T. S. Eliot

We are approaching a culmination of a very long involved encounter with Western civilization. That is, in this lecturing series - which is now in its sixth year - we have been moving from Homer to the present time to our present and we have been moving person to person trying to keep ideation at a minimum, trying to keep the sense of historicity at a minimum, keeping the theories and the traditions as much out of the picture as possible. Trying, in other words, to be as phenomenological revealing as we can about the human condition not how we come to be here but simply reviewing the long sequence of individuals who have lived like we are living, and who have produced who have created. And in this progression, as it were, in this sequence, we cannot help but notice that there are overlying values and meanings which in fact have been to those who have been following this for a long time, those meanings and values seem to reoccur and subside and are restated and vanish and without our imputing to it history has a pattern. We do not have to impute a pattern to it. We do not have to speculate. We do not have to have a metaphysic or a theology. But the pattern is there nonetheless. The ability to express this consciousness is the hallmark of the twentieth century. And in T. S. Eliot's poetry he is the apex of expression in the English language of this very complex but simple truth.

How he got there is a personal story which we'll try and relate tonight. The fact that it had occurred is a condition which we cannot ignore. His last published poetry was in 1943 and more than 40 years later there has been almost no poetry whatsoever in the English speaking language to even come up to that level much less move on. The difficulties lie in the personal sacrifice that is required to even approach that transparency of language which the four quartets present in their form. Now Eliot is extremely difficult to appreciate. He has had his vogue and he has had his detractors many times over. The difficulty lies in the ambiguities of the life which individuals in the twentieth century have to live. We do not have a culture or a civilization that supports us. We do not have a natural nor a conscious tradition which allows us to be what we are. And so we are all scavengers trying to eke out, patch by patch, some robe of being which we can identify ourselves with. And the only people at home in this mode are mendicants, any world negating tradition. And Eliot in order to perfect this vision approached very close to that mendicant order. But still not committing himself exclusively to it, nearly shredded himself with anxiety and that is what we have to reveal somehow tonight.

But the story of the man is complicated - not only by our times and by the history which we are subjected to almost electrocuted by, by its frayed endings that are not knit together - but it is complicated because it is very difficult to understand poetry. Poetry is not just language. It's not just rhyme or assonance. That in poetry we have art and that art is the very navel of consciousness and art emerges out of a magical order which does not occur in nature but is a transformed nature in its occurrence. And that that magical realm is projected out and created by human beings or, if one wishes to extend the courtesy to the rest of the universe, by sentient beings it is only we in our capacity to project out that create magic. It in no way occurs in nature. It is a recursive function which comes from us. And out of this art is born. And art takes the magical realm and confers upon it, shape, expressive form if you will. And in the shaping, in the forming of expression, art discovers that there is someone there whose consciousness does this. That the artist is what emerges out of art just as art emerges out of magic. And when the artist emerges in this pristine revelation of self-presidential quality, then religion is born. For one looks around the world and understands that anyone, any human being that one comes across, has this capacity. And the religious realm is the meeting of individuals in terms of the expressive shape of community which is an amplification of the individual, amplifies it. And through this religious experience a visioning of the cosmos occurs. This is how it would happen were nature and consciousness to be left to their natural ordering. But in our time the entire scheme is scrambled. There's nothing but static and diagonal lines - snow on the screen of the mind - and nowhere is there clarity.

In response to that condition, early in the 20th century was a movement to try and find ways out of this impasse. And it was the artists - both artists in painting, artists in poetry, artists in physics, artists in many realms - who attempted to find ways out of this. Methods and structures. The most important for T. S. Eliot was the development of what has been called in literary criticism as the objective correlative and one can find a very apt description of it. In, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot: An Essay on the Nature of Poetry by F. O. Matthiesen, Chapter three is entitled “The ‘Objective Correlative’.” And in this he writes, giving a quotation from Matthew Arnold at the beginning.

