Tag: poetry

The Journey of T. S. Eliot

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

Part Two

In the heart of Périgueux’s historic district, stands Saint-Front Cathedral

In August 1919 Eliot was still battling with the ideas and the form that would become The Waste Land. In that month he went, with Ezra Pound, on a walking tour of Provence. At one point they separated, Pound leaving to meet his wife. At this stage Eliot made what Matthew Hollis describes in his 2022 book on The Waste Land as a “his defining visit to Périgueux cathedral”. Hollis continues by saying that no account of what happened there is available but that “what is known is that what took place at the cathedral would be a turning point in Eliot’s life”.

The cathedral was dedicated to the legendary St Front, sent by St Peter to preach in the lands of Aquitaine. It was its later history which moved Eliot in some way, perhaps through the example of the powerful convictions of the protagonists of a later story. Provence and Aquitaine became battlegrounds in which Christianity had to confront two separate heresies in different ages, Arianism in one age and Albigensianism in another. 

Bishop Paternus had been deposed as the Bishop of Périgueux in 361 AD for preaching Arianism, the heresy which held that Jesus was not truly the Son of God, and unequal to Him. Paternus, was fiercely punished by St Hilary of Poitiers, known as the “Hammer of Arians”. Hilary proclaimed that to deny the Trinity was not only folly, but  a heresy. In substance Hilary said: To undertake such a thing is to embark upon the boundless, to dare the incomprehensible; to attempt to speak of God with more refinement than He has provided us with; it is enough that He has given His nature through the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. “Whatever is sought over and above this is beyond the meaning of words, beyond the limits of perception, beyond the embrace of understanding.”

Hilary was writing in the fourth century but his  language would resonate in Eliot in the twentieth. Eliot now found himself rudderless. It would be more than twenty years until his belief in the Blessed Trinity would flower definitively in Four Quartets. But in the early 1920s he still had many miles to travel. Nevertheless, these early Christian struggles shattered what was left of Eliot’s Unitarian foundations. 

Hollis writes:

In Périgueux, that summer, Eliot was a son separated from the love of a father in death and in life, and had yet to find the guidance of a holy spirit with which his joining of the Church of England in 1927 would allow him to commune. In the chronicles of the building before him, and in his walking conversations with Pound, Eliot could trace the accounts of martyrs and heretics alike who had gone into exile – or gone into the fire – for their convictions or their sins, people who had found a measure to live by and even to die for, who had found a family of higher calling. What had Eliot to offer compared to such commitment? Not the “one great tragedy” of the war in which he was denied a part. Not the daily negotiations at the bank for a treaty that he considered immoral and unjust, and altogether “a bad peace”. Not the wedding vows, taken before God, that seemed to him to have turned to ashes in his hands. He found he had no ideological framework from which to respond. The Unitarianism of his childhood seemed to him a poor man’s fuddle: a culture of humanitarianism, of ethical mind games rather than a passionate adherence to Incarnation, Heaven and Hell… And in the absence of a religious conviction, his writing simply could not bear the weight: regarded merely for its satire and wit, it had yet to find the ground from which to respond to the intensity of the emotions he was experiencing.

Eliot now felt alone. Pound was a kind of Confucian and this meant nothing to Eliot. “There are moments,” wrote Eliot in 1935, “perhaps not known to everyone, when a man may be nearly crushed by the terrible awareness of his isolation from every other human being.” But this religious anxiety filling him at times with a sense of dispossession, of emptiness, turned out in fact to be cathartic, his dark night of the soul.

Hollis interprets it this way: “a dispossession was also an exorcism: a word to describe the purging of demons, as applied by the Catholic Church from as early as its second century: it is a removal of the bad by the good. But that wasn’t exactly what Eliot had said. A dispossession not of the dead but by the dead:  not an action undertaken by him, but one done to him.”

He was now experiencing intimations of Purgatory, something alien to the theology of Unitarianism but surely something which might have remained in his subconscious from Annie Dunn’s prayers for the souls she believed to be in that place for a time. Hollis comments:

What transfixed Eliot in this moment was not heaven and hell, but purgatory, the temporary suffering or expiation for the purpose of spiritual cleansing. “In purgatory the torment of flame is deliberately and consciously accepted by the penitent,” Eliot wrote in his 1929 Dante. He made his own translation of the moment in the Purgatorio in which Dante is approached by souls from the  flames: “Then certain of them made towards me, so far as they could, but ever watchful not to come so far that they should not be in the fire. The souls in purgatory suffer “because they wish to suffer, for purgation”, he wrote, because they wish to be in the fire, because “in their suffering is hope”. 

