Tracking Eliot’s Spiritual Journey for Lent

T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot

Spiritual Sunday

I’ve decided to make it my Lenten quest to come to terms with T. S. Eliot’s religious poems. They have always confused me—at times I have no idea what Eliot is talking about—and I took a stab at one last Sunday with my post on Part I of “Ash Wednesday.” Though I have mixed feelings about Eliot, he and I go far enough back that I’m sure to learn something. I’m hoping the immersion will help me understand my own grappling with faith..

Like many literary geeks, I fell in love with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” when I in high school. As a freshman, I overheard an English teacher discussing it with a sophomore and felt that being able to enter such conversations would be like joining an exclusive club, one that had a special language and knew special things. “Prufrock” was the first poem that felt adult to me.

This perspective of Eliot was only reinforced when, my junior year, I encountered “The Hollow Men” and saw Eliot in dialogue with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Although Eliot, even at 27 when he wrote “Prufrock,” sounds like a man going through a midlife crisis, his world-weariness speaks directly to intelligent but insecure adolescents, who know all about putting on a face to meet the faces that you meet and stumbling around avoiding eye contact in death’s other kingdom. I was drawn to Eliot for the same reason I was drawn to Sartre, Camus, and Dostoevsky. I thought it profound to describe the world as meaningless.

In my defense, I was an adolescent at a very confusing time. All around me I saw the race hatred of George Wallace and heard the drum beat of the Vietnam War. In 1968 when I turned 17, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated, Wallace was shot, the Soviets quashed the Czechoslovak awakening, Chicago police beat up protesters at the Democratic National Convention, and Richard Nixon was elected president. No wonder I put on a cynical mask.

Eliot also seemed important because I grew up in Sewanee, Tennessee and Eliot was a major influence on The Sewanee Review. As an Episcopalian college, Sewanee liked the fact that Eliot found his way to Anglicanism.

For the longest time I only liked the early poems and reacted against Eliot’s reactionary politics and his high church sensibilities. Looking back now, I realize I was reacting against Sewanee as well as Eliot. Then, after a long hiatus, I made my way back to the Episcopalianism of my youth, although I was attracted more by the poetry of its liturgy than by its high church rituals. In the last couple of years, I have also found my way back to The Waste Land, in part because I was interested in how poetry could comfort a man who felt like the world was flying apart. Last week, “Ash Wednesday” seemed to be a good poem to reflect on as we move into Lent. And here I am.

In reading articles about Eliot’s religious poetry, I am struck by two different views. Joseph Bottum, in “What Eliot Almost Believed” (1995), writes that Eliot was never able to move beyond the intellect. Bottum believes that the poet wrote eloquently about what stood in the way of belief but never truly believed. Of “Ash Wednesday” Bottum writes,

It is a poem not so much about God as a prayer for God, and not so much about prayer as about the effort of the poet to put himself in the attitude of prayer.

Bottum contrasts Eliot was St. Augustine, who he argues was driven mad by his intellect but then, propelled by grace, made a leap of faith into faith:

Augustine falls further and further into self-willed madness as he advances further and further into self-willed self-consciousness, and at last (in a garden as the Confessions tells the story) he converts by the grace of God from madness to that pure and selfless act he sought. But it is a pure and selfless act of will and not of intellect. Augustine becomes an unthinking, irrational, and motiveless desire for the Will of God. And when a child’s voice-saying, “Take up and read”–wafts over the garden wall, Augustine drifts as gently as a leaf across the garden and over to the table where he finds the letters of St. Paul.

That Eliot was never able to so drift, Bottum contends, can be seen in the closing lines of “Ash Wednesday” where, addressing Mary and the Holy Spirit, he describes union with God by what it is not. Rather than asking to be filled with God’s grace, he asks not to be separated:

Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

C.E. Chaffin also sees Eliot exploring in “Ash Wednesday,” describing the poem as “more an approach to faith than a record of conversion or a revelation of wisdom.” Chaffin agrees with Bottum that Eliot was stumbling towards faith after having written himself into a corner with “The Hollow Men”:

If Eliot had not been converted after writing “The Hollow Men,” what more could he have written? It is hard to imagine him re-working the theme of worldly despair more vividly. Without some tangible hope to follow that dark poem it seems to me his only options were either suicide or to stop writing poetry altogether.

Happily, Eliot’s body of work chronicles a spiritual and artistic journey that rebounds from such things. Thus we might call “The Hollow Men” his artistic “dark night of the soul.”

But where Bottum sees subsequent failure, Chaffin sees an ever more confident journey:

One might say Eliot was always and only working on one poem, the record of his spiritual journey—from the timid neurosis of “Prufrock” through the superannuated persona of “Gerontion” to the psychotic pilgrimage of “The Waste Land,” on to the hopeless limbo of “The Hollow Men,” through the delicate negotiation of faith in “Ash Wednesday,” finally arriving at the triumphant resolution of “Four Quartets.”

Since I am not familiar with Choruses from the Rock or “Four Quartets” and since I read Eliot’s religious plays (The Cocktail Party, Murder in the Cathedral) at a very different time in my life, I’m curious about what I will learn. I promise to report back.

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