“What is not interesting, is that it does not add to our knowledge of any kind; that which is vaguely conceived and loosely drawn; a representation which is general, indeterminate, and faint, instead of being particular, precise, and firm… What are the eternal objects of poetry, among all nations and at all times? They are actions; human actions.”

It was the desire to hone language, to hone poetry, down to the sparse bare minimum. The quotation here from Matthiessen that Eliot had looked for the emotional equivalent of thought, not thought per se, but the emotional equivalent of thought. That the essential function of poetry is not intellectual but emotional. That the business of Dante or Shakespeare was to express the greatest emotional intensity of his time based on whatever his time happened to think. It had to be contemporary. It had to be focused. It had to be sponged dry of all sentimentalism. Sponged dry. Presented precise. Matthiessen writes,

“All that he insists is that the more intelligent the poet is the better, since he is thus likely to be wider in his interests and more mature in his expression of them. He believes also that ‘fundamental brain-work’ can be justly demanded of the reader, particularly since ‘our civilization, as it exists at present… comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results.’ But purely in terms of the elements of tradition which Eliot has attempted to bring to fresh expression in his own poetry, it is by now apparent that his principal desire is not for intellectual density but for richness and subtlety of emotional impression.”

The difficulty for Eliot rose early in his life. We read that he is born in St. Louis, Missouri but this completely obscures the fact that the Eliot’s were three hundred years residents in Massachusetts, two hundred years before Eliot was born. That the Eliots came over and participated in the early 1690s in Massachusetts and that the first Eliot participated in the Salem witchcraft trials as a judge. The taint of that event, the guilt of that occurrence, permeated that family and the sophisticated Eliots - the cream of New England - in their conservatism, in their balance, in their reserve, had the skeleton in their closet constantly. Eliot's grandfather who died before he was able to know him was the family patriarch and because he had died, for Eliot it was almost like a ghostly presence of authority. He was constantly in a world of women held up to the standards of the grandfather who was gone. His four sisters were older than him, the oldest more than 19 years older than he. Eliot's mother, Charlotte, fawning on the boy in some ways and holding him distant in others, encouraged him to read and be a good boy. Rarely held him; she let nurses take care of him; let sisters take care of him. Eliot's personality is extremely complex and his sense of integrity is not to give up. And it was this ability to hold on to an electrocuting situation that finally burnt off in anguish all of the dross and left a transparent vision of the geometry of human nature. But there was no way to flesh it out. And so Eliot is a tragic figure and with him American culture comes into the atomic era as an irradiated skeleton with a sophisticated structure and no content whatsoever.

If we were to realize the true nature of our society at this time it would be a pristinely ordered amoral -ism and this is a difficulty obviously. It makes us unsympathetic with the past, unsympathetic with any future different from this, and sympathetic only to computers. They are our kith and kin for they have the same pristine structure and the same lack of content. So schoolchildren now are being acclimated to the computers so they will be able to function in the new world. It is a tragedy ongoing and profound. And in Eliot's work in life we see the signal transformation.

Eliot was constantly exposed to Massachusetts through various summer vacations, various family reunions and finally was put into an academy in Massachusetts, Milton Academy, to prepare him for Harvard University where eventually he went. His time in Milton Academy was profound for him and much later in his life, when his marriage was collapsing, when his whole interior structure was becoming leached out by anxiety and he returned to the United States for a visit. He went to Milton Academy and spoke there to the youngsters not even to the youngsters but to the young 17-year-old T. S. Eliot, which he said was still haunting like a ghost. The environment just like his grandfather's ghost still haunting him just like the ancestor still haunting the family. There is a profound magic in the ghostliness of structure without content. This haunting is exactly what is wrong with Western civilization.

Eliot finds in Milton Academy that he is an extremely agile intellect. He discovers that he is able to write, in parody, any style that he comes across. That he has an incredible facility for language, and for writing, for observation. He discovers that he can remember exactly the perceptions that he has had today, yesterday, a year ago, ten years ago. That this indelibleness of perception stays with him but that in the vast array of clear perceptions, any conception is a complete problematic that he is unable to find any conception that rises from this pure phenomenological quality of accurate resolution. And of course we recognize in this exactly the disease of the twentieth century. We have incredible mountains of exact statistics, of exact facts, exact perceptions. We don't have an idea in the world of how things fit together, or how they work, or what they're for.

