 Hello, fellow followers of Christ, and welcome to the show that introduces you to the men and women behind history's greatest works of literature. Come along every week as we explore these renowned authors, the times and genre in which they wrote, why scholars praised their writing, and how we as Catholics should read and understand their works. I'm Joseph Pierce, and this is The Authority. Hello and welcome to this episode of The Authority. I am your host, Joseph Pierce, thanks as always for joining me. This week we are looking at arguably, and indeed I would probably say probably, the greatest poet of the 20th century, certainly in the English language, and that's T.S. And last, last time we looked at Siegfried Sassoon, and there are a few parallels that exist between Siegfried Sassoon and T.S. Eliot. First of all, they're near contemporaries. Sassoon was born two years before Eliot and died two years afterwards, but basically they lived parallel times. So T.S. Eliot was born in 1888 and died in 1965. And I said that the similarity is not just in terms of the fact that they lived at the same time, almost exactly, but Siegfried Sassoon came from a very wealthy family, sometimes known as the Rothscholls of the East, the Baghdad Sassoons, whereas T.S. Eliot comes from the group sometimes known as the Boston Brahmins, in other words, the Wasp elite from New England that possessed most of the wealth and the power in the United States and certainly in New England. So T.S. Eliot comes from that class, but although he's a New Englander by roots, and an Old Englander, if you go back further of course, he actually was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and the reason for that was that his grandfather had left New England to start a Unitarian church. So Eliot's upbringing was certainly not orthodox in terms of Christianity. Unitarianism was part of the family heritage, in other words, a denial of the trinity. But as befits, as one would expect from someone of his class in society of the elite order, so to speak, he was educated at Harvard, received his BA and MA in literature, and he then went on to spend a year studying philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, so having studied first of all undergraduate and master's level at one of the elite schools in the United States. He then went to study at the elite school basically in France, in Paris, the Sorbonne, one of the medieval universities of course. Then returning to Harvard, he studied Indian philosophy and Sanskrit between 1911 and 1914. This is a very learned man who has a great and deep academic background. Someone would have thought at this point that he would be pursuing a career, a vocation in the academy as a professor, but things were not to actually be. So he came to Oxford in 1914 and studied at Merton College, Oxford. But after a year he dropped out, so he actually became a college dropout, although of course he'd got his BA and MA and further studies. He preferred London. So he basically fell in love with the London society scene and particularly the scene of the literati, to find himself amongst the literary people of London, not particularly liking Oxford. So in 1915, having dropped out of school, he got married somewhat hurriedly at the, should we say, encouragement of Ezra Pound, the American poet whose influence upon Eddie was powerful but not always necessarily healthy. He married Vivienne, his wife in 1915, and she had a drug problem. He had a drink problem. Both of them were prone to sickness and in the case of Vivienne, ultimately to insanity. So it was a very troubled and turbulent marriage. And in a private paper written in the 1960s, Elliot confessed the following, I'm quoting. I came to persuade myself that I was in love with Vivienne simply because I wanted to burn my boats and commit myself to staying in England. And she persuaded herself, also under the influence of Ezra Pound, that she would save the poet by keeping him in England. To her, the marriage brought no happiness. To me, it brought the state of mind out of which came the wasteland. So I'm going to, at this point, spend some time looking at T.S. Eliot's probably his most famous poem, either that or Four Quartets, which was the last final great work he wrote. So I wrote a series for Crisis Magazine called Great Literature in a Nutshell where I endeavored to take the great works of Western civilization, great works of literature, Western civilization, try to encapsulate and encompass them in around a thousand words. Well, that's ideal suited for a podcast of this sort. And as this is one of the most important poems ever written, certainly arguably the greatest poem of the 20th century in English language, it's worth us knowing. It's also one of the most misunderstood. So it's worth us understanding. So here we go, The Wasteland in a Nutshell. The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot is probably the most influential poem of the 20th century and one of the least understood. Published in 1922, it was perceived at the time as being a jarring and iconoclastic modernist attack on tradition. One reviewer described it as a, quote, mad medley and so much waste paper. Another thought it depicted, another thought it depicted, a quote, a world or a mind in disaster and mocking its despair, adding that it expressed the toppling of aspirations, the swift disintegration of acceptance stability, the crash of an ideal. Its cultural impact was certainly very divisive. The modernist avant-garde gazed in awe at its many layers of allusive meaning. The old guard claimed that the layers were not so much allusive as an illusion, suspecting that the emperor had no clothes. The pessimism