9781137301321

T.S. Eliot MaterializedLiteral Meaning and Embodied TruthISBN: 9781137301321DOI: 10.1057/9781137301321Palgrave Macmillan

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DOI: 10.1057/9781137301321

T.S. Eliot Materialized

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10.1057/9781137301321 - T.S. Eliot Materialized, G. Douglas Atkins

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Also by G. Douglas AtkinsTHE FAITH OF JOHN DRYDEN: Change and Continuity

READING DECONSTRUCTION/DECONSTRUCTIVE READING

WRITING AND READING DIFFERENTLY: Deconstruction and the Teaching of Composition and Literature (co-edited with Michael L. Johnson)

QUESTS OF DIFFERENCE: Reading Pope’s Poems

SHAKESPEARE AND DECONSTRUCTION (co-edited with David M. Bergeron)

CONTEMPORARY LITERARY THEORY (co-edited with Laura Morrow)

GEOFFREY HARTMAN: Criticism as Answerable Style

ESTRANGING THE FAMILIAR: Toward a Revitalized Critical Writing

TRACING THE ESSAY: Th rough Experience to Truth

READING ESSAYS: An Invitation

ON THE FAMILIAR ESSAY: Challenging Academic Orthodoxies

LITERARY PATHS TO RELIGIOUS UNDERSTANDING: Essays on Dryden, Pope, Keats, George Eliot, Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and E.B. White

T.S. ELIOT AND THE ESSAY: From Th e Sacred Wood to Four Quartets

READING T.S. ELIOT: Four Quartets and the Journey toward Understanding

E.B. WHITE: Th e Essayist as First-Class Writer

SWIFT’S SATIRES ON MODERNISM: Battlegrounds of Reading and Writing (forthcoming)

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DOI: 10.1057/9781137301321

T.S. Eliot Materialized: Literal Meaning and Embodied TruthG. Douglas Atkins


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t.s. eliot materializedCopyright © G. Douglas Atkins, 2013.All rights reserved. First published in 2013 byPALGRAVE MACMILLAN®in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.ISBN: 978–1–137–30133–8 EPUBISBN: 978–1–137–30132–1 PDFISBN: 978–1–137–30131–4 HardbackLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.First edition: 2013www.palgrave.com/pivotdoi: 10.1057/9781137301321


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Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments vi

Reading Literally, Reading Laterally

Turning and Acceptance in Ash-Wednesday: Affi rming Life’s Newness and Joy

Falling in Love and Reading Spinoza: Some Forms of Approach to “Amalgamating Disparate Experience”

Th e Gift Half Understood: Incarnation as “Impossible Union,” Way, and Intersection

Th e Word, Words, and the World: Redeeming the Word, or Some Implications of Incarnation for Reading and Writing about Literature

Bibliography

Index

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vi DOI: 10.1057/9781137301321

Preface and Acknowledgments

T.S. Eliot Materialized is not, of course, a materialist or his-toricist reading of the royalist, Anglo-Catholic, and clas-sicist poet, essayist, and dramatist. It is not, in fact, strictly speaking, a “reading.” Rather, it is an essay toward literal reading made up of chapters mirroring in thematic dis-covery the way of reading that Eliot himself embraced and appears to have wanted. Also about separation and healing union, the book you hold or screen reveals Old Possum’s reiterated desire to “amalgamat[e] disparate experience.” With recourse to Incarnational patterning even before he converted to Anglo-Catholicism in 1927, Eliot declined to engage in simple either/or choices; instead, for him, the letter, for example, is the spirit embodied.

I am thus challenging the familiar “deep” reading of Eliot, which oft en entails the search for “hidden” meanings and prizes symbols for their richness and diffi culty. I also challenge the familiar, indeed perennial notion that Eliot, before and aft er conversion, was an idealist, really a pur-itan, fundamentally hankering to escape from time and the so-called real world for a transcendent and pure world of ideas and spirit. Readers have, unfortunately, been trained to miss his commitment to the physical, tangible, sensory world, in part because they fail to understand Incarnation. Eliot begins from the physical and the literal and proceeds in, through, and by means of it to the spiritual; he is thus neither immersed in the physical nor will-ing ever to leave it behind. In this, he follows such luminaries as Lancelot Andrewes (and before him, Saint Anselm).

A labor of love, this little book follows from my earlier books on Eliot (T.S. Eliot and the Essay and` Reading T.S.

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Preface and Acknowledgments

Eliot), in both of which the great essay-poem Four Quartets took center-stage. Here that poem has receded, perhaps, into the background, though it retains some importance, serving, I might say, as mediator as well as Magister. In treating the letter and the spirit, this book partners with my recent study of Swift and modern inwardness and subjectivity. It may, of course, be read singly, alone, and with profi t, or so I trust, by specialist and nonspecialist reader alike.

I happily acknowledge my debts to Old Possum himself; his previous readers, particularly Elizabeth Drew, Dame Helen Gardner, and Hugh Kenner; and my teachers, especially Vincent E. Miller (Woff ord College), who introduced me to Eliot and who taught me to read by asking ques-tions of a text; Irvin Ehrenpreis (University of Virginia), who showed me the way to proceed in, through, and by means of eighteenth-century studies to twentieth-century ones; and Geoff rey Hartman (School of Criticism and Th eory, University of California, Irvine), who showed me all about reader-responsibility.

I owe a special debt here to Brigitte Shull, senior editor at Palgrave Macmillan, who invited me to contribute to the new Palgrave Pivot series. Her invitation prompted this essai. Th is is my fi ft h, and, I hope, not last, book with Palgrave Macmillan. Working with Brigitte, whom I still have not met or spoken with on the phone, has been a pleasure and a profi t. As has working with Erin Ivy, senior production manager, whose effi ciency, skill, and acumen I wish I could say she took from me when she was my student. But, alas, Erin is alone responsible for her consum-mate capaciousness. I also owe a great deal to the anonymous reviewer of the manuscript, who provided much-needed support and off ered acute suggestions for improvement. I hope I have not disappointed that reader. I thank again Lori Whitten, Paula Courtney, and Pam LeRow, who assisted in so many ways, always with grace and good cheer.

Last, but not least, I thank, once more, my daughter Leslie, her husband Craig, my granddaughter Kate, my son Christopher, his wife Sharon, my grandson Oliver, my wife Rebecca, and our child, the won-derful Millicent Bofort Black-’n-Bonny, reminders, each and every one of them, that every moment is “attended.” No one mentioned in this preface, or unmentioned, bears any responsibility for my mishaps or missteps; for them, alas, I alone am responsible.

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1Reading Literally, Reading Laterally

Abstract: Much of T.S. Eliot’s undeniable diffi culty stems, not from inherent obscurity, but from the way we have been taught to read the poetry. He himself famously said that modern poetry must be diffi cult, and his is demanding: allusive, indirect, oft en following what he called the “logic of the imagination.” Rather than continue to read him “in depth,” with special attention to symbols and allusions, it is time to follow the lead of the poetry itself, and read it literally and laterally. Eliot practiced a comparative style of reading, and his own poetry calls for reading that juxtaposes passages within a given poem and between and among his poems. Th e words themselves are the means by which the Word is approached.

Atkins, G. Douglas. T.S. Eliot Materialized: Literal Meaning and Embodied Truth. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. doi: 10.1057/9781137301321.

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The spirit killeth, but the letter giveth life.—T.S. Eliot, “Baudelaire in Our Time,” Essays Ancient and Modern

The welcome News is in the Letter found.—John Dryden, Religio Laici or A Laymans Faith

The two tools of criticism are analysis and comparison.—T.S. Eliot, Th e Sacred Wood

Today, nearly 100 years aft er the publication of “Th e Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Th e Sacred Wood, and Th e Waste Land, T.S. Eliot still suff ers from the perception of being diffi cult. It is, of course, a judgment that he himself invited when, in 1923, he boldly declared that the mod-ern poet must become “more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.” Th e result is, he said, in his magisterial critical voice, that “poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be diffi cult.”1 It is a predictive statement with creative force and capacity.

As my freshman students confi rm semester aft er semester, Eliot is not as diffi cult as alleged. Th ere are complexities and problems, to be sure: allusions to older texts, oft en in foreign and even recondite languages, references to a wide variety of historical and cultural fi gures, philo-sophical ideas transmuted into complex sensations, arcane words (e.g., “Polyphiloprogenitive”), “metaphysical,” “quaint,” “obscure” language and diction. Nevertheless, many students, and other readers as well, do bet-ter than muddle their way through; re-reading helps, particularly when done aloud, and there exists a plethora of cribs and companions to assist the befuddled reader. Th e real diffi culty in reading Eliot, I have come to understand, lies not in some supposed depth at which his meaning lies, accessible, if at all, only to the most knowledgeable and persistent digging and mining. Rather than vertical, the issue is horizontal, and lateral: how parts relate to parts and to whole, one section, verse, word to the next. We are accustomed, however—Romantic even in our theoretical rebellion against Romanticism, in love still with personality and spirit and soul—to look deep within for the true meaning, for the essence that is spirit, which, we all supposedly know, lies far below the surface. If, though, Eliot does not subscribe to these Romantic and modern notions, we may look for his meaning in all the wrong places. I am suggesting, indeed, that he asks to be read laterally, comparatively, even literally. In addition to listing “comparison” as one of the two available tools of the critic, he himself



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practiced a thoroughly comparative way of reading texts, as the essays included in his fi rst collection, Th e Sacred Wood (1920), illustrate.2

Let us return to that early essay “Th e Metaphysical Poets,” from which I quoted above. Aft er delivering his partly defensive assertion that contemporary poets will have to be diffi cult, Eliot proceeds to link the “school of Donne” with “classical poets” for the way they share the “essential quality of transmuting ideas into sensations, of transforming an observation into a state of mind.”3 Immediately recognizable as absent from this formulation, however obscure the defi nition may appear, is that “inward” turn that he reprobates in the Romantics in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and develops in “Th e Metaphysical Poets”: there is simply no hint of (Romantic and modern) refl ection. Eliot then goes on in the latter essay to the critical, and no doubt surprising, remarks on surface and depth, soul and diction, engaging, as always, in comparison:

It is interesting to speculate whether it is not a misfortune that two of the greatest masters of diction in our language, Milton and Dryden, triumph with a dazzling disregard of the soul. If we continued to produce Miltons and Drydens it might not so much matter, but as things are it is a pity that English poetry has remained so incomplete. Those who object to the “artifi-ciality” of Milton or Dryden sometimes tell us to “look into our hearts and write”. But that is not looking deep enough; Racine or Donne looked into a good deal more than the heart. One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts.4

Here, I suspect, Old Possum is at pranks with the literal and the fi gurative, as he dethrones the heart and soul as the object, end, and test of art.

Eliot’s diffi culty lies, I think, where he says that St.-J. Perse’s lies in his Modernist poem Anabasis, which Eliot translated and published, along with an important preface, in 1930. In that preface, Eliot begins with expressed doubt about the need for such a piece while acknowledging the work’s diffi culty:

I am by no means convinced that a poem like Anabasis requires a preface at all. It is better to read such a poem six times, and dispense with a preface. But when a poem is presented in the form of a translation, people who have never heard of it are naturally inclined to demand some testimonial. So I give mine hereunder.

“For myself,” Eliot goes on, “there was no need for a preface”; he knew that the poem carries no reference to Xenophon or the Journey of the



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Ten Th ousand, that it has “no particular reference to Asia Minor, and that no map of the migrations could be drawn up.”5 Perse means by his title that “the poem is a series of images of migration, of conquest of vast spaces in Asiatic wastes, of destruction and foundation of cities and civilizations of any races or epochs of the ancient East.”6

Borrowing from a French commentator on Perse’s poem (Lucien Fabre), Eliot proceeds to “two notions which may be of use to the English reader.” Th e fi rst of these notions is that

any obscurity of the poem, on first readings, is due to the suppression of “links in the chain”, of explanatory and connecting matter, and not to inco-herence, or to the love of cryptogram. The justification of such abbreviation of method is that the sequence of images coincides and concentrates into one intense impression of barbaric civilization. The reader has to allow the images to fall into his memory successively without questioning the reasonableness of each at the moment; so that, at the end, a total effect is produced.7

Eliot proceeds to another fi nely analytical paragraph, his second sentence below becoming a virtual staple of subsequent commentary on poetry, one in which the critic is very much present and plainly visible, as well as patently engaged in “Gen’rous Converse” (Alexander Pope):8

Such selection of a sequence of images and ideas has nothing chaotic about it. There is a logic of the imagination as well as a logic of concepts. People who do not appreciate poetry always find it difficult to distinguish between order and chaos in the arrangement of images; and even those who are capa-ble of appreciating poetry cannot depend upon first impressions. I was not convinced of Mr Perse’s imaginative order until I had read the poem five or six times. And if, as I suggest, such an arrangement of imagery requires just as much “fundamental brain-work” as the arrangement of an argument, it is to be expected that the reader of a poem should take at least as much trouble as a barrister reading an important decision on a complicated case.9

Eliot’s translation of Perse’s poem appears as prose, but Eliot insists it is poetry: “Its sequences, its logic of imagery, are those of poetry and not of prose; and in consequence—at least the two matters are very closely allied—the declamation, the system of stresses and pauses, which is par-tially exhibited by the punctuation and spacing, is that of poetry and not of prose.”10

Eliot moves then to the second “notion” he has borrowed from Lucien Fabre, “a tentative synopsis of the movement of the poem,”



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off ering guidance for a fi rst reading, which can be forgotten when the reader no longer needs it.11 It amounts to a putting-in-other-words that “movement,” which is not thematic, of the poem’s ten divisions (e.g., IV. “Foundation of the city,” VII. “Decision to fare forth,” X. “Acclamation, festivities, repose. Yet the urge towards another departure, this time with the mariner”). Eliot immediately adds: “And I believe that this is as much as I need to say about Perse’s Anabasis.” He does say more, however: “I believe this is a piece of writing of the same importance as the later work of Mr James Joyce, as valuable as Anna Livia Plurabelle [later incorporated into Finnegans Wake]. And this is a high estimate indeed.”12

Th e “logic of the imagination” that Eliot defends in his discussion of Anabasis bears a certain relationship to that “mythical method” that he identifi es with Joyce in Ulysses: the juxtaposition, without commentary or refl ection, of diff erent time periods and cultures, this via the context cre-ated by allusions to Th e Odyssey. Such allusion as appears in the opening verses of Th e Waste Land functions in similar fashion, although the situ-ation is medieval rather than mythical: there, the comparison and con-trast with Chaucer’s pilgrims on the way to Canterbury in April render tellingly the wastelanders’ incapacity for feeling and meaning. Fecundity and fertility comment on, and off er a critique of, modern barrenness and infertility—all without direct authorial intrusion or editorial statement. A burden thus rests on the reader to know, to perceive, the unstated. It is by no means, though, a matter of reading deeply; instead, it is a matter of placing side by side, of comparing two contrasting situations.