So Eliot finds himself at Harvard increasingly able to write increasingly involved in literary concerns. And He moved from literature where he specialized in Medieval and Renaissance literatures, he moved into philosophy. But before he moved into philosophy he took a sabbatical, a vacation and went to Europe - he went to Paris. And in Paris he studied for a while under Henri Bergson and Bergson's great creative intuition affected Eliot for a while, until the effect began to wear off because for Eliot he began to have suspicions that he recognized something fearful in Bergson's vitalism. That the élan that Bergson talked about could nowhere be found with precision. There was no clear perception of it. There was no clear record of it anywhere in experience. The fear was that it may not exist. That it may be a figment of the imagination. And for this Eliot became interested not in literature anymore but in philosophy. And he returned to Harvard and he studied and took a master's degree at Harvard in philosophy. He studied under George Santayana. And at the same time took literature with Irving Babbitt. But with Santayana who never really appreciated Eliot said that he was awfully confused. He kept looking for some way to find what is real in the patterning. The perceptions are real; the thoughts are real; how do they fit together? And for this Elliot became interested in a Hegelian philosopher named F. H. Bradley whose monumental work is entitled Appearance and Reality. But whose other major work concerns itself with ethics - the ethical decisions which human beings have to make and that the ethical decisions are personal summations leading to direct action. One has to come to conclusions in order to act. One has to make judgments and that the conscientious person must do this on an ethical basis. So the overriding issue on the surface was appearance and reality. But the undercurrent was always, as Tolstoy once wrote, what must we then do? For Eliot this was a complex unity. What to do and the differentiation between appearance and reality were intimately bound together. They were like two birds, like two hawks, two hunting birds of prey, circling in his mind and sensibility for the entirety of his life, they never left him. And once he perceived the problem in its clarity it, like a ghost, haunted him constantly, hounded him constantly and for lack of doing something wrong Eliot increasingly became reserved and introspective and ascetic. In fact we find an individual like this in his first poem, written in 1911, his first major poem called “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Notice how the language goes.

“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells;
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question…

Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’
Let us go and make our visit.”

And so you see the power of the poetry. But you see the intensely catastrophic pairing of two issues which cannot be resolved. For as long as one is concerned with the polarity between appearance and reality, one is stuck in an ethical quandary. One cannot act; one cannot live.

For Eliot, after he did his doctoral dissertation on F. H. Bradley at Harvard, he returned to Europe and he went to Marburg University in Germany in 1914 August just before the First World War broke out. And just a month or so before the war broke out, because it was discernible, he left Germany intending to go to Oxford University in England and study there. He arrived in London in 1915 and searching to try and find some place to be; he being now an American living abroad sought other Americans living abroad and who was more conspicuous in London as an American living abroad than Ezra Pound. And so this electric young man with an intolerable burden of proof came into contact with the greatest carnival barker of world culture that we've seen probably since Augustan times in ancient Rome. And the meeting of Eliot and Pound coming together - very interesting situation. Pound forever talking effusive, full of theories and insights and ideas and spinning them off; and Eliot more and more quiet and desperate, profound. Out of this meeting out of the introductions out of the London years would be born The Wasteland. But the trigger in The Wasteland was not Ezra Pound but was the woman that Eliot found and married very quickly married: Vivian, Vivian. Vivian, very high strung energetic woman, very capable of deep depressions. Constantly wanting to be appreciated and felt important and constantly questioning are you really caring for me? And that marriage in 1916 set up for Eliot the beginnings of a long period of travail because he could not respond to her in kind.

