised, stray thoughts without any attempt at scientific definition, classification, division and subdivision which are the marked features of later systematic works. In short, what we have in the Gîtâ are the germs, the raw materials and not the well-developed, ready made systems of philosophy’ (K. N. Upadhyaya, Early Buddhism and the Bhagavadgîtâ, Delhi, 1983, p. 14-15).

The hour of death is the temporal reality on which Eliot most intently seizes, but he wants to live every moment as a moment of death and resurrection, by being freed from bondage to time and bondage to works. The Gîtâ has much to say about this, apart from the passage Eliot quotes: ‘And whoever, at the time of death, gives up his body and departs, thinking of Me alone, he comes to My status (of being); of that there is no doubt. Thinking of whatever state (of being) he at the end gives up his body, to that being does he attain, O Son of Kuntî (Arjuna), being ever absorbed in the thought thereof’ (8.5-6). Note that the devotionalism of the Indian poem is rather absent in Eliot, who does not talk about keeping one’s mind fixed on Christ or on God. The last phrase, sadâ tad bhâva bhâvitah, (lit. ‘ever made to become in the condition of that’) is echoed in Eliot’s ‘the hour of death is every moment’ – absorbed in the will of God in a renunciant way at every moment, one is dying to self. The Gîtâ verses take up what was mentioned earlier: ‘Those who know Me as the One that governs the material and the divine aspects, and all sacrifices, they, with their minds harmonized, have knowledge of Me even at the time of their departure (from here)’ (7.30). Arjuna asked for clarification: ‘How again art Thou to be known at the time of departure by the self-controlled? (8.2). The practical upshot: ‘Therefore at all times remember Me and fight. When thy mind and understanding are set on Me, to Me alone shalt thou come without doubt’ (8.7). ‘This is the divine state (brâhmîsthiti) O Pârtha (Arjuna), having attained thereto, one is (not again) bewildered; fixed in that state at the end (at the hour of death) one can attain to the bliss of God (brahmanirvâna)’ (2.72). ‘He who meditates on the Seer, the ancient, the ruler, subtler than the subtle, the supporter of all, whose form is beyond conception (sarvasya dhâtâram acintyarûpam), who is suncoloured beyond the darkness; he who does so, at the time of departure, with a steady mind, devotion and strength of yoga and setting well his life force in the centre of the eyebrows, he attains to the Supreme Divine Person’ (8.9-10). ‘Apparently this practice is possible only for those who choose the moment of death by the power of yoga’ (Radhakrishnan, ad loc.). ‘He who utters the single syllable Aum (which is) Brahman, remembering Me as he departs (vyâharan mâm anusmaran), giving up his body, he goes to the highest goal’ (8.13). Those who go forth never to be reborn choose the way of light, those who will be reborn choose that of darkness: ‘Light and darkness, these paths are thought to be the world’s everlasting (paths). By the one he goes not to return (anâvrttim), by the other he returns again’ (8.26).

All of this ties up with Christian ideas in Ash Wednesday and Four Quartets.

.

           Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death (Ash Wednesday I, quoting the ‘Ave Maria’)

.

           Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew (Ash Wednesday IV)

.

           Chill

Fingers of yew be curled

Down on us? (BN IV)

.

We, content at the last

If our temporal reversion nourish

(Not too far from the yew-tree)

The life of significant soil. (The Dry Salvages V)

.

The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree

Are of equal duration. (Little Gidding V)

.

There is little sense of the Resurrection, or of a call to strive forward toward the eschatological future. Eliot emphasize less the sequence, the passage through death to a new birth, than a concord of death and birth, time and eternity.

,

Action and Incarnation

The Dry Salvages on its own might leave the impression that Eliot’s commitment to action is sapped by a sense of oriental futility. The poem addresses the condition of those from whom action has lost inherent justification and become a chore, those whose life has lost its joy and become a condition of mourning or renunciation:

.

There is no end, but addition: the trailing

Consequence of further days and hours,

While emotion takes to itself the emotionless

Years of living among the breakage

Of what was believed in as the most reliable –

And therefore the fittest for renunciation. (DS II)

.

But the final Quartet, Little Gidding, no doubt Eliot’s greatest statement, reaffirms a thoroughly Christian, incarnational sense of action, in passionate attachment yet in free detachment from any clinging to success or self-glorification. The agony he faces here centrally concerns action. The ‘compound familiar ghost’ who reveals ‘the gifts reserved for age’ in section II recalls:

.