In Th e Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), the Norton Lectures at Harvard, Eliot returned at the end to the matter of diffi cult poetry (a section reprinted in his Points of View, 1951). Here, he considers several reasons a reader may fi nd a poem diffi cult, including “the reader’s hav-ing been told, or having suggested to himself, that the poem is going to prove diffi cult.” Such a reader, reasons Eliot, “obfuscates his senses by the desire to be clever and to look very hard for something he doesn’t know what—or else by the desire not to be taken in”; instead, the reader should begin “in a state of sensitivity.”13 Citing himself as instance, Eliot says that the “seasoned reader” “does not bother about understanding; not, at least, at fi rst.” “Finally,” Eliot says, “there is the diffi culty caused by the author’s having left out something which the reader is used to fi nd-ing; so that the reader, bewildered, gropes about for what is absent, and puzzles his head for a kind of ‘meaning’ which is not there, and is not



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meant to be there.”14 Such a “meaning,” Eliot adds, may serve “to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him.” Some poets, though, “become impatient of this ‘meaning’ which seems superfl uous, and perceive possibilities of intensity through its elimination.” Aft er all, “a great deal, in the way of meaning, belongs to prose rather than to poetry,” and the poet should not be engaged in “trying to do other people’s work.”15

Although not always or altogether clear in these passages, Eliot is interested in something other than an intellectual or merely rational response to literature. He wants the whole person involved, not just “the heart,” but also “the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts.” Paraphrasable content, as it were, holds little interest or value—its creation is not the aim of the poet, nor its discovery that of the literary critic (at least, not at fi rst). For these and other reasons, then, dipping deep below the surface, for extractable meaning, may be irrelevant and, at worst, detrimental.

As to meaning, Eliot is much more interested in the verbal or linguis-tic sort. He develops this point in his essay on Lancelot Andrewes (1928), in which he weaves writing and reading together, beginning with the famous seventeenth-century preacher’s “medieval” way of constructing his sermons, in which the reader must follow the writer’s “immersion” in his material. Reading Bishop Andrewes, writes Eliot,

is like listening to a great Hellenist expounding a text of the Posterior Analytics: altering the punctuation, inserting or removing a comma or a semi-colon to make an obscure passage suddenly luminous, dwelling on a single word, comparing its use in its nearer and in its most remote con-texts, purifying a disturbed or cryptic lecture-note into lucid profundity. To persons whose minds are habituated to feed on the vague jargon of our time, when we have a vocabulary for everything and exact ideas about nothing—when a word half-understood, torn from its place in some alien or half-formed science, as of psychology, conceals from both writer and reader the meaninglessness of a statement, when all dogma is in doubt except the dogmas of sciences of which we have read in the newspapers, when the language of theology itself, under the influence of an undisciplined mysti-cism of popular philosophy, tends to become a language of tergiversation—Andrewes may seem pedantic and verbal. It is only when we have saturated ourselves in his prose, followed the movement of his thought, that we find his words terminating in the ecstasy of assent. Andrewes takes a word and derives the world from it; squeezing and squeezing the word until it yields a full juice of meaning which we should never have supposed any word to



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possess. In this process the qualities . . . of ordonnance and precision . . . are exercised.16

A remarkable work of literary analysis, compact and insightful, this brief passage sums up crucial perspectives on comparative reading, textual integrity, readerly submission to texts and “total absorption” in them, and the necessary closest attention to words qua words. Th e passage thus inad-vertently off ers insight into, and perhaps justifi cation for, Eliot’s surprising declaration in a footnote to his essay on Baudelaire included in Essays Ancient and Modern (1936): whereas, he wrote there, “the spirit killeth,” “the letter giveth life.”17 Eliot’s no doubt unexpected inversion of a biblical truism anticipates—and is perhaps clarifi ed by, as it clarifi es—his later statement in “Burnt Norton” that “that which is living / Can only die.”

Th us, perhaps, it should be no surprise that, when—constantly—asked about the meaning of the “three white leopards” in Ash-Wednesday (1930), Eliot replied that they mean “three white leopards.”18 About that poem, incidentally, the late distinguished classicist D.S. Carne-Ross wrote, in a brilliant piece on Pound, that “Eliot’s poem is ‘diffi cult,’ I suppose, but it’s the kind of diffi culty we enjoy. It fl atters our self-esteem. Pound’s simplic-ity is simply chastening.”19 Whether or not he is wrong about Eliot and Ash-Wednesday (and I for one fi nd him misleading), Carne-Ross points, in contrasting the two poets and friends, a way toward understanding Old Possum (as Ole Ez called him). Eliot (too) may be simpler than our alleged self-esteem would appreciate.

In “Th e Music of a Lost Dynasty,” included in his collection Instaurations, Carne-Ross eff ectively represents Pound’s simplicity by emphasizing his stolid insistence on the literal. Whereas Dante and Milton, for example, as Christian poets, use the myth of Persephone as a “fi gure,” Pound takes it as “the literal truth”:

Hence for the last two thousand years poetry has had to be polysemous, as Servius said of Virgil and Dante said of himself and critics say admiringly of every important modern author except Pound. Poetry has had to point away from the first, literal level to deeper layers of meaning, to “that which is signified by the letter,” as Dante puts it. The thing, however concretely rendered, always “stands for” something else supposedly more important. But Pound is not polysemous; his first level doesn’t point beyond itself.20

But this refusal to “point away from the fi rst, literal level to deeper layers of meaning” is, I hope to convince you, exactly what we fi nd in Eliot (too); and that means, pace Carne-Ross, he is following the fundamentally



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Incarnational basis of Christianity. But Eliot is (therefore) not Pound; he is no pagan immanentist (to take Herbert N. Schneidau’s apt summation of Pound).21

Before turning to Eliot, and comparing Old Possum and Ole Ez, let us stay for a moment longer with Carne-Ross discussing Pound and the literal. “I don’t want to be facile,” he writes, “and say that what is diffi cult about Pound’s poem [Th e Cantos] is the simplicity and yet in a sense this is true”:

We feel something is missing there; the whole reverberating dimension of inwardness is missing. There is no murmurous echo chamber where deeps supposedly call to deeps. Not merely does the thing, in Pound’s best verse, not point beyond itself: scandalously, it doesn’t point to us. The green tip that pushes through the earth does not stand for or symbolize man’s power of spiritual renewal. And in no way has it been created or half created by man—“processed into an object of consciousness,” so that it becomes part and parcel of a subjective mental activity. It is really there. Later Pound said of another natural phenomenon: “Leaf is a LEAF / that is enough / it has infinite implications. LOOK at it, look at the leaf / dont try to make it into a symbol of something ELSE.” The green tip is not symbolic and it is not polysemous. Pound’s whole effort is not to be polysemous but to give back to the literal level its full significance, its old significance.22 (Carne-Ross’s italics)

But—to say it again—Pound is not Eliot, Eliot no “pagan immanen-tist.” Leaving aside the vexed question of when he shared the Christian understanding of Incarnation (I for one think it well before his formal conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in 1927), we can see, from early on in his writing, how Eliot diff ers from Pound’s “literalism.” Th e crux lies in precisely how Eliot understands the relation between diff erences. Consider the following passage from the chapter “Imperfect Critics,” included in Th e Sacred Wood. Eliot is here discussing the “Romantic aristocrat” George Wyndham, and he off ers an apt description of both Romanticism and its fundamental misunderstanding of the necessary relation between critical diff erences:

the only cure for Romanticism is to analyse it. What is permanent and good in Romanticism is curiosity— . . . a curiosity which recognizes that any life, if accurately and profoundly penetrated, is interesting and always strange. Romanticism is a short cut to the strangeness without the reality, and it leads its disciples only back upon themselves.23

Eliot thus distinguishes between “reality” and “strangeness” and main-tains that the proper relation between them involves a way: you get to the strange, that is, in, through, and by means of the real—a way that the



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Romantics forgo, believing that you can bypass, or transcend, the real and proceed directly to the strange. Th us revealed is a key structure, or pattern.

Th at pattern, which at least in time Eliot came to understand as Incarnational, has far-reaching implications. It means, for example, that each and every moment is “attended”; there is, that is, an “intersection” of one place and time with another (as in allusions from the medieval period juxtaposed with “now” at the beginning of Th e Waste Land and as in the “mythical method” that Joyce employs in Ulysses). Further, it is unwise to hierarchize, to “privilege” one part of a binary diff erence at the expense of the other: for example, literal and fi gurative. Eliot would not, in other words, subscribe to Pound’s unitary elevation of the literal, which participates in the pattern also apparent in the Romantics’ “short cut to the strangeness without the reality.” Pound, that is to say, stops with the literal, believing it “unattended,” rather than proceeding in, through, and by means of it to the fi gurative. Although you do not stop with the literal, you do not transcend it either, in the sense of leaving it behind once and for all.

In Christian understanding, as Eliot came to express it in Ash-Wednesday and in Four Quartets, the literal does not “stand for” something else; it is not a symbol; and it does “point beyond” itself. Th us the “Lady of silences” in Ash-Wednesday, an enigmatic and for many a perplexing if not contradictory fi gure, may be at once both the Virgin Mary and not Her; embodying it, she is mediation literally. We “half understand,” says Eliot in Four Quartets,24 meaning, I take it, that we can understand one of the two linked diff erences but not both together—and as one. Understanding may require of us nothing less than “a lifetime’s death in love, / Ardour and selfl essness and self-surrender.” Hints and guesses are all about: “Hints followed by guesses; and the rest / Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought, and action.” According to “Th e Dry Salvages,” third of the Four Quartets, from which I have been quoting, “Th e hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.”

Let us linger with this verse from “Th e Dry Salvages,” arguably the most meaningful that Eliot wrote. It fully illustrates the necessity of a literal reading. Note, to begin with, the absence of the expected “the” before “Incarnation.” Eliot is thus not talking here about the historical occurrence whereby God (literally) became man; rather, he is referring to the timeless, universal pattern, the paradigmatic instance of which is the Incarnation of God in the person of Jesus Christ. Further, note the



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repetition of the word “half.” At fi rst glance, probably, we assume that the poet means the hint partly guessed, the gift partly understood. But that is not what the words (literally) say. Instead, with Incarnation understood as the “impossible union” of opposites, which is the Incarnation, the meaning is: we get one half of that union, either immanence or tran-scendence (as always), but not both and at the same time.

Given the Incarnation, and the divinization of every moment in every place, before as well as aft er the Advent, a leaf is, indeed, a leaf, as Pound insisted; it does not stand for or point toward something else; but the leaf also, and at the same time, means the work of transcendence as well as of immanence. For Pound, there is what a rather diff erent thinker and writer called “seriality without paradigm,” meaning total and complete immanence (without benefi t of what Derrida also called a “Transcendental Signifi er”).25

Matters pretty quickly get muddied, appear to get out of hand. Th at is, “transcendent” also connotes the vertical, whereas “immanent” con-notes the horizontal and the lateral, and the vertical, of course, extends both above and below the level where the horizontal intersects with it. In the terms we have been using throughout this essay, this means that the “transcendent,” the vertical, stretches both toward the spiritual and toward the deep, the horizontal having to do (only) with the literal and the apparent surface.