He appreciated her vivacity. He had been born with a congenital double hernia. He had to wear a truss all of his life. He came from this ghost-haunted Eliot family tradition, the New England tradition. He was a Victorian Bostonian and sexuality for him was a problem. It was something that was too hot to handle; an imagery which was corroding and destructive because it took one away from the only safety that there was keeping track of the problems. Because if you don't keep track of the problems they will get you and anything that lures you out of yourself sets you up for a mark.

The Wasteland, very interestingly, was preceded by a series of four poems called The Preludes. And I want to read you just the beginning of the first prelude and the fourth prelude because it's interesting to see that in between Prufrock and the wasteland comes this four part structure and that four part structure of the Preludes will later be amplified and developed in the Four Quartets. Here's how the first prelude begins. Listen to this kind of a language.

“The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

And then the lighting of the lamps.”

The fourth part.

“His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.”

So The Preludes. And then notice how The Wasteland catches up this fleetingness and has brought it into a very powerful mind and brought it in together with an array of occult imagery that's almost staggering. And the first part of The Wasteland, appropriately enough entitled ‘The Burial of the Dead’:

“April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.”

And so ‘The Burial of the Dead begins. And towards the end of ‘The Burial of the Dead’ out comes the image that in the Preludes was the threatening sky disappearing behind the outline of the skyline of a block. Now comes,

“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.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: 'Stetson!
‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
‘Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
‘Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
‘You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!’ ”

And immediately The Wasteland shifts to, A Game of Chess. Just the first few lines. Watch the obliqueness of the transition.

“The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Glowed on the marble, where the glass
Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
From which a golden Cupidon peeped out
(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)
Doubled the flames of seven-branched candelabra
Reflecting light upon the table as
The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,
From satin cases poured in rich profusion;
In vials of ivory and coloured glass
Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,
Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused
And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air
That freshened from the window, these ascended
In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,
Flung their smoke into the laquearia,
Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.”

And a little later as he goes into his transition out comes the whole pathetic lack of conception.

“O O O O that Shakespearean Rag—
It’s so elegant
So intelligent
‘What shall I do now? What shall I do?’
‘I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
‘With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?
‘What shall we ever do?’
The hot water at ten.
And if it rains, a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game of chess,
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.”

So you see in The Wasteland a tremendous amplification of the problems in the man, the difficulty coming out. Now Eliot, when he was married after he had become interested and interesting to the literature group, positioned himself at Lloyds Bank in London to try to find some security in his life. And this was not just taking a job to have a paycheck but it was a need for some stability. It was the need to make oneself affine to some structure that was at least as permanent as Lloyds Bank in London. It was the need to belong, to be a cog in a structure that in its safety one could at least believe for a lifetime. And along with that he became increasingly known as an editor, as a critic, as a reviewer, as well as a poet. And Eliot from time to time would publish volumes of criticism, exquisite essays, The Sacred Wood, and Poetry and Poets. He wrote in fact exquisitely in the critical mode and from time to time as in his essay on Dante, witness this quotation.

“This difference, which is one of the reasons why Dante is ‘easy to read’, may be discussed in more particular manifestations. The style of Dante has a peculiar lucidity - a poetic as distinguished from an intellectual lucidity.” Notice again, appearance in reality. What is appearance is the intellect. What is real is the emotion. The intellect, the intellect. What is this? The intellect is consciousness. What is the emotion? It is what is nature, what is natural It is setting up a polarity between consciousness and nature. Consciousness is pure appearance. Then it is nature which is real. It is nature which discloses its reality in us through emotion. Great poetry on the level of Dante and Shakespeare says Eliot discloses the lucidity of our emotion. And in order for the emotion to be lucid the mind must be transparent. Otherwise the mind obscures, the consciousness obscures. And so the whole strategy then is to purify the mind by weeding out content and allowing only structure to remain. For when the mind is denuded of its content, appearance will no longer have a hold upon us and we will have then a clear grid through which to see the lucidity of nature in our emotions. But the difficulty with this is that if you believe that you have ghosts in your past, what you will see through the lucidity of the transparency of your mind are those ghosts in all their emotional fury. You will be haunted in all of the fearful ways that consciousness had mitigated it.