Dante and Virgil encountering souls in Purgatory

In such a moment of isolation, Hollis notes, Eliot would write in years to come, he felt only pity for the man who found himself alone, as he had, “alone with himself and his meanness and futility, alone without God”. Even later he wrote that to be without the company of God is to be abandoned to the wilderness, to an endless seesaw between anarchy and tyranny: “a seesaw which in the secular world, I believe, has no end”. 

Eliot’s The Waste Land  was, in a way, a journey through Purgatory. Indeed its power to this day may ultimately rest on its character as a grim but hopeful reminder of this supernatural reality believed in by Christians and Jewish people. The Scriptural basis for the Christian belief in Purgatory is the instruction of Judas Maccabeus to his soldiers to pray for the souls of their dead companions.

The three last words of The Waste Land, one word repeated three times in fact, are Shantih shantih shantih. Eliot’s note on this tells us that repeated as here, they are a formal ending to an Upanishad. He adds a translation, “The peace which passeth understanding”, but says that this is “a feeble translation of the content of this word.”

Eliot’s great poem was soon recognised as a masterpiece of the modern world. Eliot took a few more years to reach his shantih in the Christian faith. He did reach it and from that vantage gave English literature more than one magnificent literary work which reflected the spirit of his now Christian soul.

The Journey of Thomas Stearns Eliot

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Part One

A cold coming he had of it. First there was the sterile unitarian background of his family in St. Louis. Then there was the rejection by his first love, Emily Hale – even though they became life-long epistolary confidants. Next there was the half-exile in England and the family rancour which his tragic marriage to Vivienne Haig-Wood provoked. Add to all that, living through the terrible war which he had to watch from the sidelines, combined with its aftermath when all the hopes of humanity were painfully drained from European civilisation for decades.

All this fed into his tortured soul and helped produce his most famous – if not his greatest – masterpiece, The Waste Land, in 1922. Within that complicated and mysterious work, however, are early glimpses of a soul emerging from the grim panorama of an apparently decaying and hopeless world. In it intimations can already be felt of the journey he had already unconsciously embarked upon:

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

—But who is that on the other side of you?

Of course no reader of Eliot’s poetry – or, he would hold, any genuine poetry – should dare to say what he meant by any given assembly of lines. But that does not mean that they did not mean something.

There is an account of a reading in Oxford in 1929 of the very difficult poem, Ash Wednesday, a kind of confession of faith at the time of his conversion, in which a polite student asked him ‘Please, sir, what do you mean by the line: “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree” . Eliot looked at him – I hope kindly – and said: ‘I mean, “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree.” In 1948 Eliot said of poetry,“A poem does not say something, it is something”.

Matthew Hollis in his magnificent book on The Waste Land, published in 2022, quotes Eliot as saying “…that in the construction of the poem (and here he paused to spell out precisely what he meant by construction: what he called ‘the mental operation of writing it’) there had been no appearance of an ‘intellectual generalisation’, only mood, variation and associative memory. That may have been keeping his powder dry, but in doing so he rehearsed an increasingly familiar position that no reader should look to an author for meaning, whether or not it stands for a civilisation in decline. ‘It may certainly be what the poem “means”,’ he commented, ‘so long as that is not identified with what the author is supposed to have consciously meant when he wrote it.’  Meaning, in other words, lies at the discretion of the reader”.

Using that discretion is one of the great joys of reading great poetry. It is also one of the keys to revealing the truth which unfolds in our ears, before our eyes and in our hearts through the images, intimations and moods which make up the totality of a poetic work.

But what we glean about Eliot’s journey – and of course we are talking of his journey to the Christian faith – is to be found in more than his verse. Hard facts are not wanting.

We know, for example, that Eliot, in his examination of the legacies of our past, had given much thought to the role of tradition in the religions of the world. Robert Crawford, in the first volume of his biography of the poet, Young Eliot, which takes us up to the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, noted:

He had been thinking more widely, too, about tradition and theology. To innovate, he argued, required consciousness of tradition, even if only to avoid repeating what had been accomplished already. Yet ‘Tradition’ with a capital ‘T’ could be a mere repository of unexamined practices. Strikingly, when reflecting on contemporary poetry in late 1917, he had suggested that ‘for an authoritative condemnation of theories attaching extreme importance to tradition as a criterion of truth, readers should consult a nineteenth-century papal encyclical… Tom’s commitment to avant-garde work by Joyce and Wyndham Lewis accompanied his reading of Catholic theologically-minded philosophers including Father John Rickaby, Cardinal Joseph Mercier (whose Manual of Modem Scholastic Philosophy was published in English in 1917) and Father Peter Coffey on interpretation of the tradition of ‘modern Catholic thought’. Tom belonged to no church. Yet, visiting Anglo-Catholic City churches in his lunch hours, he was conscious of Catholicism as ‘the only Church which can even pretend to maintain a philosophy of its own, a philosophy, as we are increasingly aware, which is succeeding in establishing a claim to be taken quite seriously’.