What counts, I want to suggest (without any claim or pretense to orthodoxy, or heterodoxy, for that matter), is this: the literal saves the fi gurative from thorough-going spirit-ualism, whereby the peregrine spirit walks free and easy, unimpeded; the fi gurative, on the other hand, saves the literal from the sort of immersion in the physical that read-ily emerges with (Poundian) literalism and immanence. You need both transcendence and immanence, literal and fi gurative, letter and spirit. Eliot works toward that “necessarye coniunction” that he mentions and extols in “East Coker.”

In this little book I attempt to read with “the same Spirit that its Author writ.”26 My eye will always be squarely on the literal, which I maintain has been unfairly neglected by academic critics of Eliot, who, perhaps taking their cue from Old Possum in his notorious—and laborious—notes to Th e Waste Land, allow no symbol to escape their purview, nor any depth to go unmined. Th ey persist in wanting to know, refusing (again) to take



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Eliot at his word, what those “three leopards” stand for. I shall, though, try to accept the thing as thing, the word as what it plainly says.

Reading literally, especially word by word, works against the reader’s will-fulness, that desire, need, or tendency to impose. Although he does not use the word, and perhaps would not endorse the developed notion, Pound suggests a sort of lateral reading when he identifi es “texture” as “the indispensable component” in texts like his friend William Carlos Williams’s poems.27 Rather than digging deep into texts, eff ecting a descent into the lower reaches not immediately visible or discernible, such a way of reading would incarnate a willingness to bide time, would resist the powerful temptation to leap to ideas and meanings, and would reside for a time with words. It entails, certainly, relating parts to one another and to some projected sense of the whole, taking quotations seriously, noting allusions, reacting to the charges of language. A web of relations emerges from what may be described as intra-textuality. Reading texture puts us in touch with the text as textile.

Rather than digging into texts, lateral reading entails reading widely: that is, reading more, and still more, and bringing that further reading to bear. It is, if you will, a nonspecialist activity, an amateur’s approach, that of a once-common reader.

Th e movement is lateral, rather than down. For a suffi cient time, such reading remains unashamedly on the surface, attuned to visible details and the charges set off by observed sameness, similarity, resonance, and diff erence. It appears an altogether more natural act, responsive and responsible to what appears. It thus takes very little for granted, is therefore modest, and unpretentious.

As readers, as with a culture, we are obsessed with meaning; we also assume that ideas occupy a privileged position relative to form. Despite our materialism, and the obsession with the body, we pay very little attention to “the glowing sensible world” and thus to bodies of what-ever stripe. Spirit governs body, fl esh, matter, or so we presume. Intra-textuality restores primacy to the building blocks, the fundamentals, from which we may proceed, in time and with due attention and eff ort, to the putatively more sophisticated and exotic. We must, however, always go in, through, and by means of.

Reading laterally returns attention and focus to how texts work, how they are put together, what they do. Th e quest for meaning is neither voided nor forgotten, although it comes second. Reading laterally is more akin to reading like a writer than to reading as a scholar or critic.28



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Let me be clear, for I fear that I may have inadvertently made literal and lateral reading sound easy, or at least easier than so-called close reading. It is not at all easy. In fact, it closely resembles study, for even if you do not fi nd yourself engaged in extensive, archival research, you are reading and re-reading the text. Spending countless hours with it, poring over relations, listening intently and addressing question aft er question to the text, you recall the philologist probing minute details, the Rabbinical scholar consumed by the text. It is, indeed, the work of reading that engages you.

Eliot—as always—says it best. I refer to his little-known preface to Th oughts for Meditation: A Way to Recovery from Within, an anthology selected and arranged by N. Gangulee and brought out by Faber and Faber in 1951. I shall quote liberally, for Eliot’s words resonate with a number of the present book’s concerns.

Very few people, I suspect, know how to read—in the sense of able to read for a variety of motives and to read a variety of books each in the appropriate way. We all read for diversion, or in order to satisfy a temporary curiosity; most of us read also under the necessity of acquiring information or a grasp of the contents of some book for an immediate end. For many workers, it is difficult to read a book unless it has some bearing on their own work; a professional reviewer may come to find it difficult to read a book except for the purpose of reviewing it; and a publisher may come to find it difficult to read a book except as a manuscript to be accepted or rejected. Philosophy is difficult, unless we discipline our minds for it; the full appreciation of poetry is difficult for those who have not trained their sensibility by years of attentive reading. But devotional reading is the most difficult of all, because it requires an application, not only of the mind, not only of the sensibility, but of the whole being.

Th is is perhaps the most approximate way of reading I have come across. Eliot adds to the helpfulness in describing this meditational kind of reading: “to attend closely to every word, to ponder on the [passages] read for a little while and try to fi x them in my mind, so that they may continue to aff ect me while my attention is engrossed with the aff airs of the day.”29 I would not say, of course, that Eliot’s poetry always requires such a “meditational” reading, but I do believe that Four Quartets clearly benefi ts from such—and that the reader does too.

Th is attention to the literal will, to repeat, mean a lateral, rather than deep, reading of Eliot’s poems. Ample precedent exists for lateral reading, even



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if it be not much recognized as such. It is there in Homer’s insistence on it (in, for example, the juxtaposition without authorial commentary of Odysseus’s very diff erent reactions to Agamemnon and Achilles in the climactic visit to the Kingdom of the Dead); in the frequent and critical tonal shift s and variations in diction in Dryden and Pope, which are oft en associated with their age’s interest in the mock-epic or mock-heroic, itself a literary strategy dependent upon bringing a standard to “attend” upon the present; in the shift s in language, diction, and tone that accompany the diff erent personae in Eliot’s friend Pound’s great poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, the extent of which poem’s infl uence on Eliot has not been suffi ciently recognized. What I mean is readily apparent in Eliot’s verse: perhaps most notably in the near-repetition of the opening line in the fi rst poem of Ash-Wednesday and the last (“Because I do not hope to turn”; “Although I do not hope to turn”); in the sophomoric, and bathetic, verses that follow the magnifi cent excursus on the Logos in the fi ft h poem of Ash-Wednesday (“there is not enough silence / Not on the sea or on the islands, not / On the mainland, in the desert or the main land . . . ”); variously throughout Four Quartets, which require constant, scrupulous attention by the reader to repetitions and diff er-ences, Eliot in the business here too of “rhyming” across large sections of this magisterial essay-poem. Lateral reading and literal reading depend upon one another, and in Eliot lead to the recognition, appreciation, and understanding of his critical intentions.

Consider, as an extended instance of lateral and literal reading done together, the following: a lateral reading such as I have been describing may connote something more than a “sideways,” crab-like essai. Take Dryden’s essay-poem Religio Laici or A Laymans Faith, from which I have drawn one of my epigraphs above. In those quoted verses, as a matter of fact, appears the work’s dynamic progression, akin to what Walter A. Davis calls, in an acute theoretical analysis, “immanent purposiveness.”30 Th at is, as Dryden says, so his poem does: it precisely “guides us upward,” to God, as Absolute Authority, amidst the confl icting and portentous claims of sects, theologies, and churches, for in the last resort, we can be sure, “God would not leave us without a way.”31 All other positions lack. Here, undeniably forward movement serves to promote upwardness—the latter a metaphor, obviously.

Reading Religio Laici, however, you proceed via a lateral movement (even as you edge upward). Th ere is little or no digging or excavating, as you juxtapose passages, positions, and embodiments: Deist, Roman



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Catholic, sectarians or “fanaticks.” Comparison and contrast dominate, and lead to the fi nal “resolution” as an alternative—the “middle way” that is the Established Church—emerges. Religio Laici is, moreover, revealed to and by means of a literal, as well as a lateral, reading. Unlike perhaps most great works of the imagination, Dryden’s remarkable essay-poem does not proceed, or function, metaphorically. Few images occur, the most notable and important being at the beginning, with the image of reason as sun-like. Indeed, contrary to expectations (and some commentary), Dryden builds his argument in this fashion: if anything “stands for” something else, it is not from literal to metaphorical. Th e represented religious positions are, as I said, embodied, represented in persons, whose religious, theological, and ecclesiastical (and, of course, political) positions matter as moral; that is to say, Dryden works toward the most concrete and literal level, what these positions entail morally, for the person holding them as person. Th us we move—laterally, by the way—from these verses early on:

Dar’st thou, poor Worm, offend Infinity?And must the Terms of Peace be giv’n by Thee?Then Thou art Justice in the last Appeal;Thy easie God instructs Thee to rebell:And, like a King remote and weak, must takeWhat Satisfaction Thou art pleas’d to make. (93–98)

to these climactic lines, completing the picture of the moral values oper-ative in the poem and needed in the world:

So all we make of Heavens discover’d WillIs, not to have it, or to use it ill.The Danger’s much the same; on several ShelvesIf others wreck us, or we wreck our selves. What then remains, but, waving each Extreme,The Tides of Ignorance, and Pride to stem?Neither so rich a Treasure to forgo;Nor proudly seek beyond our pow’r to know. . . . (423–30)

Religious questions resolve into questions of morality and personal conduct. Instead of plunging ever more deeply into matters, Dryden, as it were, peels off layer aft er layer to reveal a core, or pit.

Th e “letter” matters, as he has written: “Th e welcome News is in the Letter found,” in his poem as in Scripture. Being a layperson, to whom the work is aft er all addressed by a fellow-member of the laity, you read



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what is “needfull to be known,” leaving to the professionals, you amateur, you “common reader,” the intricate details, matters controverted and inessential to you as person. Th ere is no need for “expounding,” by either (a self-interested) priesthood or a preacher “gift ed” by the “pri-vate spirit,” for those matters necessary to the layman in his quest for salvation are, simply, “plain”—rather like Dryden’s poem itself, oft en mistakenly abused as prosaic. Style thus matches argument or position, mirroring it. You understand Religio Laici or a Laymans Faith as you do Scripture according to Dryden, by reading the words, themselves “plain” to common sense, everything you need to know, observable—laid out, in other words.

In Religio Laici, it turns out, lateral reading is best because the text itself demands it, being constructed according to lateral principles. Lateral reading of the text here reveals how it works, what it does: guiding us upward to God, necessitating distinctions based on comparison and measurement, and directing attention not to some meaning that must be brought to light from deep within but, instead, elucidating its very nature, its way(s) of being, its interweavings and entwinings, and thus its texture as text(ile).

In Eliot’s magisterial essay-poem Four Quartets, in my judgment the greatest religious work since Th e Divine Comedy, matters proceed yet otherwise from Dryden’s in Religio Laici. Th ere is no progressive, ever-forward movement, for the structural principle at work is Incarnational, and so at every point in the poem transcendent power shines through, each detail indeed luminous. Th is you apprehend, as you do Religio Laici’s guiding principle, by means of the sensible and the observable, through relating part to part, not through dissection or least of all excavation.

I turn in the following chapter to Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems (1930), Eliot’s fi rst long poem aft er converting to the Church of England (1927). Th e way that we read has a lot to do with what we perceive in poems (I am not prepared, here, to argue which comes fi rst). As it happens, this great poem has itself a great deal to say about the literal and its relation to the spiritual. Ash-Wednesday thus lays the groundwork for the analyses that follow in this book. Attention to the literal—that is, both the theme and the fact—leads us to notice, perhaps diff erently from before, major concerns, such as Eliot’s with questions of separation and the possibility of at least bringing together diff erences and even oppositions. Th e ques-tion of relation thus emerges, not least of that which obtains between



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letter and spirit. Always, whether in the way of reading pursued or the focus assumed, I seek not to separate myself from Eliot but to intersect with him.

Truth to tell, a literal reading of Eliot’s poems mirrors the way of understanding embodied in them. One refl ects the other. Embodiment means, aft er all, that the body shows—you don’t have to transcend it, and leave it behind, to reach some point, meaning, or truth. Instead, it lies there, as if exposed, on the surface, as visible as the letter.

Notes

T.S. Eliot, “Th e Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Essays, 3rd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 289.T.S. Eliot, “Imperfect Critics,” Th e Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920), 33.Eliot, “Th e Metaphysical Poets,” 290. Ibid. T.S. Eliot, preface, Anabasis, by St.-J. Perse, trans. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1930), 7.Ibid., 7–8. Ibid., 8. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, in Poetry and Prose, ed. Aubrey Williams (Boston: Riverside-Houghton Miffl in, 1969), line 641.Eliot, Anabasis, 8.Ibid., 9. Ibid., 9–10. Ibid., 10. T.S. Eliot, “ ‘Diffi cult’ Poetry,” Points of View (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 50.Ibid., 51. Ibid., 52. T.S. Eliot, “Lancelot Andrewes,” Selected Essays, 347–48.T.S. Eliot, “Baudelaire in His Time,” Essays Ancient and Modern (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), 68n.T.S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930).D.S. Carne-Ross, “Th e Music of a Lost Dynasty,” Instaurations: Essays in and out of Literature, Pindar to Pound (Berkeley: U of California P, 1979), 216.Ibid., 213. Herbert N. Schneidau, Waking Giants: Th e Presence of the Past in Modernism (New York: Oxford UP, 1991). I am aware of the “fourfold interpretation of Scripture.



