On the centenary of the publication of "The Waste Land":
Recalling T.S. Eliot at dusk of the collective West as Christendom
T(homas). S(tearns). Eliot (1888-1965), according to Robert Crawford, author of Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land (2015), “was never young.” The well-known lines from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, “I grow old … I grow old … / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled” were indicative, wrote Crawford, of Eliot gifted with “a preternatural mastery of the pliancy of language” from an early age that made him “the poet of poets” in the judgment of the historian Peter Gay in his wide-ranging study of a cultural epoch and movement, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy (2008).
Some eight years after Eliot left America for Europe he published The Waste Land that had been gestating within him through those years, and it exemplified the desolation of and despair in Europe of the survivors of war and the Spanish flu of 1918. In 1906 he had entered Harvard with an interest in studying philosophy, became caught up with the widespread enthusiasm in Oriental philosophy prevalent in Harvard at the time, studied Japanese Buddhism and Sanskrit, then left in 1914 for Germany on a travelling fellowship and when war broke out in Europe he took admission in Merton College, Oxford, to read philosophy and, but for a brief visit to his parents in July 1915 shortly after his marriage in June to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, did not return to America until 1932. Eliot decided to make England his home. In early 1922 Eliot launched his own periodical, Criterion, in London, which he edited until 1939. According to Northrop Frye in T.S. Eliot: An Introduction (1963), the purpose of the periodical was “to create a place for new attitudes to literature and criticism, and to make English letters a part of the European cultural community.” In the first issue of the Criterion Eliot published The Waste Land after consultation with Ezra Pound. Pound edited the poem cutting its length almost by half and, as Frye suggested, “improved the poem, and very probable that it made it more enigmatic.” Eliot dedicated the poem to Pound in later editions by borrowing a phrase from Dante ‘il miglior fabbro’ – ‘the greater craftsman’. The publication of The Waste Land, and this year 2022 marked its hundredth anniversary, gained for Eliot the reputation as a pioneer in his experiment with the technique of using multiple voices, disjointed or conflicting images, and symbolic language within modern poetry that culminated with him awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize for Literature.
It was not until December 15, 1922, “when The Waste Land,” writes Crawford, “became an American book.” He continues, “One thousand copies were printed, each stamped with an individual number, published from 105 W. 40th Street, New York. Hard at work assembling the contents for the next few issues of the Criterion, Tom opened the small, pale-jacketed volume in his London flat. Slightly heavier than it looked, underneath the dust jacket it was bound in black boards with only the words THE WASTE LAND in gold on the front board. Inside, the poem now carried its Latin and Greek epigraph (though no dedication), and was printed in large type – never more than sixteen lines of poetry per page. Thanks to this generous spacing and to the added prose ballast of the Notes, it managed to fill sixty-four pages. Throughout, the verse carried line numbers (one every ten lines), as if to bind together a work that kept threatening to explode into separate shards. The inside front-jacket flap quoted an early review by Burton Rascoe in the New York Tribune, calling The Waste Land ‘a thing of bitterness and beauty’ and, perhaps, the finest poem of this generation’. The note on the rear flap began simply, ‘T.S. Eliot was born in 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri’, then went on to hail him as ‘without question the most significant of the younger American writers’. Tom, weary and very far from the city of his birth, looked at the name ‘T.S. Eliot’ in plain black print on the title page. It was as if he had never been young.”
I discovered Eliot at the the end of my teenage years when introduced to Walt Whitman, Edgar Allen Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and I fell in love with American poetry. It was in far away Bengal, in my grandparents home in Calcutta (I still prefer to spell the name of my birth city as it used to be spelled before it was changed in spelling to Kolkata) where as in most homes reading, recitation, and love of poetry in Urdu, Bengali, and English were routinely cultivated as part of our bhadralok (“respectable/educated” people) culture. Poetry and music held a special place of reverence and pride among Bengalis, as it still does, for Bengal’s greatest poet, Rabindranath Tagore, was also modern India’s most honoured poet and became internationally renowned when awarded the 1913 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Whitman’s Leaves of Grass captivated me. His opening lines in ‘Song of Myself’ were astounding, magical, and has remained unforgettable.
