T.S. Eliot and the Fulfillment of Christian Poetics

G. Atkins

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137470836
• eBook ISBN: 9781137466259
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The culmination of a trilogy that began with T.S. Eliot, Lancelot Andrewes, and the Word, and continued with T.S. Eliot: The Poet as Christian, this gracefully executed new book brings to a triumphant conclusion the unique effort to pinpoint and identify the Christian characteristics of Eliot's poetic art. The book offers a close but companionable reading of each of the complex poems that make up Four Quartets, the essay-poem that is Eliot's masterwork. Focusing on the range of speaking voices dramatized, Atkins reveals for the first time the Incarnational form that governs the work's 'purposive movement' toward purification and fulfilment of points of view that were represented earlier in the poems.

1

Four Quartets: Simulacrum of Being

Abstract: Four Quartets is about not only the “central” Christian dogma of the Incarnation but also the difficulty of understanding it and the difficulty of getting it down right in words that inevitably slip, slide, and refuse to stay still, their meaning by no means guaranteed. As the poem fulfills, and thus completes, the partial understanding in Eliot’s pre-conversion poems, it calls the reader to participate in “forward” movement. Completion occurs only in time, a point that mirrors the Incarnational understanding that the timeless intersects with time, in time, that is.

Atkins, G. Douglas. T.S. Eliot and the Fulfillment of Christian Poetics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137466259.0003.

The verses in “East Coker” are both mundane and metapoetic, the speaker commenting, in straightforward and prosaic language, on his own just-preceding words: “That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory,” for, he says, it was “A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion” that leaves you “still with the intolerable wrestle / With words and meanings.”¹ The following half-verse is especially striking, raising a question or two perhaps never intended: “The poetry does not matter.” We have, of course, long been taught that it does, that what is said is simply inseparable from how it is said.

The enigmatic remark may, though, be more positive than it at first seems: it forces Eliot’s puzzled reader to explore that puzzlement, indeed to consider reliability of speaking voice and validity of declaration. In what sense(s) does the poetry not matter? Or does it make all the difference in the world? Old Possum imposes the questions, requiring that the reader, in the words of Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems, “Be mindful” (“Sovegna vos” are his words, indirect as often, the words a quotation in ProvenÇal from the medieval poet Arnaut Daniel, of whom Eliot’s friend Pound thought highly).²

The issue touches on, if it does revolve around, what the conjunction brings together in the subtitle of Eliot’s major volume For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (1928). In his first collection, eight years earlier, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, Eliot had pointed a union of differences and argued the necessity of turning to cultural criticism only after engaging fully in the basic and primary work of reading texts closely and doing literary commentary. The foundation thus being laid in his pre-conversion essays—he formally embraced Anglo-Catholic Christianity with his baptism into the Church of England in 1927, a move that he announced in the preface to the 1928 collection of essays—Eliot brings together in his new book, strategically organized, eight essays on a range of figures, some barely recognizable even 80 years ago, and having a range of historical significance. They begin with two on seventeenth-century Anglican churchmen (Andrewes and John Bramhall) and proceed with a discussion of political and philosophical essayists and of writers of drama and poetry: in order, Machiavelli, F.H. Bradley (the subject of Eliot’s Harvard doctoral dissertation, written but never defended though eventually published), Baudelaire, Thomas Middleton, Richard Crashaw, and Irving Babbitt (the Harvard Orientalist and another of Eliot’s teachers). It appears, at first, to be no more than a random collection, belying the claim of deliberateness made in the preface and perhaps hinted at in the subtitle.

Of course, the “order” Eliot refers to in his subtitle is that both apparent in the writing itself of the eight men chosen for discussion (and elucidation) and figuring critically in their thinking. Thus, in the titular and lead essay, Eliot employs what he has earlier called “the tools of criticism”—comparison and analysis³—to reveal Bishop Andrewes’s poetics of both writing and reading: “squeezing and squeezing a word until it yields a full juice of meaning which we should never have supposed any word to possess,” juxtaposing a word or phrase in its “nearer and more remote contexts,” and adhering to “ordonnance,” that is, structure, form, and order, the whole charged with “intensity.”⁴

Style, thus, reveals order. More: the two are not only inseparable, but a way also appears in their conjunction (“and”)—their “concord”—that affirms and confirms the argument of The Sacred Wood. That is, the way toward “order” lies in, through, and by means of “style.” A writer’s manner of saying—his or her style—reflects, indeed embodies, an understanding of inner and outer reality represented in his words, their “rhyming,” and their “ordonnance.” It is by means a new or unfamiliar idea; in Eliot it both plays a central role and participates as a crucial part of a whole.