of its language and the libertine nature of its form accentuated the polarised reaction. The detractors included poetic traditionalists such as G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis and Alfred Noyes, none of whom were aware of Eliot's own deep traditionalism, which would only become apparent a few years later with his embrace of Anglo-Catholicism and his description of himself as being a Catholic, a royalist and a classicist. It was not until his death, more than 40 years later, that a more balanced perspective would emerge of the cultural impact which the misreading of the wasteland had caused. The obituary to Eliot in the times conveys such a perceptive, that's the London Times of course, quote. His presentation of disillusionment and the disintegration of values, catching the mood of the time, made it the poetic gospel of the post-war intelligentsia. At the time, however, few either of its detractors or its admirers saw through the surface innovations and the language of despair to the deep respect for tradition and the keen moral sense which underlay them, end quote. It is ironic that the key that unlocks the wasteland is Eliot's great admiration for Dante. You cannot understand the Inferno Eliot had written without the Purgatorio and the Paradiso. The disgust Dante shows in the Inferno quote is completed and explained only by the last canto of the Paradiso, the contemplation of the horrid or sordid or disgusting by an artist, is the necessary and negative aspect of the impulse toward the pursuit of beauty, end quote. It is therefore in the light of the peace and resurrection at the end of the wasteland and the earlier infernal, that the earlier infernal and Purgatorio aspects of the poem are to be seen. The epigraph at the beginning of the poem sets the scene and a prophetic tone with this reference to the Cumaean Sibyl, the most famous of the ancient prophetesses whom the Greeks and Romans consulted about the future. She is described at length in Virgil's Aeneid in which she shows Aeneas how to enter the underworld and she is featured in Virgil's Fourth Eclogue in which she delivers a prophecy which theologians would later interpret as a foreshadowing of the birth of Christ. The Cumaean Sibyl in this sense can be seen as a figure of John the Baptist as one who cries in the wilderness in the wasteland prophesying the coming of Christ. The poem itself is divided into five parts. Part one, the burial of the dead, begins with an allusion to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales which sets the scene of pilgrimage. They then follow a heap of biblical allusions from the Old Testament, references to Job, Ezekiel, Ecclesiastes, and Isaiah which provides the penitential atmosphere. Quote, what are the roots that clutch? What branches grow out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, you cannot say or guess for you know only a heap of broken images. In these few lines, echoing intertextually with cautionary verses from Scripture, the image of the wasteland of modernity is laid out before us. The stony rubbish of modern culture enables no roots of tradition to clutch and therefore no beautiful cultural fruits can be found on branches that cannot grow. Instead we are left with nothing but incohesive and incoherent fragments, a heap of broken images. The poem's fragmented form is itself a reflection of the fragmented formlessness of modernity it satirizes and reproaches. As for its moral purpose, it is to show us something beyond our narcissistic selves. Quote, and I will show you something different from either your shadow at morning striding behind you or your shadow at evening rising to meet you. I will show you fear in a handful of dust. The wasteland is therefore a memento mori, a reminder of death, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and the four last things to which such a reminder points, death, judgment, heaven and hell. The final section of part one introduces a new motif of the unreal city, an image of modernity severed from reality by accretions of artificiality or what we might now call virtual reality. Part one ends with the poet pointing the finger at the reader in its quoting of the final line of Baudelaire's famous poem to the reader. Part two and three presents a tableau of the last and decadence of rich and poor alike, including intertextual allusions to Shakespeare's Cleopatra, to Elizabeth the First and the Earl of Leicester, to a middle class typist and the young man carbuncular to whom she sacrifices her virginity, after which he bestows one final patronizing kiss before taking his leave and to working class people in the pub who discuss sex within the context of abortion and other manifestations of the culture of death. Part three ends the section on decadence and last with a reference to St Augustine's Confessions. O Lord, Thou pluckest me out, signifying and prophesying the turning point of the poem from the inferno of modern faturity and vacurity to the purgatorial cleansing of the passions. Part four is entitled Death by Water, offering a further memento mori but beyond that a promise of the death and resurrection wrought by baptism. Part five begins with the barren and arid image of the desert and the thirst for water it induces. There then follows an allusion to Christ on the road to Emmaus and a listing of the falling towers of the cities of man. Falling towers, Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, London, Unreal. All the major centers of civilization which have been pivotal to human history are listed as fallen and unreal except for Rome which is omitted ostentatiously. Only the eternal city remains. Rome has not fallen nor is it