I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
It was the late sixties and Whitman in opening the door for me to American poetry cast another light on America when, as I recall, people of all ages at the time in distant Bengal on both sides of the 1947 partition of India were in outrage over America’s war in Vietnam. This was a light that illuminated another face of America, of the mythically lauded land of freedom and democracy despite the prevailing ugly image of a cruel imperial power waging a war against a haplessly poor people as those in the Indian subcontinent.
Whitman’s poetry was easy to read and relate to, as his voice and the music of his verses resonated beautifully for me, as did the poetry of Tagore in Bengali. Later reading about Whitman and the meaning of his work in the writings of Harold Bloom, George Kateb, or C.K. Williams, I learned to appreciate why Kateb addressed him in The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture (1992) as “a great philosopher of democracy”, and quoted Henry David Thoreau’s observation that Whitman “is apparently the greatest democrat the world has ever seen.” Whitman’s poetry, according to Harold Bloom in his study of The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994), belonged to the Democratic Age and are transparently simple and emotive in arousing the sentiments of the demos, each unique and incomparable as he praised them in ‘Salut Au Monde!’,
Each of us inevitable, Each of us limitless—each of us with his or her right upon the earth, Each of us allow’d the eternal purports of the earth, Each of us here as divinely as any is here.
Unlike Whitman’s ‘Memories of President Lincoln’, or Emerson’s ‘Brahma’, or Poe’s ‘Annabel Lee’, Eliot is not easily accessible on the first encounter. But once one makes the effort and is patient with Eliot, as I learned to do, the reward of reading Eliot, as in reading Whitman or Poe or Emerson, is similarly unending. Eliot in Bloom’s schematic belonged to the Chaotic Age, which is ours at its dusk. And he needs to be read, as Frye indicated, because a “thorough knowledge of Eliot is compulsory for anyone interested in contemporary literature. Whether he is liked or disliked is of no importance, but he must be read.”
[ ii.
Eliot belonged to one of those distinguished and dynastic New England families, or once referred to as Boston Brahmins, who have supplied, Frye wrote, “so much cultural and political leadership in American life, and, like other American writers with such names as Adams and Lowell, reflects the preoccupations of an unacknowledged aristocracy, preoccupations with tradition, with breeding, with the loss of common social assumptions.” His tangled family tree related him to some well known Americans including novelists Henry Melville, author of Moby Dick, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter, and to the second and sixth presidents of America, John Adams and John Quincy Adams.
But with the publication of The Waste Land Eliot distanced himself from his native inheritance as an American. He had been raised in the Unitarian Church of his paternal grandfather, Rev. William Greenleaf Eliot, who had moved from New England to St. Louis, Missouri, before the Civil War to establish a Unitarian church in the adopted city. His father, Henry Ware Eliot, was a prosperous business man. His mother, Charlotte Champe Eliot née Stearns, wrote verses and some of them were published in the Unitarian Christian Register, was attracted to the liberal theology of Friedrich Schleirmacher and writings of Emerson, and wrote a biography of Eliot’s paternal grandfather so he may not be forgotten by her children. A few years after The Waste Land was published followed by ‘The Hollow Men’ in 1925, Eliot became a naturalised British subject and in 1927 formally left behind his Unitarian roots in becoming an Anglo-Catholic and was received into the Church of England. On the day of England’s patron saint, St. George’s Day, in 1928 Eliot wrote himself the following note, quoted in Crawford’s Young Eliot:
“Some day I want to write an essay about the point of view of an American who wasn’t an American, because his America ended in 1829; and who wasn’t a Yankee, because he was born in the South and went to school in New England as a small boy with a nigger drawl, but who wasn’t a southerner in the South because his people were northeners in a border state and looked down on all southerners and Virginians, and who so was never anything anywhere and who therefore felt himself to be more a Frenchman than an American and more an Englishman than a Frenchman and yet felt that the U.S.A. up to a hundred years ago was a family extension.”