Style would, therefore, appear to be more than Alexander Pope termed “dress” of thought in An Essay on Criticism (1711).⁵ In other words, the poetry does matter. We are thus back to the contrary assertion in Four Quartets, with elucidation still needed.

And yet—the passage in question in “East Coker”—and especially the bold declaration that “the poetry does not matter”—is like so many others in Four Quartets. It does not, apparently, require analysis, being straightforward and clear. It does require meditation. And that means slowing down, considering, weighing—being mindful (as Ash-Wednesday urges). Indeed, therein may lie Old Possum’s purpose. If we think of “poetry” as signifying the words, then of course it matters. But if, differently, by “poetry” we mean the accoutrements, or “dress,” “style” as ornamentation, then no. Eliot’s concern lies, properly, with “the ancient rhyme”: the word “rhyme” brilliantly captures the entailed paradox, an apparent ornament that is the “dogma” (as the decorative angel atop the Christmas tree is, for the child, an Angel, in the later Ariel poem), “rhyme” itself referring to relations, union, and the play of sameness and difference. That the “ancient rhyme” can appear in “new verse” means liberation from the past mindlessly embraced made possible by submission to the universal and timeless, which time, along with entailed difference, requires that we convey “in new verse.”

The burden on the reader of Four Quartets is not just considerable; it is massive, and exhausting, confronting the inexhaustible poem.

Taking the indirect way that Eliot endorsed, and described as a characteristic of modern “difficult” poetry,⁶ I turn, with prospects ahead of further understanding, to the critical discussion of the path toward belief of the “intelligent” pilgrim in the essay introducing Blaise Pascal’s Pensées (1931). The following passage from it is rife with autobiographical ramifications. “To understand the method which Pascal employs,” begins Eliot, the word “method” rhyming with the word “process,”

the reader must be prepared to follow the process of the mind of the intelligent believer. The Christian thinker—and I mean the man who is trying consciously and conscientiously to explain to himself the sequence which culminates in faith, rather than the public apologist—proceeds by rejection and elimination. He finds the world to be so and so; he finds its character inexplicable by any non-religious theory: among religions he finds Christianity, and Catholic Christianity, to account most satisfactorily for the world and especially for the moral order within; and thus, by what [Cardinal] Newman calls “powerful and concurrent” reasons, he finds himself inexorably committed to the dogma of the Incarnation.⁷

Eliot’s words bear greater relevance to his own journey toward belief than is, I believe, often recognized. That “process” is, indeed, intellectual, rather than emotional (or, perhaps, spiritual), and it is fundamentally empirical, exploratory, analytical, and comparative. “To the unbeliever,” he then continues,

this method seems disingenuous and perverse: for the unbeliever is, as a rule, not so greatly troubled to explain the world to himself, nor so greatly distressed by its disorder; nor is he generally concerned (in modern terms) to “preserve values”. He does not consider that if certain emotional states, certain developments of character, and what in the highest sense can be called “saintliness” are inherently and by inspection known to be good, then the satisfactory explanation of the world must be an explanation which will admit the “reality” of these values. Nor does he consider such reasoning admissible; he would, so to speak, trim his values according to his cloth, because to him such values are of no value. The unbeliever starts from the other end, and as likely as not with the question: Is a case of human parthenogenesis credible? and this he would call going straight to the heart of the matter. Now Pascal’s method is, on the whole, the method natural and right for the Christian. ... ⁸

Described is the method Eliot himself followed on the way to Anglo-Catholicism. In this process, as the words above attest, order—and “disorder”—figure prominently. Just as he said it was for Lancelot Andrewes, the Incarnation was for Eliot “an essential dogma.”⁹