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Carne-Ross, Instaurations, 214.T.S. Eliot, “Imperfect Critics,” 27–28. T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943).Jacques Derrida, “Living On: Border Lines,” trans. James Hulbert, Deconstruction and Criticism, by Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Derrida, Geoff rey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller (New York: Seabury-Continuum, 1979), 130.Pope, An Essay on Criticism, line 234.Ezra Pound, “Dr. Williams’ Position,” Polite Essays (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, n.d.), 76. Here, I think of literal reading in relation to lines in “Little Gidding” (last of the Four Quartets) in which Eliot speaks, not for the fi rst time in the poem, of the way up and the way down. I will argue below that, pace Heraclitus, he doubts there is an identity; the way up is in, through, and by means of the way down. Extrapolating, we might (too easily) suppose that the way to read responsibly lies in, through, and by means of digging deep inside a text, but in fact, the way to responsible reading leads in, through, and by means of the literal. We, thus, have to be careful in moving among analogues of such binaries.Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Th ose Who Want to Write Th em (New York: Harper Collins, 2007).T.S. Eliot, preface, Th oughts for Meditation: A Way to Recovery from Within, sel. and arr. N. Gangulee (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 11–12.Walter A. Davis, Th e Act of Interpretation: A Critique of Literary Reason (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978).John Dryden, Poems and Fables, ed. James Kinsley (London: Oxford UP, 1962), line 296.



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2Turning and Acceptance in Ash-Wednesday: Affi rming Life’s Newness and Joy

Abstract: Ash-Wednesday (1930) represents the stiff est challenge to Eliot’s controversial statement that “the letter giveth life” whereas “the spirit killeth.” Th e fi rst editions of the poem, though, materialize it by requiring that the reader literally turn page aft er page in order to arrive at the poem. Th e “Lady of silences” holds the key to the question of the spiritual and the transcendent; fundamentally paradoxical, she fi gures the Incarnation, being a mediator for man vis-à-vis God. A close, lateral reading shows that the ascetically inclined speaker gives way to a voice that understands the Christian necessity of going in, through, and by means of the world and the word—the way of Incarnation.




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Turning and Acceptance in Ash-Wednesday

“It hath seemed good to the Holy Ghost” and to her, to order there shall be a solemn set return once in the year at least. And reason; for once a year all things turn. And that once is now at this time, for now at this time is the turning of the year. In Heaven, the sun in his equinoctial line, the zodiac and all the constellations in it, do now turn about to the first point. The earth and all her plants, after a dead winter, return to the first and best season of the year. The creatures, the fowls of the air, the swallow and the turtle, and the crane and the stork, “know their seasons,” and make their just return at this time every year. Every thing now turning, that we also would make it our time to turn to God in.

—Lancelot Andrewes, “Of Repentance and Fasting”

For penitence and humility, as is suitable to remember at Mid-Lent, are the foundation of the Christian life.

—T.S. Eliot, a sermon preached at Cambridge University, March 7, 1948

Acceptance is more important than anything that can be called belief. There is almost a definite moment of acceptance at which the New Life begins.

—T.S. Eliot, Dante

I. Turning

Th e plain facts:

Conversion.Ash-Wednesday.Lancelot Andrewes’s Lenten sermons.Th e prominence of the word “turn” in Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems, from the fi rst line of the fi rst poem (“Because I do not hope to turn”), through the turnings on the turning stairs in the third, to the opening of the sixth poem (“Although I do not hope to turn”).1

Th e turning the reader must do in the fi rst editions of Ash-Wednesday in order to reach those fi rst words: aft er the front free endpaper, a blank page, followed by another blank, a half-title page, then the title page, the dedication (to the poet’s wife), and another half-title page.

Th e reader thus joins the poet in literally turning.



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Many readers, however, emphasizing Eliot’s recent formal turn to Christianity, the Church of England, and in particular Anglo-Catholicism (as he announced two years before Ash-Wednesday in the preface to his essays For Lancelot Andrewes),2 think that the poet has arrived at some state of fi nality and stasis, whereby turning will no longer be necessary and is, in fact, undesirable. To turn to Christianity means, for them, a transcendence of earthly “turnings,” including those that Bishop Andrewes describes as characteristic of the Lenten season (in the epigraph above). To have accepted Christianity means, for such readers (and their numbers appear to be Legion), both a rejection of turning and a transcendence of earthly delights and pleasures.

And yet in having to turn page aft er page aft er page in order to reach the book in which all this is represented, the reader engages in a literal, physical act that mirrors what “spiritualist” interpreters regard Eliot as opposing, which is turning. Th ey may also miss the accrued diff erence between “Because” and “Although” in the opening verses of the fi rst and sixth poems, respectively—a critical diff erence available to and revealed by such comparison as the poem pointedly invites. Whereas the former points to resignation, the latter is positive in its guarded affi rmativeness. In fact, as I shall argue in the pages that follow, Ash-Wednesday dramatizes a turn in its speaker—not to be simply identifi ed with the poet himself—away from resignation, stillness, and separation from those turns that nature everywhere shows off in springtime, and toward those very signs of creation, renewal, and joy, signifi ed in “the salt savour of the sandy earth” that the fi nal poem features in its depiction of the fi ve senses and their receptiveness and response. Th e turn that Ash-Wednesday endorses and celebrates is not, as commonly supposed, toward transcendence but, rather, Incarnational, toward immanence as that in, through, and by means of which transcendence may be reached—without ever, how-ever, leaving the things of this world behind. Immanence thus becomes mediational, a point highlighted in the poems’ central dramatizations of the Virgin, everywhere represented as both one thing and another.

Th e place to begin a reading of Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems may well be with the “Lady of silences,” who closely resembles Mary and yet is said in II not to be Her (since “She honours the Virgin in meditation”). She it is whom the speaker addresses in prayer at the end of the fi nal poem: “Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden.” We fi rst encounter her in II, along with those “three white leopards”



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“under a juniper tree / In the cool of the day”—her “goodness” and “loveliness” are stressed. Moreover, the “dissembled” bones (about which more directly) declare that they “shine with brightness” because of the Lady’s goodness, incarnate in her honoring of the Virgin. Soon follows a lengthy description of her, made of paradox, which she also embodies. What could be plainer or more obvious—it seems that here, as elsewhere, Eliot simplifi es, becoming direct and making it relatively easy for his grateful reader: she is, for example, both “calm” and “distressed,” as well as “Exhausted” and “life-giving.” Verses here point unmistakably to the Lady’s mediational character, rhyming, as we shall soon have occasion to discuss, with the opening verses of V, which focus on while distinguish-ing Word and word. We have already observed that it is to the Lady that the speaker prays, as he does in some detail in V.

Th e thing is, fallen, inevitably sinning humankind needs—that is, requires—a mediator, whose work takes place in the turn between dif-ferences and especially opposites.

Th at Eliot chose to call his work Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems is another plain fact that counts for something. Together, they make a whole, of course, obvi-ously, and yet the fi rst three were published separately: II as “Salutation” in the Saturday Review of Literature, December 1927; I as “Perch’io Non Spero” in Commerce, Spring 1928; and III, also in Commerce, Autumn 1929, bearing the title “Som de L’Escalina.” Th e three remaining poems were added to make the whole, the fi rst, limited edition appearing in London on April 24, 1930, the trade edition fi ve days later, and the American fi rst edition not until September 26, 1930 (although 400 of the 600 copies of the UK limited edition were intended for sale in the United States).3 As publication history shows, Ash-Wednesday, being literally put together, made out of several poems, is an amalgamation, just as are Four Quartets, the individual essays constituting Th e Sacred Wood (notably including the infl uential “Tradition and the Individual Talent”), and even “Th e Hollow Men,” short as it is.

My point is, we can expect too much of that “whole,” too much con-sistency and straight-line development, precisely the sort of expectation that Eliot himself warned us about in his preface to Perse’s Anabasis, itself fi rst published, in London, on May 22, 1930, not quite a month aft er Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems was published. Th anks to these facts, we are further alerted to the possibility—you have to compare—that a diff erence might appear between I–III and IV–VI, a possibility borne out, in fact. Perhaps accordingly, that turn is mirrored in a turn in the speaker himself.



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Th at speaker, I have already suggested, should not be simply identifi ed with the poet T.S. Eliot, whose “conversion poem” Ash-Wednesday is very oft en said to be. To be sure, it is his fi rst long poem following his conver-sion, but as I have attempted to show in previous books, and as commen-tators such as the biographer Lyndall Gordon have likewise maintained, important signs of Christian understanding are present as early as the mid-1910s, long before he formally embraced Anglo-Catholicism.4 I do not think that a turn in Eliot appears in the six poems he fi nally pub-lished together as Ash-Wednesday. Th e speaker is quite another matter. We should also keep in mind what Eliot says about conversion in his 1948 sermon at Cambridge, denying that anyone “ever attempted to convert me” and acknowledging that “for me the strongest outside infl u-ences were negative” and hinting that, thanks to Montaigne, for one, he may have been infl uenced “by pursuing scepticism to its utmost limit.” In any case, he says, “Observation of the futility of non-Christian lives has its part; and also realization of the incredibility of every alternative to Christianity that off ers itself.”5 Th e point is, in any case, that being converted to the world is structurally of a piece with being converted from it. Both are incomplete, perhaps equally so from the perspective of Incarnation.

Th e speaker in Ash-Wednesday is not in desperate straits at the beginning, but he is resigned to no longer “turning”: no longer striving to “strive towards such things.” Because he does not “hope to turn again,” he will not know again “Th e infi rm glory of the positive hour,” and he knows that he will not know “Th e one veritable transitory power”: “Because I cannot drink / Th ere, where trees fl ower, and springs fl ow, for there is nothing again.” Possibilities hold promise, but the speaker is denied them precisely because he will not be able “to turn again.”

What prevents him is one of those “falsehoods” that VI says “mock ourselves.” It is decidedly un-Christian; indeed, it is anti-Christian, although many readers do not recognize it as such. Th e passage is cru-cial; Four Quartets points its diff erence, and later in Ash-Wednesday we fi nd a direct repudiation. Th e terms alone that the speaker uses in I are enough to distance us from him, establishing him as unreliable, in fact, sadly mistaken, an adherent to an asceticism and transcendentalism that represents (but) half-understanding—in the speaker’s repetitions I detect some of the same whining that marks the wastelander-speaker’s mis-taken desire for water in the fi ft h section of that earlier work. He believes



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that “what is actual is actual only for one time / And only for one place.” He thus rejoices, while renouncing “the blessed face” and “the voice.” He also “construct[s]” something himself so that he will have something to rejoice about. Th e speaker thus misses the Incarnational fact of “attend-ance,” whereby each moment in every place is “intersected” with another time and another place. Renouncing “the blessed face” is tantamount to rejecting necessary mediation, via the Virgin, which is the whole point of Eliot’s eff orts here. Th e speaker does, actually, become desperate, come to “rejoice”—but that by means of relying on himself for the creation of “something / Upon which to rejoice.”

By the end of I, the speaker shows some right thinking, in turning—note the irony—to prayer for mercy. He is also aware, importantly, that he discusses too much such matters with himself and explains “too much.” Th ere is just a glimpse, in other words, that perhaps surface matters and the literal holds out possibility denied to inveterate plunges into depths. We easily become addicted, as it were, to “thorough-going.”

Th e second poem of Ash-Wednesday shift s focus, away from the self-indulgent if not solipsistic speaker, who, however, represents his own “dissembling”; that is, he is literally dismembered, parts of himself sepa-rated out (eventually, Ash-Wednesday will pray “not to be separated”). But “Because of the goodness of this Lady,” her “loveliness,” and her honoring of the Virgin “in meditation,” the “dissembled” bones “chirp” and “shine with brightness.” I admit that much of what follows, until the depiction of the Lady’s paradoxical nature, is elusive. In any case, as promising as that Lady is, and as helpful and eff ective as she has already been, the speaker records at the end of II that “the bones sang, scattered and shin-ing,” and that “We are glad to be scattered,” a position that the poem later roundly rejects. By now, though, we are in a position to interpret the “dissembling” as pointing to elimination of the fl esh and, in relation to I, such disembodiment that comes, willy-nilly, with renunciation.

Th e poem’s speaker in thus being “scattered” in II reveals a separation that itself relates to his renunciations in I: he neither enjoys nor knows of “necessarye coniunction.” Th e last verse paragraph of II does, however, put the matter in general context that at once summarizes the “intellec-tual” movement of the poem so far and looks forward to the parts that follow. We return, from the Lady, to those “dissembled” bones. Th ere is further resignation here—and there are, perhaps, two diff erent speak-ers, established by the dizzying turn and return, from “we” to “they” on



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to “ye” and back, at the end, to “we.” Unity and division emerge as the issue, in other words, bringing together as/into one or separating one from another. Th ere is no room, thus, for such paradox as the Lady rep-resents and incarnates, no acceptance of such tension as is manifest in harmony—about which more directly.

Th e third poem of Ash-Wednesday represents another turn on the poem’s part as it chronicles the speaker engaged in a series of inevitable turns: three stairs, at least two of which themselves turn, in addition to the speaker’s own turning and, “At the second turning of the second stair,” a horrible scene, with “twisting, turning” of “the devil of the stair” and apparently “faces” and fi gures monstrous, one or more wearing “Th e deceitful face of hope and of despair.” I think it useless, and possibly detrimental, to follow the speaker and engage in prolonged discussion and attempted explanation regarding these fi gures.