Those thoughts were of a man turned forty reflecting on his journey outward and inward in search of a resting place, to finally arrive, he wrote in ‘Burnt Norton’ published in 1935 and included as one of the Four Quartets, “At the still point of the turning world.” The almost plaintive whisper with which Eliot ended The Waste Land, “Shantih shantih shantih”, in Sanskrit meaning peace, but not merely peace as the longing for cessation of unrest and hostilities; instead the longing for peace, he seemed to suggest, in the original Sanskritic meaning which transcends all that is human and, therefore, finite, transient, ephemeral, and it comes once the soul departs the mortal shell of human existence and dissolves in the Over-Soul or what represents the blissful union with Brahman, the ineffable One according to the teachings of Upanisads, the ancient Hindu scriptures, that alone is real and ultimate, and the rest is unreal. In the Platonic sense the Over-Soul or Brahman is, as Plato wrote in the dialogue Timaeus, “that which always is and never becomes,” hence the first cause as the ultimate and real, and never the effects in the world of appearance which are momentary and unreal.
Eliot was familiar with the eastern religions and philosophy, as he was with the Greek school. He found his sanctuary in High Anglicanism, his faith complete in fellowship and communion in the Church of his choice. In the Choruses from ‘The Rock’ published in 1934 the voice asks,
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance, All our ignorance brings us nearer to death, But nearness to death no nearer to God. Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.
And the voice also answers,
What life have you if you have not life together? There is no life that is not in community, And no community not lived in praise of God.
[ iii.
A year in Oxford, visiting Cambridge often, getting married and making home in London, while the war took its devastating toll across Europe, brought Eliot to settle in England. His natural talents were buttressed by individuals he met, became friends with and moved among an influential circle of English intellectuals and avante-garde artists, writers and poets. At Oxford he met Bertrand Russell, sixteen years his senior, who befriended him and his wife; during his year at Merton College, Eliot attended lectures on Aristotle by R.G. Collingwood, and was influenced by the idealist thinker F.H. Bradley whose major work Appearance and Reality (1893) greatly impressed him in terms of Bradley’s approach in thinking and style in philosophical discourse. It was, however, the meeting with his American compatriot Ezra Pound in London sometime during the academic session of 1914-15 while attending Oxford that would be a pivotal moment in Eliot’s budding career as a poet and literary critic.
Pound was already established in London and working as a secretary for W.B. Yeats when Eliot came calling upon him. Pound immediately took to Eliot, was greatly impressed by the style and imagery of Eliot’s poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ when shown to him, and was happy to introduce him to Yeats. The friendship that came so quickly to bind Eliot and Pound flourished with the eventual result of the final form that Pound helped Eliot give to The Waste Land. And by the time Eliot published The Waste Land he had been received as a friend of Russell and Pound into the Bloomsbury group that included novelists Leonard and Virginia Woolf, economist John Maynard Keynes, writers Lytton Strachey and E.M Forster, philosopher G.E. Moore, art critic Clive Bell, and painter Roger Fry. The Bloomsbury group collectively was the English face of modernism, a movement in arts and letters seeking new immoderate ways to express ideas, at the turn of the last century as the Victorian age came to an end. But Eliot’s religious inclinations that grew in depth and intensity set him somewhat apart from the mainline modernist movement, even though he continued to experiment with the innovative style for which he was heralded as a pioneer in poetry, and that made him, according to Peter Gay, “a poster boy for anti-modern modernists.”
The Waste Land was, despite its modernist tone, Eliot’s elegy for a dying civilization. The long shadow of the First World War was to haunt Eliot’s generation of the living. More than half of those who enrolled at Merton College with him died in the war. Twice during his lifetime Europe was turned into a slaughter house. But it was more than the horror of the dead and the dying that was perplexing to the living confronted with the utmost scandal of what the war they witnessed meant. Here was a civilization, Christendom, that prided itself as the fountainhead of the Culture of Enlightenment in arts, science, and industry and as a beacon of advancement for the rest of the world, in becoming un-Christian had gone insane.
Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ composed in 1919 and published in 1920 was, as if, the first draft of the horror seen and felt by the survivors of the war, and what it possibly meant in the wider context of civilization in history. The title of the poem suggested the second coming of Christ, but this second coming, as Yeats beheld and the war augured, was that of the antichrist. The image of antichrist as Spiritus Mundi (world spirit), in Yeats’s description was that of “A shape with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,” slouching its way to be born in Bethlehem. Christendom, it seemed to Yeats, was falling apart and with its centre unable to hold things together anarchy and blood-dimmed tide had been set loose upon the world as a foretelling of the coming of the antichrist.
Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ was preceded by Spengler’s The Decline of the West completed in 1917 and published the following year in Germany. The tropes of “things fall apart” and “decline” carried an apocalyptic message given by the state of war and revolution in Europe that Eliot could not entirely ignore, nor entirely accept. There was tension between despair and hope that seized Europeans in general and made for the climate that unavoidably seeped into Eliot’s writing. The opening line of the poem, “April is the cruellest month,” became one of the more famous openings in modern English poetry and set the tone of Eliot’s vision convergent with that of Yeats and Spengler. Frye wrote, “The Waste Land is a vision of Europe, mainly of London, at the end of the First World War, and is the climax of Eliot’s ‘infernal’ vision.” Less than two decades later that infernal vision turned real when Eliot experienced the blitz as bombs rained down on London.
Any “wasteland” is suggestive of barrenness and infertility, death and desolation. The war had made Europe barren and desolate. And in Eliot’s portrayal of London was epitomized the mood of despair and loneliness:
Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
But in Eliot’s abiding faith in Christ as the Redeemer resided hope. In part ‘V. What the Thunder Said’, Eliot recalled, as he indicated in his notes to the poem, “the hooded figure in the passage of the disciples to Emmaus”:
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?
For Eliot that third figure, the Son of Man, would be his sweet companion holding the promise of redemption and salvation while he searched for the path to advance from information to knowledge, and from knowledge to wisdom that might take him nearer to God and farther from the Dust. As Christian his principle, though his opinions might vary when reflecting upon and recording the transient fashions of the day, became firmly rooted in the worldview of traditional Christianity by the choice he made in joining the Church of England. He transitioned from a satirist into a devotional poet, as Frye pointed out in his study of Eliot. And Eliot expressed his self-awareness as a Christian poet and writer in the essay ‘Religion and Literature’ published in 1935, “For literary judgment we need to be acutely aware of two things at once: of ‘what we like’, and of ‘what we ought to like’… The two forms of self-consciousness, knowing what we are and what we ought to be, must go together… It is our business, as Christians, as well as readers of literature, to know what we ought to like. It is our business as honest men not to assume that whatever we like is what we ought to like; and it is our business as honest Christians not to assume that we do like what we ought to like… What I believe to be incumbent upon all Christians is the duty of maintaining consciously certain standards and criteria of criticism over and above those applied by the rest of the world; and that by these criteria and standards everything that we read must be tested.” This “love” of and “calling” for seeking, exploring, and testing what is worthy of knowing and affirming, as a Christian, of “Life we have lost in living” he summed it up in ‘Little Gidding’ published in the midst of another world war twenty years after The Waste Land:
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
[iv.
The year following the publication of The Waste Land the 1923 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Yeats. Eliot was honoured for his work twenty-five years later with the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize. In introducing Eliot during the 1948 Nobel Award presentation ceremony, Anders Österling, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, in giving special notice to the poem that came to describe an epoch, said:
“The Waste Land – a title whose terrifying import no one can help feeling, when the difficult and masterly word-pattern has finally yielded up its secrets. The melancholy and sombre rhapsody aims at describing the aridity and impotence of modern civilization, in a series of sometimes realistic and sometimes mythological episodes, whose perspectives impinge on each other with an indescribable total effect. The cycle of poems consists of 436 lines, but actually it contains more than a packed novel of as many pages. The Waste Land now lies a quarter century back in time, but unfortunately it has proved that its catastrophic visions still have undiminished actuality in the shadow of the atomic age.”