Because Eliot refers not to the Incarnation but to “Incarnation“ in Four Quartets (“The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation” [“The Dry Salvages”]), the essay-poem may recall the minor tradition of seventeenth-century “layman’s faith” works, whose focus is things that really matter.¹⁰ These works include, most notably, Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (1642), Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s De religione laici (1647), and the essay-poem Religio Laici or A Layman’s Faith (1682) by John Dryden, whom Eliot much admired and about whom he often wrote, Religio Laici specifically in his 1932 BBC radio casts published as John Dryden, the Poet, the Dramatist, the Critic. While sharing the desire of the layman’s faiths to direct attention to only the “essential” matters of faith, in hopes of avoiding needless bickering and, ultimately, ecclesiastical controversy quickly spreading to civil unrest, Four Quartets does not amount—or reduce—to a layman’s faith. That Eliot writes as a layman is a fact, though not one that he exploits as do the seventeenth-century writers, who share a clear and definite anti-clericalism. Eliot is, however, even less sectarian, as the reference to “Incarnation” indicates, for It stands as the pattern of which the Incarnation exists as the paradigmatic instance in human history. Another way of putting it: the Incarnation is the fulfillment of Incarnation (as the New Testament is of the Old).

The Incarnational pattern—the way of indirectness and of the “impossible union” of differences, as of divine and human, transcendence and immanence, but one-half of which we all too frequently grasp—constitutes for Eliot, as it does for Lancelot Andrewes behind him, the essential order in and of the world. It is the heart and soul of what Eliot believed; to understand the character of that “union,” to define the essential relation entailed, is the ongoing drama of Eliot’s writing. The other half of the story of his post-conversion work concerns how he represented the dogma that mattered so much to him. The latter constitutes his “style.”

Elsewhere, I have treated Eliot’s poetics and practice, post-1927: from Journey of the Magi in that year, to the other Ariel poems (including The Cultivation of Christmas Trees [1954]), and Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems (1930).¹¹ I did not, in T.S. Eliot: The Poet as Christian, consider Four Quartets in any detail or depth. There, I was concerned to show differences and similarities between poems written after Eliot’s formal embrace of Anglo-Catholic Christianity in 1927 and poems written before that year, which often suggest a mind and a sensibility philosophically compatible with if it not fully attuned to key matters and perspectives that Christianity explains “most satisfactorily,” including the relation of time and the timeless, and other critical instances of binary relations, differences, and apparent oppositions. Here, too, the issue is one, not of destruction or (even) transcendence of previous points of view or understanding but, rather, of their fulfillment. As has often been noted, Eliot’s poems frequently refer to his earlier work, and I suggest that he deliberately invokes a question about the relation of post- and pre-1927 poems, the latter work mirroring the relation of Christianity to Old Testament points of view. Eliot is, in Four Quartets, fulfilling (the promise of) his pre-conversion work, as “Little Gidding” fulfills that of the earlier parts of the essay-poem.

It would not be amiss to associate Eliot with Alexander Pope, as I have already hinted, for he is another “Catholic” poet for whom parts-whole figures as a central thematic, rhetorical, and poetic concern.¹² In 1921 in one of his most famous and influential essays, “The Metaphysical Poets,” later included in his Homage to John Dryden, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf in 1924 at the Hogarth Press, Eliot reveals the “dissociation of sensibility” that s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Four Quartets : Simulacrum of Being
• 2  Burnt Norton : The ancient rhyme in a new verse: Only through time time is conquered
• 3  East Coker : Mixing Memory and Desire: Lyrical Response and the Fear Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God
• 4  The Dry Salvages : Many Voices, Many Gods
• 5  The Dry Salvages (Continued): Four Quartets and the Work in the Word: What the Word Does
• 6  Little Gidding : Coming This Way, Coming Closer: Commonality, Communication, Community, and Communion, or Whats Being Done in Whats Being Said
• 7  Little Gidding (Continued): The Pattern in the Movement, the Doing in the Speaking
• Bibliography
• Index