“At the fi rst turning of the third stair” a window gives onto a complex scene. Th ere is “enchantment,” which at least initially appears positive, coupled as it is with “the fi g’s fruit” and the music of “an antique fl ute.” But then comes a Prufrock-like mention of blown, brown hair, said to be “sweet,” said to be “Distraction.” Th e poem ends on a promising though compromised note, with the speaking voice admitting in prayer his unworthiness and asking that “the word only” be spoken. If the fi rst two lines—that is, the prayer—represent healthy recognition, rather than resignation, the last appears a throwback, a request not desperate, to be sure, but misguided; its understanding clashes with the representation of the Lady: “Speech without word and / Word of no speech.” Th e speaker, in other words, desires a spoken word—and only that—knowing noth-ing of that “Word” that is “of no speech.” It is a subtle point, but one, I contend, that is plain and clear—as long as one stays with the words themselves and compares; that is to say, following Eliot as he describes reading Lancelot Andrewes: “dwelling on a single word, comparing its use in its nearer and in most remote contexts.”6

II. Critical diff erence

Just here commentary must register a diff erence from the poem, from the primary text. I off er, that is to say, a mediational section absent from Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems. Commentary thus does not mirror poem,



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not exactly, anyway. Th e divergence is necessary because my work here is (obviously) lesser than Eliot’s, to which, its onlie begetter, it remains indebted for its very being. Th e poem can do what commentary cannot, the latter requiring elaboration there not needed.

Unlike Th e Waste Land and, diff erently, Four Quartets, Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday does not chronicle a “journey toward understanding,” that motif perhaps stemming from Th e Odyssey, which consists of the hero’s spiritual and intellectual voyage from darkness to light, self-serving to other-directedness, pride to humility.7 Th e chief means of change is a descent to what the Greeks understood as the Kingdom of the Dead. In Ash-Wednesday there is neither physical journey, typically present as a mirror of the inner journey underway, nor descent: in other words, no plunging into the deep, well below the surface. It is not even clear that the six poems have a single speaker; whether they do or do not may not much matter. Seeking unity as well as deep meaning, we modern readers expect, and therefore tend to fi nd, more or less straightforward development, “progress,” and psychologically and spiritually explicable causes for perceived change in the speaker. On the literal level in this poem, however, none is readily available. In fact, Ash-Wednesday oft en seems bent on frustrating our attempts to simplify it, reduce it, or round it off . I think the poem is sophisticated in its “verse” and simple(r) in its “ancient rhyme.”

I mean, being literature and not theology or philosophy or psychology, Ash-Wednesday represents lived experience; in doing so, moreover, the poem focuses not on belief but on understanding, an altogether diff erent matter, involving heart and soul and feelings as well as will and that per-haps indescribable thing that entails surrender—or transcendence—of the mind and the sensibility. Th e emphasis falls, in still other words, on the known and on what can be known, on acceptance of mindful recogni-tion instead of mind-less delivery of the self. Despite our Romantic and modern wishes, desires, and expectations, there may be no epiphantic moment, no sudden insight. Th at, I think Eliot came to realize, is a pagan notion. Th e Christian is less dramatic, perhaps, and for Eliot it all involves a series of lived experiences culminating in acceptance, the intellectual and volitional version of self-surrender. Faith is the result of such experience as Ash-Wednesday dramatizes, not its cause.

At least, that is what Eliot (also) appears to be saying in two other key texts from roughly the same time as Ash-Wednesday. One of these is the book Dante, which Eliot published on September 27, 1929, and which—it



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is really an extended essay—he included as the geographical center of the Selected Essays, published in 1932. I quoted the most relevant passage as an epigraph above; it comes at the end of the third section of Dante, which focuses on the Vita Nuova.8 Th e other key text I refer to is W.F. Trotter’s translation of Pascal’s Pensées, which includes an extended introduction by Eliot and which appeared on September 19, 1931. Th ere, Eliot off ers a sustained account of “the process of the mind of the intelligent believer.” It is, I believe, the closest he ever came to a direct statement of his own spiritual autobiography, an account that rhymes with Ash-Wednesday in both particulars and spirit.

The Christian thinker—and I mean the man who is trying consciously and conscientiously to explain to himself the sequence which culminates in faith, rather than the public apologist—proceeds by rejection and elimination. He finds the world to be so and so; he finds its character inexplicable by any non-religious theory: among religions he finds Christianity, and Catholic Christianity, to account most satisfactorily for the world and especially for the moral world within; and thus, by what Newman calls “powerful and concurrent” reasons, he finds himself inexorably committed to the dogma of the Incarnation.9

Th is is the crux of the matter: according to Four Quartets, “Th e hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.”10 Everything—literally—revolves around this center, the pattern without which there is no meaning (of course, without movement the pattern could be neither perceived nor existent). Continuing, Eliot turns to the “unbeliever”:

To the unbeliever, this method seems disingenuous and perverse: for the unbeliever is, as a rule, not so greatly troubled to explain the world to himself, nor so greatly distressed by its disorder; nor is he generally con-cerned (in modern terms) to “preserve values”. He does not consider that if certain emotional states, certain developments of character, and what in the highest sense can be called “saintliness” are inherently and by inspection known to be good, then the satisfactory explanation of the world must be an explanation which will admit the “reality” of these values. Nor does he consider such reasoning admissible; he would, so to speak, trim his values according to his cloth, because to him such values are of no great value. The unbeliever starts from the other end, and as likely as not with the question: Is a case of human parthenogenesis credible? and this he would call going straight to the heart of the matter.11

Elsewhere, Eliot lays to rest—or at least attempts to do so—the prevalent notion that faith or belief means the transcendence of doubt.



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Furthermore, Eliot’s last sentence here bears a sting that only close atten-tion to its words reveals: as Ash-Wednesday, for one text, reveals, there is and can be no “going straight to the heart of the matter.”

III. Acceptance

In the fourth poem of the six that make up Ash-Wednesday, my students almost always detect a diff erence, a change, a turn—even if they have a diffi cult time identifying it. I think the tone is diff erent, the texture more fl uid. Th e poem returns here to the Lady, again distinct—though not separated—from the Virgin, whose white and blue “colour” she wears. Here, too, she is represented as paradoxical, as instancing “necessarye coniunction”: “Talking of trivial things / In ignorance and in knowledge of eternal dolour.” And here, the speaker, borrowing from another favorite of Ezra Pound, the medieval Provençal poet Arnaut Daniel, advises us to “be mindful”: “Sovegna vos.” It is excellent advice for the reader of Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems, perhaps especially pointed and poignant in (also) recalling such Oriental understanding as the earlier poems show to be a “falsehood.” In addition occur words that apply to Eliot’s own poetry from “Th e Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to Four Quartets; they are all bent on “restoring / With a new verse the ancient rhyme,” harmonizing traditional and old, on one hand, and new, on the other.

I detect in IV a subtle diff erence, one that I have not seen remarked before. In II, as we have observed, emphasis falls on “and,” in particular the way of incarnating diff erences and apparent opposites seen in the Lady. Here, in IV, while she still appears in terms of “and,” as I have noted, there is a turn from that conjunction to the preposition “between”: thus, “Who walked between the violet and the violet / Who walked between / Th e various ranks of green . . . ?” and “Th e silent sister veiled in white and blue / Between the yews . . ..” Th e reference to “fl utes” “rhymes” with the earlier mention of that “antique fl ute” that may be mainly a “Distraction.” Years, then, bring a greater capacity to be mindful. Moreover, movement is here (similarly) positive, linked, obviously, with turning. “Restoring,” furthermore, takes on importance since the word reappears, twice. Falsehoods and distractions proliferate, but the Mediator as Deity, this “between” fi gure, restores “the ancient rhyme,” albeit “With a new verse.” Finally, instead of dwelling on himself, discussing matters with himself “too much” and explaining “too much,” the speaker—if he is the same—in



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IV turns outward, precisely toward (the possibility of) “Redeem[ing] / Th e time.”

“Th e silent sister,” we now read here, is not just “Between the yews,” but also “behind the Garden god, / Whose fl ute is breathless.” Th is idea of silence, now clearly emphasized, is further enhanced as we are told that she “signed but spoke no word.” Evidently as a result of her action—we recall the eff ectiveness of the Lady in II—“the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down / Redeem the time, redeem the dream / Th e token of the word unheard, unspoken[.]” Th e “dream” obviously hearkens back to that earlier in IV, where “jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse,” which needed to be redeemed, perhaps by means of an “ancient rhyme” restored “With a new verse.”

Th e fi ft h, penultimate poem opens with a succinct, precise exposition of the Word and its relation at once to word and world, an account that might—if we were not mindful—be taken as gibberish. For it sounds that way. Interestingly, it is followed immediately by verses plain and simplistic. Eliot is, it seems clear, engaging his reader in comparing, as well as in being mindful. Th e plain verses, it turns out, are bathetic; it is they that say virtu-ally nothing; they thus constitute much of the noise that drowns out “the spoken word,” speaking loudly. It is the earlier, quieter verses that are highly charged with meaning (to adapt Ezra Pound’s helpful defi nition of poetry).

In the opening of V, which bears an apparent debt to Lancelot Andrewes, Eliot appears to be playing with words: “If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent / If the unheard, unspoken / Word is unspoken, unheard,” yet “Still” there is “the Word unheard,” the Word now lacking a word, the Word that is “within / Th e world and for the world.” In such darkness as marks our world, the light yet shines. Charge derives from these words’ invited comparison with earlier rhymes, earlier representa-tions in Ash-Wednesday. Th e Word speaks when It is not “heard,” even when It lacks a word. Moreover, the Word is within the world, and for it, “unstilled” and “whirling” as it is. Th is is a powerful—and clear—state-ment, reminiscent in style, manner, and content of Bishop Andrewes, with whom it rhymes. Th e speaker who earlier sought the spoken word “only” thus appears as mistaken as he who renounced “the blessed face” and “the voice.” Th e real speaking comes from the “Lady of silences,” who “signed but spoke no word” (italics added).

Following the excursus on Word, word, and world—an interesting trin-ity in itself, with the human-but-turnable “word” in between, as possible



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mediator—come lines bathetic and sophomoric, bearing the texture of the worst greeting-card verse. Th is is perhaps the most obvious and most extensive comparing that Ash-Wednesday invites. Th e rhyming, espe-cially, is embarrassing, but so is the empty “content”; indeed, both senses of “rhyme” are in play, sound and content alike being not just awkward but also incompetent (not on Eliot’s part, of course). Th e questions are, nevertheless, relevant and critical. Where will “the word”—not, now, the Word—be heard, where there is a lack of silence: “Not on the sea or on the islands, not / On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land.” Th e versifying continues: “Both in the day time and in the night time / Th e right time and the right place are not here / No place of grace for those who avoid the face / No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice[.]” Th e lines embody the noise—the drowning-out of (even) “the word”—being described. Th e last two lines, of course, urge comparison with the speaker’s self-description in the fi rst poem.

Aft er this verse paragraph, the fi ft h poem turns, for the fi rst time, to “the veiled sister” and presents her, as we have seen earlier, as “between” (e.g., “the veiled sister between the slender / Yew trees”)—it matters, of course, that yews traditionally represent both mortality and immortality. Now, at any rate, the concern is whether “the veiled sister” will pray for “Th ose who are torn on the horn between season and season, time and time, between / Hour and hour, word and word, power and power . . . ?” Th ose confl icted fi gures thus share her “betweenness,” just as she shares ours. She is, aft er all, our “sister.”

In the last poem of Ash-Wednesday, to my way of thinking one of the most beautiful and most powerful that Eliot ever penned, there returns the char-acterization of humankind as in-between. It is not just the speaker who is between, but all of us: “Wavering between the profi t and the loss / In this brief transit where the dreams cross / Th e dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying.” Th e lines directly recall “Th e Hollow Men” as human life appears as what the political philosopher Eric Voegelin, following Plato, calls the Metaxy, that ineluctable state of tension-fi lled existence.12 In fact, a short while later in this poem, Eliot writes: “Th is is the place of tension between dying and birth / Th e place of solitude where three dreams cross.” Th e echo of “Th e Hollow Men” is even greater here, and these verses also anticipate in Th e Idea of a Christian Society (1939) the discussion of healthy and productive political and social tension, a result of harmony between oppositions (rather than unity that eliminates diff erence).13



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Th e speaker here, so diff erent from earlier in Ash-Wednesday, says, aft er uttering “Bless me father,” “though I do not wish to wish these things[.]” What that wish is, appears to be manifest in the highly sensuous verses that record such rejoicings as the fi rst poem renounced: here “the lost heart stiff ens and rejoices,” and “the weak spirit quickens to rebel” in being attracted to the “lost” fl owers. One may, indeed, not “wish these things,” but there they are, and the human heart rejoices in them, the heart that may be “lost” in the sense that it must always be attracted by and to the things of this world. Would that it were otherwise, but it isn’t, and what it is, can and should still be affi rmed, as the quoted verses plainly do. What Eliot embraces and advances is not transcendence of the “lost” world, but an Incarnational approach to it, which means that the world is accepted for what it is, neither a sign of a better world nor an evil to be rejected, but instead a means—a mediation—by which you proceed toward another, better world. Eliot does not risk mocking with falsehood, in part because he never diminishes either the incomplete-ness of our present world or its deceptions—“the blind eye creates / Th e empty forms between the ivory gates.” Th e attractiveness remains: there is always the risk, which he remarked in his 1948 sermon at Cambridge, of being converted by “the world.” He affi rms, even so, knowing very well that things of this world are “attended.”