This is called opening the Pandora's box and Eliot was as good as anybody had ever been in world literature at progressively taking out all of the content and leaving in its place a beautifully lucid structure where feeling could be seen in all of its power. But the feeling that came out through Eliot was this hauntedness, this incredible evil. And for Eliot the progressive realization that evil actually existed made him suspect all of the humanitarian and libertarian structures that man had devised. He began to deride and scoff at things like Unitarianism, most literatures. he would say they're deluding themselves. They're trying to say that we can work things out in our humanness when I can see with great clarity and know darn well that there's real evil in the world and the only security is to have a real structure to deal with it. That there is original sin, therefore one has to have the kind of salvation that deals with that. And Eliot was to join the Church of England to become a member. And notice now the difference from the wasteland. We move now nine years later in Ash Wednesday. Listen to the difference in the tone. Someone who has found refuge.

“Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive to strive toward such things
(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

Because I do not hope to know [again]
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again”

For Eliot, his acceptance of Christianity was a mystical experience but it was a mysticism that was purely geometric. The rituals were understood to have efficacy, as formula to combat a real evil, but it was not the content of the religion, it was the efficacy of the magical arrangement, the magical pattern, that held the evil in balance. This of course is much closer to Persian Zoroastrianism than it is to Christian humanism.

Well let's take a break and then we'll come back and see a little bit more about Eliot.

This is the second half of this lecture. And so just like I began the first half of the lecture with a quotation from F. O. Matthiessen, I want to begin the second half of the lecture with a quotation from a new book on Eliot called T. S. Eliot and Hermeneutics by Harriet Davidson published by Louisiana State University Press. Hermeneutics has to do with interpretation. It has to do with a very sophisticated realization that at every step of an interpretation the previous interpretation has changed the set, changed the matrix. So that every step in an interpretation has to take into account that the interpretation itself is progressing, itself is influencing what is going on. So it's like a kind of a conscious awareness that as you're pioneering in your thought the previous thought is influencing what you are pioneering in. And so, the question of context becomes overwhelming in interpretation. And the question is always, ‘What context is effectively now operative?’ Her quotation she is going to mention Heidegger which is Martin Heidegger the German philosopher.

“For Heidegger, poetry, the most privileged of the arts because it is language, both ‘bestows’ and ‘preserves’ a new truth. Ricoeur…” - this is Paul Ricoeur - “…finds this same hermeneutic circle in the etymology of the word invent, which means both to create and to discover.”

Discover, uncover, discover. To create - the word for create in Greek was poiesis, poiesis. To make, to create. That to create is also at the same time a discovery. That one creates a form but that the form discloses what was there already. And poetry, being language raised to the nth degree, is the most primordial human act in consciousness.

How primordial is it? Let's digress for just a second. A name. The name is the most compacted form of a myth. When you implode a whole mythic understanding, its ultimate point is a name. It's like in yoga, the bindu, the one-pointedness of mind. The persevering to the point of ekagrata of grasping the single point. That is what is in effect when one is able to name. So the fact that Adam could name the animals is very primordially revealing. He knew the whole amplitude of the mythic to be able to do that.

A poet like T. S. Eliot is like a primordial shaman who is able to find that single point of reality. That's the objective correlative, not the thing, but the thing was exactness. That's what he was able to locate. But because he could do that he couldn't live in a secular way. Because when you can do that you have to live in a sacred way. Mother nature will not allow someone who has a sacred capacity to live in a secular way. And so Eliot's personal life was always falling apart, always tattered by anxiety, because he was always clinging to the secular comfort of literateurs, of literary magazines, of Lloyd’s Bank, of the publishing company Faber and Faber - which he became an executive of - of his world fame of the Christian church. All of this which is all legitimate in a secular way is illegitimate in a sacred way because it's making the world and things in the world the repository for your livingness. And you cannot do that when you are sacred.