The rending pain of re-enactment

Of all that you have done, and been; the shame

Of motives late revealed, and the awareness

Of things ill done and done to others’s harm

Which once you took for exercise of virtue.

.

(Anthony Julius, in the skewed perspective that his adversarial brief creates, sees here an avoidance of detailed confession of anti-Semitic offences, and indifference to the sufferings these failures caused to others.)

Eliot is aware that there is no guarantee that action will be right. Decisions will turn out to be wrong, yet avoiding decision is wrong too. Only ‘the purification of the motive/In the ground of our beseeching’ (LG III) can provide a relative safeguard. Arjuna, too, learns to purify his motive, but not in such a way as to dispel the ambiguities that hover around the motif of dharma, righteousness, right through the Mahâbhârata. ‘Save work done as and for a sacrifice this world is in bondage to work. Therefore, O son of Kuntî (Arjuna), do thy work as a sacrifice, becoming free from all attachment’ (3.9). ‘The Gita, in the Upanishadic tradition, had proposed the transformation of the phenomenal self into the noumenal by way of transcending the ego and its desire for the “fruits.” The idea served Eliot in reinterpreting the Laforguean dédoublement of the self of his early poetry’ (Ron D. K. Banerjee, ‘T. S. Eliot and the Gita,’ in: C. D. Verma, ed. The Gita in World Literature, New Delhi: Sterling, 1990, pp. 117-29; p. 123). The Cocktail Party dramatizes this, as does The Elder Statesman:

.

           What is this self inside us, this silent observer,

           Severe and speechless critic, who can terrorise us

           And urge us on to futile activity,

           And in the end, judge us still more severely

           For the errors into which his own reproaches drove us? (Act II)

.

Action has to become a penitential purgation. Each action becomes a kind of martyrdom, a death and a resurrection. When he talks of

.

Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment

From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference

Which resembles the others as death resembles life (LG III)

.

he is not advocating indifference, the false synthesis between extremes. Misled by the analogy of the Buddhist middle path, critics like C. K. Stead (The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot, London: Hutchinson, 1964) see Eliot as opting for indifference. But Eliot is not talking here of a Buddhist abstention from the extremes of substantialism and annihilationism, or – in Mahâyâna terms – of belief in the reality of what exists and attachment to emptiness. Rather he is celebrating the paradoxical conjunction of commitment and lucid detachment, each sustaining the other. Hence,

.

not less of love but expanding

Of love beyond desire, and so liberation

From the future as well as the past. (ibid.)

.

As the last words indicate, the attached-detached agent is the one who lives in the present, and for whom the perspectives of memory and of hope are enabling rather than paralyzing, for they are no longer occasions for clinging or distraction.

Like Becket in Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot seeks to purify the springs and motives of action. He does so, not through cogitations, but in fulfilling his duty in the present moment, like Arjuna, thus aspiring to:

.

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything) (LG V)

.

That is the condition of ‘the saint’:

.

To apprehend

The point of intersection of the timeless

With time, is an occupation for the saint –

No occupation either, but something given

And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love,

Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender. (DS V)

.

The milieu the Quartets most explore is that of the average believer, forging ahead amid doubt and failure:

.            

There are only hints and guesses,

Hints followed by guesses; and the rest

Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.

The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation. (ibid.)

.

This poetry of meditative surmise finds an anchor in a modest practical wisdom, a karma-yoga, ‘the wisdom of humility’ (EC V), which threatens to drag it down to a plodding drabness. The entire performance is dominated by the symbol of ‘Incarnation’ as the intersection of time and eternity in moments of intense vision or in a life of saintly action, as gloriously celebrated in Little Gidding. That symbol seems unaffected by the Indian sources, yet their presence in the poem at all intimates a more pluralistic, truly incarnated ethic and spirituality than Eliot was able to articulate.

.

The Oriental Sense of Time

Eliot’s philosophy of time focuses on the present as the locus of ‘reality,’ in which past and future are present as present dimensions. Our dreams of the future are as unreal as our retentions from the past, and indeed they are made out of the stuff of memory, hence ‘a faded song.’ The Oriental note is subtly present from the start of Burnt Norton, not only in the lines, ‘And the lotos rose quietly, quietly,/The surface glittered out of heart of light,’ but in the very opening lines, which may echo Nagarjuna’s demonstration of the unreality of time due to the mutual implication of temporal categories (Stanzas of the Middle Way 19): ‘Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future/And time future contained in time past.’