Because he knows this, he can fi nish with verses remarkably clear and plain, although demanding of precision in apprehending them: “Sovegna vos.” Diffi culty thus intersects with clarity and plainness, the latter “attended” by the former, which you approach in, through, and by means of the letter. Th e prayer is to “Blessed sister, holy mother.” Eliot actually invokes both God the Father and the Virgin, Mother of God and our sister. With the line “Teach us to care and not to care” we meet the temptation toward falsehood, with which he asks that we not be tempted. As well, he recalls the end of Th e Waste Land, but there hope was hope for the wrong thing; here, “peace” feels earned, God’s will fully accepted.

Eliot does much more here. Th e verses serve, in part, both to sum-marize and to emphasize points dramatized earlier. One of the most important of these is represented in the penultimate line, “Suff er me not to be separated.” As we saw, the speaker was, precisely, “separated” in II, with consequences that Ash-Wednesday explores. Now at poem’s end, the line surely refers to separation of body and spirit. Th e other strikingly important, as well as enigmatic, verse is “Teach us to care and not to care,” which repeats exactly a verse in the fi rst poem, where it is followed, as



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in VI, by “Teach us to sit still.” But a big diff erence separates VI from I (a separation that Eliot works to overcome by just this repetition, represent-ing diff erence mediated by similarity): in the fi rst poem, the speaking voice subscribed to “falsehood,” which by the end no longer mocks him.

“Teach us to care and not to care” encapsulates the issues at stake in Ash-Wednesday. Th e fi rst meaning likely to come to mind is that repre-sented in the early dramatizations of the speaker, who is “dissembled.” In similar fashion, the line in question may be separated into caring and not-caring. Further, brought together, caring and not-caring can point—away from the literal meaning of the words themselves—to a Hegelian-like synthesis. But if we stay with the plain meanings of the words, “Teach us to care and not to care” means something diff erent altogether: “and” is the “necessarye coniunction” that Eliot has been exploring and drama-tizing throughout Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems. He literally means here the necessity of caring and not-caring at the same time, as one act, in other words—thus mirroring God and man being one in the Incarnation.

Notes

T.S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930).T.S. Eliot, For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1928), ix.Donald Gallup, T.S. Eliot: A Bibliography, rev. and extended ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1969), 39–40, 218, 219, 223.See Lyndall Gordon, T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (New York: Norton, 1999), and my books T.S. Eliot and the Essay: From “Th e Sacred Wood” to “Four Quartets” (Waco, TX: Baylor UP, 2010) and Reading T.S. Eliot: “Four Quartets” and the Journey toward Understanding (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).T.S. Eliot, A Sermon (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1948), 5.T.S. Eliot, “Lancelot Andrewes,” Selected Essays, 3rd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 347.See my Reading T.S. Eliot.Eliot, Selected Essays, 277.T.S. Eliot, “Th e ‘Pensées’ of Pascal,” Selected Essays, 408.T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943).Eliot, Selected Essays, 408.For the Metaxy, see Eric Voegelin, for example, Th e New Science of Politics (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1952), passim.T.S. Eliot, Th e Idea of a Christian Society (London: Faber and Faber, 1939), passim.



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3Falling in Love and Reading Spinoza: Some Forms of Approach to “Amalgamating Disparate Experience”

Abstract: From beginning to end, in verse and prose alike, Eliot was concerned with “separation”: for example, in the fragmentariness of modern awareness, of thought and feeling, of men and women from each other, of the modern world and the wellsprings of cultural and spiritual understanding, as of letter and spirit. He famously sought to overcome the “dissociation of sensibility” and to “amalgamate disparate experience.” Th e Incarnation—that “impossible union”—instances the way to bring diff erences and even opposites together, with far-fl ung implications. Eliot’s discovery of “tension” as fi guring, for example, the eff ective relation of Church and State stems from Incarnational understanding.




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Falling in Love and Reading Spinoza

When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is con-stantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.

—T.S. Eliot, “Th e Metaphysical Poets”

No doubt it will seem at best odd and at worst merely perverse to put T.S. Eliot in a context that includes F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Baldwin, authors who record vastly disparate experience, and yet that is what I am about to do. In relation to Eliot’s famous statement from “Th e Metaphysical Poets,” quoted just above, I place, fi rst, Fitzgerald’s observation, off ered near the beginning of his essay “Th e Crack-Up” and deriving from his own experience: “the test of a fi rst-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”1 Th e fi rst sentence rhymes with Eliot’s understanding of the sort of “wit” that he locates in the Metaphysical poets and that he defi nes as a comparison entailing a “rapid association of thought which requires considerable agility on the part of the reader.”2 Th e second sentence, meanwhile, rhymes with James Baldwin’s hard-earned and moving con-clusion to the title essay in Notes of a Native Son: “It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. Th e fi rst idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace.” Th e other half of the equation follows: “But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fi ght them with all one’s strength.”3

Diff erences certainly exist among the three perspectives on diff erence and union, holding together opposite viewpoints, and discovering a positive relation among what appears to be merely “chaotic, irregular, fragmentary.” Both Baldwin and Fitzgerald recognize the Hamlet-esque risk in self-debate and self-division, with the potential of inactivity and inaction, and Eliot adds a desire for “new wholes” perhaps absent in the



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other two writers. And yet a concern with the “disparate” links Fitzgerald, Baldwin, and Eliot, leading me to wonder, in the present circumstances of this book, whether something, and if so what, holds together falling in love, reading Spinoza, “the noise of the typewriter, the smell of cooking.” Th e question occurs with particular relevance, or so it certainly seems, to Th e Waste Land, which is all about the diff erences between Chaucerian and post–World War I England, fi re and water, life and death. In “Th e Fire Sermon,” the third and central section, we hear, “ ‘I can connect / Nothing with nothing,’ ” despair that rhymes with the speaker’s own dec-laration at poem’s end that “Th ese fragments I have shored against my ruins.”4 Perhaps desperately hopeful, that last statement points, though, only to fragments that remain separated, no way readily apparent by which to amalgamate them or to form a new whole.

At the end of his so-called conversion poem, Ash-Wednesday, the speaker prays, “Suff er me not to be separated.”5 As we saw in the previous chapter, the poem represents the heinous eff ects of forms of separation, notably including those of spirit from body and of self from world. Eliot long dealt with matters of separation and division, beginning perhaps with “Th e Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in 1915, twelve years before his embrace of Christianity, the Church of England, and Anglo-Catholicism. Th at revolutionary poem opens with the now-famous line “Let us go then, you and I.”6 Probably most oft en, “you” is thought to be a part of that “I,” Prufrock the speaker thus implicitly acknowledging an internal division elsewhere in the poem fi gured as intense self-consciousness and debilitating self-doubt; in this regard, Prufrock anticipates both that enig-matic fi gure—called “the third”—encountered “Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded” in “What the Th under Said” in Th e Waste Land and, more importantly, the “familiar compound ghost” met on the bombed-out streets of London in “Little Gidding,” the last of the Four Quartets.7 Of course, the conjunction of “you and I” is a distinction made up of a unity. Mainly, in any case, at least prior to around 1927, Eliot’s verse and prose alike reveal a fascination with questions of separation. Not all of these works, by any means, highlight the problems entailed in and by forms of separation, but that very lack of critical mass points up the prevalence, as well as signifi cance, of the issue in Eliot’s thinking and writing.

Separation permeates “Prufrock” as it does Th e Waste Land (1922). Prufrock is not only confl icted and self-divided; he is also distinct and separate from both that world of “one-night cheap hotels” and “lonely



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men in shirt sleeves, leaning out of windows” that he knows about and that very diff erent world that he evidently seeks and craves, where “the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.” Prufrock experiences further separation between desire and satisfaction in communicating via words: “It is impossible to say just what I mean!” and so he, rightly, fears that if he tried to say whatever it is he wants or needs to say, he would be misunderstood: “ ‘Th at is not it at all, / Th at is not what I meant, at all,’ ” which, though imagined as coming from the woman, could just as eas-ily be said by Prufrock himself. Finally, at poem’s end, there is the utter separation of Prufrock from any possibility of happiness or meaning. He has “heard the mermaids singing, each to each,” but he does “not think that they will sing to me.” Th ese last verses dramatize Prufrock’s separa-tion from reality, for there is precious little likelihood that he ever expe-rienced anything so romantic or thrilling—except in his imagination.

Th e Waste Land is littered with separation—of all sorts. In addition to the fragments that constitute the poem, including individual sections as well as lines themselves, the inhabitants fi nd themselves, without know-ing it, separated from life-sustaining forces, physical, cultural, literary: lust abounds equally with indiff erence, and abortion is both a literal thing in “A Game of Chess” and a fi gure for potential nipped even before the bud bursts forth. Th us the unfortunates here crave the rain that only dis-tances them even further from needed refi ning or purgatorial fi res. Th e wastelanders bear a certain relationship to Gerontion, himself a kind of elder Prufrock; he too is separated from needed contact, in his case from the fi ve senses, and now lacks passion, being merely, or so he laments, “a dry brain in a dry season”: “I that was near your heart was removed therefrom / To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.” In the event, “I have lost my passion” and with it “my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch: / How should I use them for your closer contact?”8 In Reading T.S. Eliot: “Four Quartets” and the Journey toward Understanding, I argued that Gerontion’s plight, rueful and tragic, mirrors that of Western civilization around the time of and aft er the Reformation and Inquisition.9 Decline is fi gured in such separation as Gerontion represents. He also makes abundantly clear the power and primacy of the senses.

“Th e Hollow Men” has to do with the same period, specifi cally the abortive eff orts of Guy Fawkes to blow up Parliament in 1605. Arguably, the most striking word here is “between”: it literally separates and pre-vents completion or fruition (in Ash-Wednesday, where it is also promi-nent, it serves, diff erently, as a sort of mediator); in other words, here it



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aborts: between “idea” and “reality,” “motion” and “act,” “conception” and “creation,” “emotion” and “response,” “desire” and “spasm,” “potency” and “existence,” “essence” and “the descent” (this last perhaps allud-ing to the Fall)—between them “Falls the Shadow” (possibly Original Sin).10 Certainly embodiment is lacking, these men—us—“hollow” and “stuff ed,” unable to embody (any) ideas in act(ion).

What both Baldwin and Fitzgerald solicit—that agility of mind that allows it to hold opposing viewpoints without becoming incapacitated—Eliot embodies in the mythological fi gure Tiresias in Th e Waste Land. Having spent part of his life as woman and part as man, the blind Th eban seer—a walking paradox—“perceive[s] the scene” taking place at the fl at of “the typist home at teatime” and “foret[ells] the rest”: the sexual encounter with “the young man carbuncular,” which features female indiff erence and male lust. Tiresias is also gift ed with the power of unique sympathy, mirroring Odysseus’s education in the Kingdom of the Dead: “And I Tiresias have foresuff ered all / Enacted on this same divan or bed; I who have sat by Th ebes below the wall / And walked among the lowest of the dead.” For these reasons, Eliot says in the notes he added to the poem in 1925 that Tiresias, “although a mere spectator and not indeed a ‘character’, is yet the most important personage in [Th e Waste Land], uniting all the rest” (italics added).