Language bestows and preserves at the same time it creates and it discovers at the same time. “Heidegger uses the concept of figure and ground.” Figure and ground. Or sometimes it's been talked about as form and background, that in order to perceive a form there must be a background which allows for that form to be distinct and perceived. It's like if we carve out a shape, no matter what shape it is, even abstract, that shape is only possible because the background allows it. And so the ground is as essential as the form but the ground cannot be perceived. And so if you are addicted to the clarity of perceptions one exasperates the need for unity almost infinitely. And the more you hone perceptions the clearer you become the more anxiety there is because there is no context that is real. This is the way in which the divine protects the sacred from being ransacked by the secular. Those are sacred portals. And when you're honed enough in consciousness to be able to go in if you don't go in with compassion you will shred yourself. You will see your own self flayed right before your eyes whatever you think is valuable. That's why it reads over the entrance, “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.” Because just that pride that you take in there is the poison that will kill you.

Eliot in sort of a slow motion nightmare discovered that this was exactly true. And he was frightened because it was so exactly true that he couldn't let go of the pursuit of it. He was concerned in the mid-30s after his marriage broke up, his wife had become just a ghost of herself. Notice a ghost again. Descriptions of her at this time are of a shivering, shriveled woman nervously tugging at her husband's shoulder to get his attention and him monumentally indifferent. She became what we call a basket case living in a world of fantasy that he would come back to her. The life had been hell, he couldn't go back. He never understood that human relationships are never one-sided, that she became that way because of him. He was the ground to her form and that she was the ground to his form. He never understood that he had sacrificed a human being for the clarity of his perceptions. And when she plaintively used to say that she and Tom had done these wonderful poems together people thought that she was crazy and she was speaking truthfully from the feminine nature who understands the need for space in love to support the forms that come out expressively. He never understood that in a human way. He always understood that in a cosmological metaphysical way. And that's the problem with our time. We're electrocuted by grand precise exact true metaphysics that cannot be lived as human beings - never will be.

So he began leaving poetry aside. He joined the Christian Church, divorced his wife, become a literateur, become the arbiter of culture. Can you imagine a man, a single man, who became the arbiter of culture? Young poets would come to him to see if it was all right to publish. Publishers would see what he was publishing and that set the tone for year after year after year several generations of people. He was a king of civilization. T. S. Eliot, an American born in St. Louis, was a king of civilization. These archetypal energies, this Oceanus beckoned up by the magician who is able through his art to cast that form but who does not have the integration from himself of the subconscious then borrows from the structure of belief their ring of forms, their ring of the subconscious. And in borrowing that, Eliot finally found a little confidence and with this surrogate borrowed integrity of the Christian church he began writing poetic dramas, some of the most powerful poetic dramas. But the first poetic drama that came out was almost consumed by a preaching Old Testament tone. And this is not to be wondered at because he was evoking beyond the Christian subconscious, the Jewish collective unconscious, which is there because Judaism is the ground for the form of Christianity. There is no Christianity without Judaism. Notice the title, it's called ‘The Rock’, ‘The Rock’. Here are some choruses from the Rock. I'll just read you a few lines of number three. Listen to the tone of the man now.

“The Word of the Lord came unto me, saying:
O miserable cities of designing men,
O wretched generation of enlightened men,
Betrayed in the mazes of your ingenuities,
Sold by the proceeds of your proper inventions:
I have given you hands which you turn from worship,
I have given you speech, for endless palaver,
I have given you my Lawm and you set up commissions,”

It's different. It's not only radically different from Prufrock, or The Wasteland, or even Ash Wednesday, it's a sensibility which is inundated. And what is it inundated with? It's inundated from transpersonal content. The individual person has been so denuded of form but so tightened into a geometric perceptual accuracy that he's able to deliver exactly the tone, exactly the language that was there in Isaiah and Ezekiel thousands of years before him. You read Isaiah, you read Ezekiel and you get the same prophetic tone that T. S. Eliot had in the 1930s. There's not enough to live on in terms of difference between them. But this bothered T. S. Eliot because his commitment was not to Judaism, but to Christianity, and this began to really bother him. So he wrote a book which a man like this, now you understand, has got to do: The Idea of a Christian Society. You're a member in good standing of the Christian church. You can't be having the Jewish background come through and inundate yourself. Well what is Christianity then? He begins,

“The fact that a problem will certainly take a long time to solve, and that it will demand the attention of many minds for several generations, is no justification for postponing the study.”