Eliot’s philosophy of time is more Oriental than biblical. He conceives the Incarnation as the intersection of the time and eternity in a privileged present. Its impact on history has nothing to do with a future-oriented expectation of the Kingdom of God – indeed any image of history as progress is scotched to a degree that is rather incompatible with the biblical idea of God working in history. ‘History may be servitude,/History may be freedom’ (LG III); it is the latter when ‘history is a pattern/Of timeless moments’ (LG V).

Choosing Becket as a model, Eliot correlates the passive action of the obedient martyr with a sense of eternity in the midst of time, ‘the still point of the turning world’ (BN II). The world is an unreal stage in which we perform our part in duty and obedience. The Indian sources would be seen as encouraging this attitude, which had a crippling effect on Eliot as a social and as a Christian thinker. ‘The world has no meaning. It is only the game that God carries on with himself,’ but Krishna, unlike Brahmanism, demands that instead of remaining an uninvolved spectator, Arjuna ‘play along with this divinely instituted game, in abandonment to God, no matter how incomprehensible he finds it’ (Albert Schweitzer, Die Weltanschauung der indischen Denker, Munich: dtv, 1982, p. 148). The following verse may have a special relevance for Eliot: ‘He who does the work which he ought to do without seeking its fruit he is the samnyâsin, he is the yogin, not he who does not light the sacred fire, and performs no rites’ (Gîtâ 6.1). He may often have felt that he was merely acting a role in life, that he had not found his proper work, svadharma as opposed to paradharma (see Gîtâ 3.35). Rootless in America, as the scion of a New England family living in the South, and then as a Southerner in Boston, his roots in English life, as an expatriate, were shallow also. The more polished his performance, the more of a game it seemed, just as his parodic mastery of old genres showed them up as ludic conventions. Thus he staged his life of action as a sacrificial spirituality, and when he tried to give it public dimensions, beyond the literary and spiritual, he floundered, and failed to connect effectively with the socio-political currents and debates of his time.

.

A Liberal Vision

Eliot chose Anglican orthodoxy, yet he retained, or recovered, the open horizons of his Unitarian childhood. His appreciation of so liberal a theologian as Tillich, in the 1950s, shows the absence of reactionary dogmatic reflexes. Eliot and Tillich share a faith open to contemporary culture; he was drawn to Tillich’s theology of forgiveness based on love rather than remorse; he read the first volume of Systematic Theology on a 1950 boat-trip to South Africa, later praising it as one of the deepest theological works of recent times (see Gordon, pp. 238, 328). The fabric of doctrine in Four Quartets is handled lightly, as a set of skilful means (upâya) for spiritual exploration. Eliot’s mind followed many paths and held them together under the rubric of his faith in the Incarnation. In current inter-religious and inter-cultural dialogue the work of literary style and visionary imagination whereby Eliot gave new vibrancy to every tradition he took up may be a beacon toward a ‘deeper communion’ between East and West. His investment in orthodox faith did not erase the skeptical complexion of his mind; the combination of faith and questioning lends enigmatic appeal to Four Quartets and the plays. He continued to philosophize in his critical essays, often striking notes from beyond the world of the average literary scholar.

Eliot’s open, liberal vision has been occluded by his image as a reactionary Anglican. In fact his Christianity is the broadest imaginable, set in connection with a secular world and with the history of religions. His plays are very secular parables, not at all oriented to a solely Christian reading of the human dilemmas they expose. Any sectarian narrowing of Christian identity could only be suicidal, Eliot knew. The explorer of vegetation myths in The Waste Land set the paschal mystery in relation to the cosmic seasons and elements in Four Quartets. If one gives undue weight to Eliot’s less happy performances, such as After Strange Gods (1933), The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), and Notes Towards a Definition of Culture (1948), one can see Eliot as ‘a woolly, second-order critical thinker, whose drive to mate two very different creatures modernism and Anglican orthodoxy produced a sterile, unproductive aesthetic ideology,’ as Will Self does (The Guardian, May 26, 1996). But a retrieval of Eliot in another key, starting from the relativization of traditional Christian representations by their placement in interreligious space in Four Quartets, may yet reveal that Eliot’s work retains its seminal potency.

.

A shorter version of this essay appears in Journal of Vaishnava Studies 16/1 (Fall, 2007)