Eliot, at the least, exacts from his reader the very burdens and demands that lie on his characters/speakers. Th at “considerable agility,” the abil-ity that the poet may teach the reader to come to share in, seems to be what he is talking about in introducing St.-J. Perse’s Anabasis, which we looked at earlier. It is worth returning, briefl y, to Eliot’s critical introduc-tion to his 1930 translation. In Perse’s highly complex and elusive work, says Eliot, “any obscurity” derives from “the suppression of ‘links in the chain’, of explanatory and connecting matter, and not to incoherence, or to the love of cryptogram.” Anabasis, he continues, in terms that certainly resonate with his own work, consists of

a sequence of images and ideas [that] has nothing chaotic about it. There is a logic of the imagination as well as a logic of concepts. People who do not appreciate poetry always find it difficult to distinguish between order and chaos in the arrangement of images; and even those who are capable of appreciating poetry cannot depend upon first impressions. I was not con-vinced of Mr Perse’s imaginative order until I had read the poem five or six



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times. And if, as I suggest, such an arrangement of imagery requires just as much “fundamental brain-work” as the arrangement of an argument, it is to be expected that the reader of a poem should take at least as much trouble as a barrister reading an important decision on a complicated case.11

Th e “logic of the imagination,” operating in Modernist works, would thus appear to call out for more and more on the part of the reader, per-haps accustomed to the “order of concepts.” (By the time he has reached Four Quartets, Eliot combines concepts and imagination, “restoring / With a new verse the ancient rhyme.”) Th e work consists, in any case, of putting together: fragments, elements of disparate experience. Th at work is more diffi cult, Eliot makes clear, because of what he (also) exposes in “Th e Metaphysical Poets,” especially the regnant “dissociation of sensibility.” In fact, Eliot expresses, by what he calls “the following theory,” “the diff er-ence” between the ability to “amalgamat[e] disparate experience” and the opposite condition by which one “can connect nothing with nothing”:

The poets of the seventeenth century, the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth, possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience. They are simple, artificial, difficult, or fantastic, as their predecessors were; no less nor more than Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Guinicelli, or Cino. In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered. (Italics added)12

Over the next decades, thanks in part to Milton, Dryden, and their infl u-ence, “the language became more refi ned,” but “the feeling became more crude.” Th en came what Eliot calls “the sentimental age”:

The poets revolted against the ratiocinative, the descriptive; they thought and felt by fits, unbalanced; they reflected. In one or two passages of Shelley’s Triumph of Life, in the second Hyperion, there are traces of a struggle toward unification of sensibility. But Keats and Shelley died, and Tennyson and Browning ruminated.13

Actually, at least in the dramatic monologues, Browning anticipated Eliot’s own work, particularly “Th e Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

In “Th e Metaphysical Poets,” Eliot has already ascribed the diff erence between Tennyson and, say, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, whom he has quoted for comparative purposes, to that cultural change in sensibility, specifi cally the separation of thinking and feeling:

The difference is not a simple difference of degree between poets. It is something which had happened to the mind of England between the time



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of Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of Tennyson and Browning; it is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflec-tive poet. Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience. . . .

And that amalgamation, Eliot says, consists in “these experiences . . . always forming new wholes.”14

In Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems, Eliot similarly represents, and dramatizes, the coming together of diff erences, opposites in fact, in the production of such paradox as the Virgin Mary embodies—indeed, the poems’ “Lady of silences” may herself be at once the Virgin and not Her: she incarnates paradox, as we saw in the last chapter, representing “impossible union” of opposites. In character, she may mirror the achievement the speaker prays for: “Teach us to care and not to care.” Th e prayer certainly relates to the ascetic, possibly Buddhistic poems of Ash-Wednesday and is, in fact, a repetition of the untrustworthy speaker’s line in the fi rst poem. Eliot urges us in the poem to “Be mindful” (“Sovegna vos”), emphasizing how easily and oft en we “mock ourselves with falsehood.” Accordingly, “Teach us to care and not to care” may be misunderstood.

It appears, in fact, that the speaker of the fi rst poem does misunderstand, whereas the speaker in VI, whether or not he is the same “person,” under-stands perfectly, despite the entailed diffi culty. My students always respond to the line the way the “fi rst” speaker evidently does: they assume a coming-together that results in a sort of Hegelian synthesis, thus the production of a third, new capacity that does not unite the original two but changes them completely into a transcendent, far superior “thing.” Eliot may mean that in I, or rather his speaker does, but in VI something altogether diff erent, and more diffi cult to grasp precisely and securely, seems to be in play.

What that is, is indeed diffi cult to put into words—it is, though, what Four Quartets is all about. To begin with, we can say that it is neither a synthesis nor quite the diff erent forming of a new whole. Th e latter would mean the ultimate creation of a third, as in the former, although, not being a synthesis, it would retain the original constituents as they were. To be sure, the notion of the Christian Trinity may tempt us into a quick embrace of “third-ness,” perhaps encouraged by the scene on the road to Emmaus toward the end of Th e Waste Land, which smacks of



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both the Prufrockian and the Tiresian. Th e speaker identifi es an inde-terminate fi gure, and so “do[es] not know whether a man or a woman”: “When I count, there are you and I together / But when I look ahead up the white road / Th ere is always another one walking beside you.”

An alternative is possible, deriving from the Christian sense of Incarnation: just as Eliot accepts that Jesus Christ was both God and man, fully one and fully the other, he evidently prays for that “agility” and delicate “balance” that allows for both caring and not-caring at one and the same time. No refl ection is involved, and no time-lapse. It is an immediate act, clearly rhyming with that ability in the Metaphysical poets that Eliot so admired: the “immediate sensuous apprehension of thought.” It is all so diffi cult because it involves holding and doing two seemingly contradictory acts at the same time, like, too, the Lady of Ash-Wednesday serving as “Speech without word and / Word of no speech.”

As a brilliant instance of Incarnational union, I cite the passage in “East Coker” that represents Elizabethan rustics dancing around a bonfi re in an open fi eld, complete with historical spellings. Th e scene represents a striking contrast to Th e Waste Land with its crowd hardly rustic who have no living connection with each other, who, in fact, lack all rhythm, precisely what these rustics “keep,” observing, attendant: they would go to Canterbury in April. As we read these verses, and presumably enjoy and appreciate them, we come to understand that they lack depth; their mean-ing lies on the surface and is enhanced by comparison with other scenes. Th e passage means man and woman dancing together; the meaning lies in the pattern in which they happily participate, re-creating it. Th e dancers do not stand for something; they are the thing. “Man” and “woman” are both generic and richly particular and individual, the latter emerging in, through, and by means of the implied acceptance of “tradition.” Th us the actual acts performed “betokeneth” the general and the abstract, rather than symbolize it; you can read the general in the particular, no in-depth refl ection called for. Th e passage acquires its meaning, or at least some of it, in comparison with Th e Waste Land before (and with other passages in Four Quartets, notably including the last section of “Little Gidding,” which returns to the language on display here in talking about writing):

The association of man and womanIn daunsinge, signifying matrimonie—A dignified and commodious sacrament.Two and two, necessarye coniunction,



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Holding eche other by the hand or the armWhich betokeneth concorde.

Th e rustics engage in the same “coupling” as the “beasts,” which makes them, not bestial like (some of) the wastelanders, but participants in life that extends well beyond them; as a result of the pattern in which they move and dance, they lead meaningful lives. For them, dancing is living, living is dancing. Keeping time, not spending or wasting it, the rustics produce—no hint of abortive action here. Literally close to the earth, these Elizabethan fi gures are also close to death. Enclosed in their own egos, the wastelanders, on the other hand, know only what “Th e Hollow Men” refers to as death-in-life. Knowing death as such, the rustics cel-ebrate life. Close to the earth, the rustics are—thus—in touch with the letter; if spirit appears in their dancing, and I think it does, it is in that “coniunction,” not separate and apart from it.

Th e strong affi rmations apparent in the Elizabethan rustics are present also in the Chorus’s fi nal pronouncements in Eliot’s drama Murder in the Cathedral (1935). Here, they “acknowledge ourselves as type of the com-mon man” (italics added),15 and utter words that rhyme with the later “East Coker”—as they diff er from the sensibility rendered in Th e Waste Land:

Even with the hand to the broom, the back bent in laying the fire, the knee bent in cleaning the hearth, we, the scrubbers and sweepers of Canterbury,

The back bent under toil, the knee bent under sin, the hands to the face under fear, the head bent under grief,

Even in us the voices of seasons, the snuffle of winter, the song of spring, the drone of summer, the voices of beasts and of birds, praise Thee.

We thank Thee for thy mercies of blood, for Thy redemption by blood. For the blood of Thy martyrs and saints

Shall enrich the earth, shall create the holy places.For wherever a saint has dwelt, wherever a martyr has given his blood for

the blood of Christ,There is holy ground, and the sanctity shall not depart from itThough armies trample over it, though sightseers come with guide-books

looking over it;From where the western seas gnaw at the coast of Iona,To the death in the desert, the prayer in forgotten places by the broken

imperial column,From such ground springs that which forever renews the earthThough it is forever denied.16



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Th ere is, of course, no hint of the blood of martyrs, of saints, around the Elizabethan bonfi re in “East Coker.” And yet that land, too, somehow feels almost holy because it supports a “type” of “dignifi ed and commo-dious sacrament.” Th e Chorus essentially reiterates this point in continu-ing, themselves a “type of the common man,” that is, of persons just like the rustics:

Of the men and women who shut the door and sit by the fire;Who fear the blessing of God, the loneliness of the night of God, the

surrender required, the deprivation inflicted;Who fear the injustice of men less than the justice of God;Who fear the hand at the window, the fire in the thatch, the fist in the

tavern, the push into the canal,Less than we fear the love of God.We acknowledge our trespass, our weakness, our fault; we acknowledgeThat the sin of the world is upon our heads; that the blood of the martyrs

and the agony of the saintsIs upon our heads.17

Th at no overt or direct religious awareness is apparent in the rustics is just Eliot’s point.

In a (dramatic) poem in which binaries fi gure prominently (e.g., “living and partly living,” “knowing and not knowing”), the Chorus has earlier represented the horrors of separation—a land made worse than that dry and fearsome waste land Eliot saw in the contemporary Western world:

And behind the Judgement the Void, more horrid than active shapes of hell;Emptiness, absence, separation from God;The horror of the effortless journey, to the empty landWhich is no land, only emptiness, absence, the Void,Where those who were men can no longer turn the mindTo distraction, delusion, escape into dream, pretence,Where the soul is no longer deceived, for there are no objects, no tones,No colours, no forms to distract, to divert the soulFrom seeing itself, foully united forever, nothing with nothing,Not what we call death, but what beyond death is not death,We fear, we fear.18

Th e trouble with the wastelanders, at least a major problem, is that they know not nothing, having studiously avoided its nearer and farthest contact.

Murder in the Cathedral raises the political question represented by Th omas à Becket’s confrontation with the King. It is one that Eliot



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explores in several works, though it has received scant attention in the commentary. Th e Th ird Knight poses the question near play’s end:

[The King] therefore intended that Becket, who had proved himself an extremely able administrator—no one denies that—should unite the offices of Chancellor and Archbishop. Had Becket concurred with the King’s wishes, we should have had an almost ideal State: a union of spiritual and temporal administration, under the central government.19

Prose works that Eliot published between 1934 and 1948 revisit this central issue of the relationship between the spiritual and the temporal “administration,” Eliot very much interested in what he calls, in the title to one of these, “the idea of a Christian society” (1939). In the earliest of these prose works (1934), based on his Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia and titled Aft er Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy, Eliot approaches conclusion with this damning statement about the guidance of “the Inner Light,” which he calls “the most untrustworthy and deceitful guide that ever off ered itself to wandering humanity.”20 Th e other two books are written from a similar perspective, but focus on the social and political more than the religious.

In Th e Idea of a Christian Society, Eliot is at pains not just to stake out essential characteristics but also to pinpoint the relations that ought to obtain between the Christian understanding and the political world. In the Appendix, Eliot off ers this valuable summary statement:

That there is an antithesis between the Church and the World is a belief we derive from the highest authority. We know also from our reading of history, that a certain tension between Church and State is desirable. When Church and State fall out completely, it is ill with the commonwealth; and when Church and State get on too well together, there is something wrong with the Church. (Italics added)21

Eliot explains, explores, and develops the diff erence, the necessary “ten-sion,” that must prevail. Th e distinction he draws is between “unity” or “identity” and “harmony,” the latter of which includes and maintains “tension”:

even in a Christian society as well organised as we can conceive possible in this world, the limit would be that our temporal and spiritual life should be harmonised: the temporal and spiritual would never be identified. There would always remain a dual allegiance, to the State and to the Church, to one’s countrymen and to one’s fellow-Christians everywhere, and the latter would always have the primacy. There would always be a tension; and this



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tension is essential to the idea of a Christian society, and is a distinguishing mark between a Christian and a pagan society.22

In Notes towards the Defi nition of Culture, Eliot begins to lay out the issues in such statements as the following, where the pattern or structure apparent in his notion of “tension” again plays a key role:

In order to apprehend the theory of religion and culture . . . we have to try to avoid the two alternative errors: that of regarding religion and culture as two separate things between which there is a relation, and that of identifying religion and culture. I spoke at one point of the culture as an incarnation of its religion; and while I am aware of the temerity of employing such an exalted term, I cannot think of any other which would convey so well the intention to avoid relation on the one hand and identification of the other. (Eliot’s italics)23

Of course, “Incarnation” is precisely the right term, the one that accu-rately describes the relation represented in the Elizabethan rustics danc-ing around that bonfi re in “East Coker.”

Later on, Eliot introduces a new term or concept to account for what he has been treating. As he does so in the following passage, he calls atten-tion, note, to the use of imagery and sides with thinking literally, arguing

the vital importance for a society of friction between its parts. Accustomed as we are to think in figures of speech taken from machinery, we assume that a society, like a machine, should be as well oiled as possible, provided with ball bearings of the best steel. We think of friction as waste of energy. I shall not attempt to substitute any other imagery: perhaps at this point the less we think in analogies the better. . . . I [have] suggested that in any society which became permanently established in either a caste or a classless system, the culture would decay: one might even put it that a classless society should always be emerging into class, and a class society should be tending towards obliteration of its class distinctions. I now suggest that both class and region, by dividing the inhabitants of a country into two different kinds of groups, lead to a conflict favourable to creativeness and progress. And . . . these are only two of an indefinite number of conflicts and jealousies which should be profitable to society. Indeed, the more the better: so that everyone should be an ally of everyone else in some respects, and an opponent in several oth-ers, and no one conflict, envy, or fear will dominate.24

—a perfectly reasonable position, with some hints perhaps of Jacques Derrida’s infamous “trace.”