In reading The Waste Land together with the volume of his Collected Poems 1909-1962 (1963) and his prose writings some three-quarters of a century after he was awarded the Nobel Prize, what strikes me most is how greatly his early prognostications of the collective West, or Christendom – Europe and North America – despoiling its traditional Christian culture from within turned out to be chillingly true. Eliot’s voice struck a discordant note against the dominant ideology of liberal-progressivism in his time, which in hindsight from the vantage point of the first quarter of the twenty-first century has unhinged the West from its Christian roots.
In 1932 Eliot returned to America and was invited to give the Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia. The three lectures were published the following year as an essay titled After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy. Eliot opened by referencing an earlier essay he published in 1919 entitled ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ in which, he noted, despite “some unsatisfactory phrasing” he would not repudiate what he had meant by tradition. In that earlier essay he wrote that tradition “involves, in the first place, the historical sense,… and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence… This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional.” In his Virginian lectures Eliot expanded on his views of tradition and traditional, rejecting the notion that defense of tradition meant “the maintenance of certain dogmatic beliefs”. But he cautioned against “clinging to an old tradition, or attempting to re-establish one, of confusing the vital and the unessential, the real and the sentimental”, or to think of tradition “as something hostile to all change”. He instead offered the view of “aiming to stimulate the life which produced that condition in its time”, because “a tradition without intelligence is not worth having.” What was, however, required for maintenance of the vitality of the past securely continued in the present was “stability” in society and that the “population should be homogeneous.”
Eliot was speaking as a New Englander to a southern audience of Virginians supportive of their conservative neo-agrarian movement faced with the pressures from the north of industrial expansion, growth of mill towns and movement of populations. He remarked, “The Civil War was certainly the greatest disaster in the whole of American history; it is just as certainly a disaster from which the country has never recovered, and perhaps never will: we are always too ready to assume that the good effects of wars, if any, abide permanently while the ill-effects are obliterated by time. Yet I think that the chances for the re-establishment of a native culture are perhaps better here than in New England. You are farther away from New York; you have been less industrialised and less invaded by foreign races; and you have a more opulent soil.”
In later years Eliot’s usage of the term “foreign races” to describe immigrants, or in his earlier poems from 1920, such as ‘Gerontion’ and ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’, reference to Jews as a rootless people, and that race mixing was undesirable and detrimental to the stability of traditional society and its continuity, aroused indignation among the progressive liberals of the north. After the Second World War to that initial indignation was added the accusation that Eliot was anti-Semitic. This charge of anti-Semitism was pursued doggedly by Anthony Julius, a British solicitor and a Jew, in his book T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (1995).
The larger issue, however, in After Strange Gods was Eliot’s unsparing criticism of the modern industrial-mechanized society and immigration characterized as “invasion” that together would hasten the disintegration of traditional culture and with it the loss of Christian values. He was a conservative defending tradition and out-numbered by the progressive liberals relentless in their attack on the Church and Christianity. In his book Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948) Eliot wrote, “The dominant force in creating a common culture between peoples each of which has its distinct culture, is religion… I am simply stating a fact. I am not so much concerned with the communion of Christian believers today; I am talking about the common tradition of Christianity which has made Europe what it is, and about the common cultural elements which this common Christianity has brought with it. If Asia were converted to Christianity tomorrow, it would not thereby become a part of Europe. It is in Christianity that our arts have developed; it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe have – until recently – been rooted. It is against a background of Christianity that all our thought has significance… I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith… If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes.”
In The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana (1953), Russell Kirk took note that Eliot stood in the conservative tradition of Burke and Coleridge. Kirk, in agreeing with Eliot, wrote, “our mechanical civilization already has accustomed masses of the population to the notion of society itself considered as a machine.” He further observed, “Mr. Eliot, no friend to pure democracy, believes in class and order; for that very reason, he detests the new elite, recruited from this mob of the spiritually impoverished. Trained at uniform state schools in the new orthodoxies of secular collectivism, arrogant with the presumption of those who rule without the restraining influence of tradition and consecration and family honor, such an elite will be no more than an administrative corps; they cannot become the guardians of culture, as the old aristocracies have been.”