Thomas Stearns was the seventh and last child of Charlotte and Henry (Hal) Eliot. She was forty- three when he was born. Matthew Hollis recounts how his upbringing was entrusted to Annie Dunn, a nursemaid of Irish parents from Co. Cork, who heated the bath water for Eliot each morning, and whose affectionate presence in the house warmed the space in the young boy’s life that his mother left vacant. It was Annie, said Eliot later, who was his earliest influence, and the household figure to whom he was greatly attached. She took him to school, and sometimes to pray in the small Catholic Church of Immaculate Conception which she attended. There he would delight in the colourful statues, the bright paper flowers and glowing lights. It was with Annie that he had his first conversations about the presence of God. To a young boy of six and seven, her religion was the vivid entertainment that his family’s Unitarianism was not. ‘I was devoted to her,’ he recalled.

Who can measure influence, especially at so young an age? But all truth is not measurable to us and it would be foolish to rule out the influence of Annie on the intimations of mortality – and immortality – revealed later by Eliot. When he showed Gerontion, his pre-Waste Land poem about old age and death to his sceptical friend Ezra Pound, he is also reported to have revealed something of his ongoing wrestling with religion: ‘I am afraid of the life after death,’ he told his friend. A religious anxiety worried him, filling him at times with a sense of dispossession, of emptiness.

Eliot, without apology, ‘borrowed’ from others and from tradition for his own art.

About Gerontion he wrote to Pound: “But I can show you in the thing I enclose how I have borrowed  from half a dozen sources.” Among the borrowings to which he referred was The Dream of Gerontius, a poem by John Henry Newman written in 1865 after his conversion to Roman Catholicism. The poem was set to music in 1900 in a magnificent choral work by Edward Elgar. Newman’s poem follows a life through to death into reawakening before God.

Eliot’s pre Waste Land years were full of influences which laid the foundations not only for his great poem but also for that moment when he discovered that he was “no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, with an alien people clutching their gods”. But to reach that point his journey had to take him through The Waste Land.

(Posted on Position Papers,  in In Passing)

Part Two next Friday

Sad fate of poetry in our education system

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Billy Collins

The point of reading a poem is not to try to “solve” it. Still, that quantifiable process of demystification is precisely what teachers are encouraged to teach students, often in lieu of curating a powerful experience through literature. The literature itself becomes secondary, boiled down to its Cliff’s Notes demi-glace. 

These are the words of a teacher who confesses that 16 years after enjoying a high school literary education rich in poetry, I am a literature teacher who barely teaches it. So far this year, my 12th grade literature students have read nearly 200,000 words for my class. Poems have accounted for no more than 100.

This is a shame—not just because poetry is important to teach, but also because poetry is important for the teaching of writing and reading.

Andres Simmons is an American and he is writing in The Atlantic. He explores  the fate of poetry in the modern classroom – and the fate of the students deprived of a good education through poetry, deprived of one of  the richest and enriching means of expressing our understanding and feelings about the human condition that there is.

In an education landscape that dramatically deemphasizes creative expression in favor of expository writing and prioritizes the analysis of non-literary texts, high school literature teachers have to negotiate between their preferences and the way the wind is blowing. That sometimes means sacrifice, and poetry is often the first head to roll.

Yet poetry enables teachers to teach their students how to write, read, and understand any text. Poetry can give students a healthy outlet for surging emotions. Reading original poetry aloud in class can foster trust and empathy in the classroom community, while also emphasizing speaking and listening skills that are often neglected in high school literature classes.

He admits that one of the biggest problems is that teachers either shy away from the proper method of introducing their students to poetry or lack the skills to do so.

Either of these failures leads the temptation to disembowel a poem’s meaning and diminish the personal, even transcendent, experience of reading a poem. He quotes Billy Collins who characterizes the latter as a “deadening” act that obscures the poem beneath the puffed-up importance of its interpretation. In his poem “Introduction to Poetry,” Collins writes:  “all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope/and torture a confession out of it./They begin beating it with a hose/to find out what it really means.”

Sad fate.