unreal. The poem culminates and climaxes in the coming of the much needed and much desired reign, a symbol of grace and the awful daring of a moment's surrender which is the acceptance of faith. As the thunder proclaims the need for sacrifice, compassion and self-control, the poet ends with gratitude for the peace that passeth all understanding. So there we have a brief summary of the profundity of the great poem The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot. We'll backtrack a bit now. The Wasteland was published in 1922. We go back to 1915 during the year that Eliot was in Paris studying at the Sorbonne. He fell under the influence of Axion-Fran, Axion-Française and particularly its leader, Charles Morasse. Long since prior to that even when studying at Harvard had been very interested in French literature in general and the French symbolists or decadence in particular. But Charles Morasse is leading this political and cultural organization called Axion-Française, somewhat controversial, but we won't discuss that now. But the important thing is that Charles Morasse summarized his creed in a very simply. He said that he was a catholic, a monarchic, a classicist. So a Catholic, a monarchist and a classicist. When Eliot is received into the Anglican Church as an Anglo-Catholic in 1927, he describes himself as being a royalist, a Catholic and a classicist. So he echoes exactly, mirrors exactly the words of Charles Morasse. And this is important because it shows the influence of this tradition-oriented understanding of culture, which Axion-Française and Charles Morasse has, that dates back seven years before the publication of the Wasteland. So the point is that although Eliot was not a Catholic, when he wrote the Wasteland, the trajectory that he was on was one leading towards conversion. There was a desire for conversion at work in the Wasteland and that desire came to fruition five years after the Wasteland was published. But before the Wasteland was published, Eliot first came to prominence for the publication of a volume of poetry during World War I, 1917, Proof Rock and other observations, and then three years later a volume just called Poems in 1920. And then the Wasteland was the one that really exploded, if you like, onto the cultural scene as the anthem of modernism, both understood and misunderstood in 1922. And then there's a wonderful poem by T.S. Eliot called The Hollow Men, published three years after that, 1925, and I'm just going to read the beginning because of its cultural importance to other writers, and then we'll also read the end of it, because that's also very important. So I'm just going to read the first part of the poem, The Hollow Men. We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men, leaning together, headpiece filled with straw alas. Our dried voices when we whisper together are quiet and meaningless, as wind in dry grass or rats feet over broken glass in our dry cellar. Shape without form, shade without color, paralyzed force, gesture without motion. Those who have crossed with direct eye to death's other kingdom remember us, if at all, not as lost, violent souls, but only as the hollow men, the stuffed men. So this image of modern man as being hollow, vacuous, lacking form, substance, tradition, roots, which you'd always seen rehearsed, if you like, in the wasteland, became very important for writers such as Evening War and C.S. Lewis. So C.S. Lewis, who is certainly not an admirer of T.S. Eliot, in his own book, The Abolition of Man, published in 1945, I believe, towards the end of World War II, talked about men without chests and C.S. Lewis's Men Without Chests or Effectivity Synonyms are the same as T.S. Eliot's Hollow Men, this understanding of modern man as someone lacking substance or depth, vacuous, fatuous, not fully real, unreal, virtually real, living in virtual reality, artificiality. And Evening War, in writer and visitor, in fact, much of his fiction is full of these hollow men, samples of examples of modern men and women who lack any substance or integrity, any philosophical depth, any theological depth, any historical depth, merely slaves of the zeitgeist, slaves of the spirit of the age. So this idea, which Eddie encompasses here in The Hollow Men, published in 1925, is taken up by other writers such as Evening War and C.S. Lewis. I'm just going to read the final part of the poem as well because it's marvellous and I'm going to see how it leads into a quote by G.K. Chesterton. Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, force the shadow, for thine is the kingdom. Between the conception and the creation, between the emotion and the response, force the shadow. Life is very long. Between the desire and the spasm, between the potency and the existence, between the essence and the descent, force the shadow. For thine is the kingdom. For thine is, life is, for thine is the, this is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper. The conclusion of that poem irked G.K. Chesterton. You remember I mentioned how the old guard were not very enamoured of the avant-garde. And Chesterton certainly did not like the poetry of T.S. Eliot. And one of Chesterton's final broadcast before his death in 1935 was, he ends with, they may end with a whimper, but we will end with a bang. And the idea being that somehow or other, T.S. Eliot represented this pessimistic, sceptical view of reality, which the moderns display. But of course, what Chesterton didn't understand is that on the contrary, Eliot was satirising these people. He was, he was basically in agreement with Chesterton. And as we shall see, Chesterton, Eliot, actually came to some sort of reconciliation towards the end of