The modernist movement born in the post-Napoleonic era of the nineteenth century was set to shock the bourgeois sensibilities of the dominant culture in Europe. In keeping with the ethos of modernism came Nietzsche’s announcement in 1882 that the Christian God was dead. In the century since that announcement Europe became the West or Christendom’s continental theatre of two world wars, of fascist and communist revolutions, of split asunder by the Cold War, and the end of Western colonial empires in Africa and Asia. Regardless of whether the Christian God was dead or mortally wounded, Eliot lived long enough to witness historian Arnold Toynbee’s aphorism, “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” And it was, as if, in the final verse of ‘The Hollow Men’ Eliot had prophesied the manner of the West’s cultural demise coming “Not with a bang but a whimper.”
In the third quarter of the twentieth century the West was seized with a cultural and political exuberance for reforms amounting to dismantling its traditional Christian values. It started with the oral contraceptive pill for birth control that liberated women from unwanted pregnancies and set the institution of marriage on a very slippery slope. Sex sans pregnancy within or without marriage also liberated men in pursuing their libidinous urgings without any responsibility or accountability. Sexual liberation brought about by the “pill” set loose the family ties by easing divorce laws. Eliot had written in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, “The primary channel of transmission of culture is the family.” But as the institution of marriage was subverted and divorce became common, women entered work force and became independent wage earners, single-parent homes proliferated as families began to fracture, and the transmission of culture shifted from family to state run secular schools. Then came legalization of abortion, of sodomy and homosexuality, of pornography, of same-sex marriage, followed by the politics of gender identity and, finally, transgenderism nullifying by decree the physiological reality that male and female sexes are biologically determined. It mattered not whether the Christian God was dead or mortally wounded, His laws were mocked and discarded.
The sexual liberation brought about in the decades following the Second World War culturally transformed the West through the second half of the last century from Christendom into a poor imitation of pagan Rome’s self-immolation in the dying days of the empire. The self-inflicted culture of abortion, homosexuality and pornography is infertile and incapable of sustainability in the barren fields of wasteland. Throughout this insane process of gutting Christianity and hoisting in its place a culture of death, the leaders of the Church stood impotently watching what the modern day vandals were bent upon doing to their nearly twenty centuries of religious and cultural inheritance.
The sexual revolution moreover contributed negatively to the precipitous decline in the total fertility rate within the West, and the need to balance the increasing aging population through immigration from non-Western societies was conceived as a solution to the problem. The passage of Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 in the United States, and in the year of Eliot’s death, followed by similar legislations in the collective West initiated the process of migration from the global south that in time would represent population replacement in western societies. As immigrants and migrants headed west from the former colonies of European powers, the idea of multiculturalism, the notion that all cultures are equal and deserving of equal respect, was hatched and adopted as a distinguishing feature of the modern West. The predictable result of such a cultural experiment would be that what remained of the gutted Christendom was further hollowed out with the toxins of multiculturalism and identity politics.
[v.
In his 1920 poem ‘Gerontion’, Eliot was almost apologetic for having sat on the sidelines watching the devastation of Europe in the Great War of 1914-18, and he asked:
After such knowledge, what forgiveness?
Twenty years later in ‘East Coker’ with his old age approaching, Eliot was once more surrounded by the dins of cannons and bombs exploding and, as nations of Europe moved against each other with their guns blazing, he wrote:
Do not let me hear Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly, Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession, Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God. The only wisdom we can hope to acquire Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
And so we may pray for such wisdom and forgiveness, as Eliot longed for, as we stand watch impotently at the dusk of a civilization that was, despite its flaws and sins, splendid at its noon time for greatness.
_________
December 26, 2022
What a wonderful revisiting of T.S. Eliot. His work was so prescient, demonstrating its truth as time passes. Thank you for this thoughtful meditation.