This does not bode well. Instead of being a comfort, instead of being an encouragement, it was a goad. And what it goaded was T. S. Eliot's artistic sensibility. He began trying to direct his great creative powers to drama and he thought by writing theater it would be alive, it would be fun. He wouldn't have to be caught in his own mind. Do you see the fearfulness? In poetry there's only you, and that's what you have to disclose. It's the gut level of the personal real. It's the language of disclosure and creation. One discloses what one is but one also creates what one is in the very act. Eliot could no longer do this. And so he turned to drama. And in the middle 30s he was doing a play called Murder in the Cathedral. Notice the title: Murder in the Cathedral. And while the actors were dealing with it - English actors, trained actors - they kept saying some of these lines don't belong. And Eliot would say in his inimitable combed way. “Which lines?” As if to say, “what?” And the actors would show him that in the dramatic flow in the language which was appropriate for that dramatic flow and that repartee these lines do not belong there from some other work because really good trained actors can do that. These lines are exquisite but they are not in this play. They belong to some other form. And there was Eliot absolutely astounded. What other form?

The background has got some other form in it. He couldn't let go of the issue. He couldn't ignore that. It's like a hunter challenged on his own turf. There's some really big game back there that you haven't even seen. These plays, important as they are, are chicken feed compared to this. There's something else and it's right at the crux of civilization. Can you find it? It was impossible to ignore. He found that the lines that were excised from Murder in the Cathedral - he carried them around in his head and he went with a friend of his, a woman, on a weekend to an estate where she had a large family and he was enjoying himself. And the lines like seeds began to just grow in him. And the estate was called Burnt Norton. And so he called that poem Burnt Norton a five-part poem. But when Burnt Norton came out in 1935 there was something uneasy in T. S. Eliot because Burnt Norton had a resonance which was not captured fully. It seemed almost inscrutable to him because the poem is great. It's incredible. The integrity of the poem is incredible but it doesn't have any real synthesis. You can go over it with a fine-tooth comb, you can find all kinds of plausible meanings. There is no meaning in Burnt Norton other than the appreciation of a colossally complex arrangement in beautiful order of what really is an assemblage of extracts. It's just the sheer ingenuity of form that holds them together and makes a poem. They don't belong together in any poetic way.

And so five years later with the outbreak of the Second World War just about to come out Eliot wrote a second poem exactly based on Burnt Norton - the same five-part structure - called East Coker. Sold twelve thousand copies in just a few weeks. Astounded everybody. But he wasn't through, because Burnt Norton and East Coker were just hanging there in the midst of his sensibility, so he wrote the next year, The Dry Salvages - again a five-part poem and the three of them were like resonances hanging in his psyche. And so the next year, 1942, he finally wrote Little Gidding. And he realized that in order to bring this infinite sequence, Little Gidding, in order to bring this infinite sequence to some closure the fourth poem, also five-part poem, takes the resonances of the first three and ties them together beautifully. The only thing that holds them together is the sheer ingenuity of poetic form, the geometry of the language. But the perceptions, which are objectively correlative in a most beautiful way, do not interpenetrate. It's like a fabric which is magnified through a sophisticated consciousness until you see the net of the warp and the woof. But there's no design on the warp and the woof. And the Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot is the last time that twentieth century consciousness was able to confront itself with what it had done to itself. Had been able to see universal structure and had lost all human meaning.

Here's how Burnt Norton begins:

“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.”

The end of Burnt Norton runs like this, and I think you can appreciate from what I've said the incredible agility and simplicity and genius of T. S. Eliot, disclosing that he has nothing to say and he has the most beautiful sophisticated form in which to say it.