Chesterton's life, which I'll get to anon. 1927, the T.S. Eliot published a wonderful poem called The Journey of the Magi, which is one of the greatest Christmas poems ever written. It puts us into the mind and experience of the three wise men on their way to Bethlehem. And indeed, they're looking back on the experience after the event. So 1927, the same year, Eliot himself becomes a wise man by becoming a Christian. He announces Christianity, as I've said, in the manner which I've already spoken. In the same year, he also announces British citizenship, deciding that his future lay certainly in England and not in the United States, his land of birth. When asked by someone, Jacques Maritain, the great Thomist philosopher, when asked by someone why T.S. Eliot never became a Catholic in the fall, should we say, Roman sense of the word, Jacques Maritain laughed and said that T.S. Eliot exhausted all of his powers of conversion when he became an Englishman. So certainly he had a much better English accent than I did than I do. Very posh, very Chelsea, and C.S. Lewis very irritated by what he saw as T.S. Eliot's posing as a sort of Chelsea posh part of London, bourgeois, Anglo-Catholicism. He actually satirizes him as the character Neoangular in C.S. Lewis' book, The Pilgrim's Regress, written and published in 1933, so just six years after Lewis' war's conversion. T.S. Eliot's conversion, C.S. Lewis satirizes Eliot as the character Neoangular, the Anglo-Catholic in his book, The Pilgrim's Regress. Ash Wednesday is a marvelous poem published in 1930, shows the purgatorial spirit. Certain people such as my good friend, Father Dwight Longenecker, compartmentalizes Eliot's poetry from the infernal poetry, the poetry of Hell, the early poetry, and then the purgatorial period, of which Ash Wednesday evidently is part, and then finally the Paradise, Paradise of Vision of Four Quartets, published in 1945. I think that's an oversimplification because I think there's a purgatorial dimension in all of Eliot's verse, but certainly there's this progression, and Ash Wednesday is certainly Eliot's certainly in purgatory now, not in the inferno. Perhaps the most popular book in terms of its cultural impact, possibly at least, is Old Poss'er's Book of Practical Cats, Eliot in a much more playful and lighter vein, and that of course became the inspiration and some of the lyrics for the musical Cats, which continues to be very, very popular. For Quartets we mentioned 1945, which is a deep meditation on the relationship between time and eternity, God's presence, the relationship with history. Don't have time to talk about that, unfortunately. Perhaps we'll come back and look at that. In greater depth, he also wrote plays at the poem The Rock, published in 1934. It choruses to the rocks on great Christian poetry, and this is The Reconciliation with G.K. Chesterton. In 1935, Eliot wrote a play for the Canterbury Festival called Murder in the Cathedral, based upon the martyrdom of Sir Thomas Beckett, and Chesterton as an old man, again, a year or so before he died, very big. It said he took up two seats at the theater, but he went to see it. But he went to see Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral and loved it very much. Eliot began to write to Chesterton and said that he thought that Chesterton was the greatest critic of the works of Charles Dickens. So they became friends belatedly in spite of Chesterton's misunderstanding of Eliot's purpose and form in his earlier poetry. His nonfiction needs to be mentioned. He wrote some very good works about what we might call cultural conservatism or cultural traditionalism, including Christianity and culture and notes towards the definition of culture. He also wrote literary criticism, and I do not think he was a great literary critic. I'm begging to differ with him here. He is wrongheaded about Hamlet. He calls Hamlet an artistic failure. He also described it as an insoluble puzzle. There are two types of insoluble puzzle, a puzzle which has no solution, which is objectively insoluble, and a puzzle that's only insoluble for the person trying to do it, and it might just be that the person trying to do it is not equal to the puzzle, not that the puzzle is itself insoluble. That was the case with T.S. Eliot's approach to Hamlet. I also think he was wrongheaded about the metaphysical poets, and it was a very, very uncharted one, wrong, about the status of Germanic Hopkins. Although I'm a great admirer of T.S. Eliot, I don't greatly admire his literary criticism. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, and so we'll conclude with asking some questions around insoluble puzzles, should we say. Was T.S. Eliot an American? Was he British? Was he an Englishman? Was he somehow a hybrid form of one or other or more of these? Apart from that puzzle, it's certainly he's the most influential poet of the 20th century, and arguably the century's greatest poet, and on that note, T.S. Eliot, we salute you. Thanks for joining me as always, and please do join me next time. Until then, goodbye, God bless, and good reading. This has been an episode of The Authority with Joseph Pierce, brought to you by TAN. For updates on new episodes and to support The Authority and other great free content, visit theauthoritypodcast.com to subscribe, and use coupon code authority25 to get 25% off your next order, including books, audiobooks, and video courses by Joseph Pierce, on literary giants such as Tolkien, Chesterton, Lewis, Shakespeare, and Bellach, as well as TAN's extensive catalog of content from the saints and great spiritual masters to strengthen your faith and interior life. 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