“The detail of the pattern is movement,
As in the figure of the ten stairs.
Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always–
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.”

Notice five years later in East Coker he's picking that up and trying to do something with that. Just the first few lines.

“In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, and are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and feces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered aresse woven with a silent motto.

In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls
Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
Where you lean against a bank while a van passes
And the deep lane insists on the direction
Into the village, in the electric heat
Hypnotized. In a warm haze the sultry light
Is absorbed, not refracted, by gray stone.
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
Wait for the early owl.”

And the third section of East Coker, one of the most poignant in world poetry, just a few lines.

“O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark.”

And of course it goes on from there, exquisitely. Just the first couple of lines from The Dry Salvages. He's trying to tie a bow. And trying to keep from tightening the bow too much to make a knot. And so he's paying particular attention to keeping the poetic form exacting. And so in The Dry Salvages he begins:

“I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god - sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognized as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;”

And then he goes on and the last lines are:

“In the smell of grapes and the autumn table,
And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.

The river is within us, the sea all about us;
The sea is the land's edge also, the granite
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation”

The sea is the background for the land. The land is the background for the sea. The poem has ourselves as a background. And our form has this poetry as a background. The abstractness of Eliot's poetic form was an attempt to externalize the background which would allow him to occur as an individual. But the background’s form was such that what appeared was just a ghost of himself. Little Gidding which is the fourth of the Four Quartets has a beautiful development and I think I'll give you just a few lines at the beginning and then the section that I wanted to read.

This is the summation of a lifetime. He never wrote much poetry after this at all, even though he lived another nineteen years. This is in the midst of the Second World War. This was the culmination of his whole quest for exactness.

“Midwinter spring is its own season
Semipiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on ponds and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart's heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.”

I'm going to jump in here. This is a long chant. In fact this part of Little Gidding, towards the end, T. S. Eliot approaches Walt Whitman in his chanting. But where Walt Whitman chanted for life, Eliot is chanting a dirge for consciousness which has achieved its goal of perfection and has found it absolutely vacant.

“ ‘...
Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort.
First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and soul begin to fall asunder.
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, 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’ harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
Then fools’ approval stings, and honor stains.
From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.’
The day was breaking. In the disfigured street
He left me, with a kind of valediction,
And faded on the blowing of the horn.”

Eliot's tremendous capacity revealed round the world that American consciousness and art had raised to a penultimate level. It was no longer a question of European domination of Western civilization. The United States had clearly outdistanced everyone. The poignancy of Eliot, added to the amplitude of Pound, was just devastating because what it disclosed was that the whole procedure of Western civilization, heightened in the nineteenth century towards a dematerialization of form, had actually disclosed that it isn’t form that's dematerializing but the content of the human character. And that one eventually came to the point in the Second World War that there was no enduring stable content anywhere in the universe of the human character but that it took an exacting form to disclose that barrenness. It was extraordinary, but there were individuals who could not accept this. There were individuals, especially in the United States, who said, ‘No, some error has been made somewhere. Something has been left out. Something perhaps so subtle that it may take a lifetime to find. Or perhaps so naturally there that one has to just become almost super present to find it. But find it we will.’

It was this reaction which gives us a cue to next week's lecture because the American poet who took that upon himself to discover - E. E. Cummings. And we find Cummings trying in three different ways to approach it in poetry. In short lyrics we'll see his playfulness. We will dance before the Lord with all our might with the loveliness of life and he will disclose to us his love, because he likes happy children in light little poems. But in two great large works, one The Enormous Room, Cummings tries to come in directly. And then in his great stream of consciousness epic Eimi - E-I-M-I, the Greek for ‘I am’, Eimi - Cummings thought I will parade out the entirety of my being and see what it is and disclose that. Vacuous you say? Not there. I will be there.

And so we'll see you next week with E. E. Cummings, tremendously heroic task assumed by another American poet.

Thank you.