In Notes, in the chapter titled “Unity and Diversity: Sect and Cult,” Eliot acknowledges that “the reader may have diffi culty in reconciling”



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his assertions concerning the inevitability, and productivity, of confl ict with the earlier point of view, “according to which there is always, even in the most conscious and highly developed societies that we know, an aspect of identity between the religion and the culture.”25 Eliot then proceeds to his most sustained—and important—development of the notion of tension and of the pattern involved in the confl ict of identity and diff erence, a pattern that puts transcendence in its place:

I wish to maintain both these points of view. We do not leave the earlier stage of development behind us: it is that upon which we build. The identity of religion and culture remains on the unconscious level, upon which we have superimposed a conscious structure wherein religion and culture are contrasted and can be opposed. The meaning of the terms “religion” and “culture” is of course altered between these two levels. To the unconscious level we constantly tend to revert, as we find consciousness an excessive burden; and the tendency towards reversion may explain the powerful attraction which totalitarian philosophy and practice can exert upon humanity.26

Th e analysis, rooted in both psychology and common sense, as well as Incarnational theology, then approaches its climax: a brilliant reading with massive and far-reaching implications for both the individual and the whole of which he or she forms a part:

Totalitarianism appeals to the desire to return to the womb. The contrast between religion and culture imposes a strain: we escape from this strain by attempting to revert to an identity of religion and culture which prevailed at a more primitive stage; as when we indulge in alcohol as an anodyne, we consciously seek unconsciousness. It is only by unremitting effort that we can persist in being individuals in a society, instead of merely members of a disciplined crowd. Yet we remain members of the crowd, even when we suc-ceed as individuals. Hence . . . I am obliged to maintain two contradictory propositions: that religion and culture are aspects of one unity, and that they are two different and contrasted things.27

With this statement we are back with James Baldwin and F. Scott Fitzgerald—albeit with telling diff erences.



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Notes

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Th e Crack-Up,” Th e Crack-Up, ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1945), 69. Of course, Eliot’s poems are themselves amalgamations of “disparate experience.”T.S. Eliot, “Th e Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Essays, 3rd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 282.James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son,” Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon, 1955), 113–14.T.S. Eliot, Th e Waste Land (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922).T.S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930).T.S. Eliot, “Th e Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Prufrock and Other Observations (London: Egoist, 1917).T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943).T.S. Eliot, “Gerontion,” Ara Vos Prec (London: Ovid, 1920).Reading T.S. Eliot: “Four Quartets” and the Journey toward Understanding (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).T.S. Eliot, “Th e Hollow Men,” Poems 1909–1925 (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1925).T.S. Eliot, preface, Anabasis, by St.-J. Perse, trans. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1930), 8.T.S. Eliot, “Th e Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Essays, 287–88.Ibid., 288. Ibid., 287. T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral (London: Faber and Faber, 1935), 71.Ibid., 84–85. Ibid., 85–86. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 78–79. T.S. Eliot, Aft er Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934), 64.Ibid., 95. Ibid., 56. T.S. Eliot, Notes towards the Defi nition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1948), 31–32.Ibid., 58–59. Ibid., 68. Ibid. Ibid., 68–69.



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4Th e Gift Half Understood: Incarnation as “Impossible Union,” Way, and Intersection

Abstract: “Th e hint half guessed, the gift half understood,” writes Eliot in Four Quartets, “is Incarnation.” By omitting the expected “the” before “Incarnation,” he refers to the pattern of which “the Incarnation” is the paradigmatic instance. Th e particular pattern that Incarnation names—as “impossible union” of opposites and the way of proceeding in, through, and by means of one “term” in its diff erence from the other—appears in hints as early as Th e Sacred Wood (1920). It fi nds its fullest expression in Ash-Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1935–1943).

Atkins, G. Douglas. T.S. Eliot Materialized: Literal Meaning and Embodied Truth. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. doi 10.1057/9781137301321.



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Th e Gift Half Understood

For Eliot, “full Christian virtue cannot exist without full Christian belief ”, and this meant for him an unqualified submission to the teachings of Catholic and Apostolic Christianity. Faith and its practice were inextricably linked; practice was the incarnation of belief. . . .

—Barry Spurr, “Anglo-Catholic in Religion”: T.S. Eliot and Christianity

Th e center of Four Quartets, defi ning the pattern that gives meaning to the poem’s movement, is a single line in arguably the least literarily sophisticated part of the great essay-poem: “Th e hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.” It is straightforward, absolutely literal—and highly charged: deliberately, Eliot omits the defi nite article before “Incarnation,” for he refers to a timeless, universal structure, the paradigmatic instance of which was the historical moment when God became (fully) man without ceasing to be the Deity. Th e repeated word “half ” precisely names our diffi culty in understanding that gift : we readily enough grasp the idea of immanence as we do the idea of transcendence, but both, together and at the same time, give us fi ts. “Apprehension,” warns Eliot, may take “a lifetime’s death in love, / Ardour and selfl essness and self-surrender.”1 We can, accordingly, but engage in “prayer, observ-ance, discipline, thought and action.” Th ough he suggests that only a “saint” may comprehend, may take the hints and guesses and arrive at understanding, he undertakes, in Four Quartets, nothing less than to reveal the essential structure, made clear once and for all in the historical event of the Incarnation. As Eliot put it in 1937, “the fullness of Christian revelation resides in the essential fact of the Incarnation.”2

Th at he succeeds, where so many others have failed, is due in con-siderable part to his understanding of Incarnation as a pattern, which enables him to sidestep the intricacies and controversies surrounding the Incarnation. Pattern, like structure, reveals itself to comparison, more so than to in-depth analysis and refl ection. Like the most important single verse in the four poems, in fact, Four Quartets is literal. It lacks the allusiveness of Eliot’s earlier poems, as well as the occasional fi gurative language that oft en seems to obscure more than it reveals, and it consists, largely, of complete sentences, the fragments that mark Th e Waste Land, “Th e Hollow Men,” and even Ash-Wednesday having disappeared. Four Quartets “reads”—and even looks, apart from the verse typography—like very good prose. It is, aft er all, (also) an essay. You follow the “journey toward understanding” by reading Four Quartets comparatively, laterally,



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listening and looking for rhymes, placing beside one another words, phrases, concepts, verses, scenes. When Eliot represents Elizabethan rustics dancing around a bonfi re, he means just that; they do not point to something else or other, nor do they function as symbols. Similarly with the “familiar compound ghost” in “Little Gidding”: he does not stand for Milton or Yeats or anyone else—although he does rhyme with Tiresias at the (geographical and therefore rhetorical and thematic) center of Th e Waste Land. As a “compound,” that elusive, enigmatic “personage” embod-ies, incarnating the “impossible union” and “necessarye coniunction” that Incarnation names. As a “familiar compound ghost,” he joins and unites, and is thereby diff erent from the separated, fragmented souls all about him, no doubt including the struggling, journeying, ever-exploring speaker of the poem(s).

As early as 1935, when the fi rst poem of Four Quartets, “Burnt Norton,” appeared, Eliot was emphasizing “pattern.” In fact, in the fi ft h and fi nal section of that earliest poem, he established the clear meaning of pat-tern as well as its critical importance, claiming that only pattern allows you to reach “Th e stillness.” Pattern is, simply, what gives meaning; that we should be seeking and exploring, rather than “spirit,” or “heart,” or meaning itself, for the latter may be reached only indirectly, in, through, and by means of pattern. Among other things, the following verse gives the ultimate lie to the speaker’s early falsehood in Ash-Wednesday that cessation from turning is the desideratum: “Th e detail of the pattern is movement.” Note that when Eliot resorts to simile (e.g., “as in the fi gure of the ten stairs”), it is only to elucidate, never to establish.

As Nicholas Lossky has masterfully shown, Lancelot Andrewes proceeded in a fashion that I fi nd similar to Eliot’s and that no doubt infl uenced the Modernist poet (as he certainly did Ash-Wednesday, with its various turns on the key word “turn”): “by starting from a word . . . Lancelot Andrewes brings out all the reality of the Incarnation.”3 As Fr. Lossky puts it, around a single word “and its reality, Andrewes creates for his congregation all the aspects of the mystery of the Incarnation and suggests the more distant perspectives that the mystery opens up.”4 Of course, Eliot writes only about Incarnation, minus the defi nite article. In Lossky’s words, in any case, Bishop Andrewes works “against the heretical temptation to perceive only one reality at a time; God becomes fully man, while remaining fully God.”5 Th e Anglican divine also used “the same word or the same root, but in opposed or contrasting contexts,” much as we have



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seen his epigone Old Possum do.6 Lossky goes on to discuss parallelism, a device from the liturgy that Bishop Andrewes also puts to prominent use; this treatment allows us to grasp more fully the privilege he gives to the letter:

the same idea is found in two orders of reality, it is something that creates between them a relationship of reciprocity. Thus the theme of the reality of the Incarnation is the occasion . . . of taking a firm and clear position, though not a polemical one (for it remains strictly within the realm of exegesis), on one of the most controversial points of the liturgical ritual: the bodily posture in the Eucharistic celebration. . . . Worship, veneration, says Andrewes, must not be only interior.7

Lossky proceeds to an excursus that bears particular importance for us in this book. He refers to Bishop Andrewes’s “ ‘symbolist’ method,” but he is quick to distinguish his meaning from the meaning of “symbolist” common in literary discussions of the nineteenth and twentieth centu-ries. Th e applicability to Eliot is strong and, I hope, readily apparent:

It is not a matter of the creation of a personal universe of signs which give access, by means of the creator’s experience, apprehension, or vision of real-ity, to a reality which is “universalized” in some way by becoming intelligi-ble to the reader. From this perspective, the reader, while recognizing the level of the personal experience of the creator, catches a glimpse beyond it of a signification and a reality that transcends the phenomenological plane. Thus, for example, “The Beautiful Lady” of whom the poet Aleksandr Blok sang becomes the feminine ideal, but equally becomes Russia, also a kind of divine feminine essence, and the whole cycle of poems suggests a quest of love that transcends the human level. The symbol here consists essentially in filling a particular phenomenon with signification, in other words in creating a significative reality from the basis of a subjective vision.8

Th is is the position from which Fr. Lossky distinguishes his so-called symbolist method:

On the contrary, when the Fathers of the Church speak of a symbol, it is very often a matter of an “objective” reality founded on a vision univer-sally accepted by the Catholic Church. According to this conception . . . the symbol, or the sign in a strong sense of the word, or better still the image, is, so to speak, the co-existence of two realities: that of what signifies and that of what is signified. That which signifies, the image for example, par-ticipates in the reality signified. A symbolic name of Christ is an image of Christ, but an image not at all in the abstract sense of a reminder, by certain



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conventionally recognized traits, of the existence of an absent reality; it is an image in the concrete sense of participation in the reality of what it rep-resents by the likeness of the representation to that which is represented.9

I will stay just a little longer with Fr. Lossky writing about Lancelot Andrewes because the following paragraph makes clear what he has fi nely but laboriously just distinguished:

In this perspective, the application to Christ of a name like “Lamb”, for example, is not a simple poetical allegory; the name and the image of the Lamb themselves acquire a sacred character by the presence in them of the grace of the One they evoke. The symbolic name, the symbolic image, the symbolic gesture, the symbolic object, are “realistic” symbols in the sense that they are bearers of two realities, the human reality and the divine reality, after the image of the Godmanhood of the Person of the Incarnate Christ. The experience of the duality of natures is not conceived as a sub-jective vision of human psychology, but as an “objective” revealed reality, grasped by the movement of faith. However, it is not a matter of any kind of collective procedure; it is “personal”, but not “individual”, for it does not separate a man from his fellows by defining him, as it were, a contrario with reference to others, but on the contrary it unites him to them.10

Twenty-fi rst-century readers have it especially hard trying to under-stand Incarnation. Many of my students, for example, graduate and undergraduate alike, confuse “Incarnation,” about which they appear to know nothing, with “reincarnation,” of which they have at least heard. I continue to be shocked at how diffi cult they fi nd the notion of Incarnation, to say nothing of the dogma of the Incarnation. I have recently concluded that a great deal of their diffi culty resides in their inexperience and impatience with words alone, notably including those in the fi ft h part of “Th e Dry Salvages.”

Contemporary readers—again, my students, present and past, con-stitute much of my evidence—also exhibit an inclination toward some sort of spirit-ualism, pointedly at the expense of religion (so called) and institutional Christianity. Eliot once dismissed as “mad” a “spiritualist” he had encountered in one of his classes. He proceeded to diff erentiate “what he regarded as the charlatanism of the occult” from Christian mysticism, for the former “seeks contact with the sources of super-natural power, divorced from religion and theology,” in other words impatiently taking the same direct route that in 1920 Eliot had found in Romanticism’s “short cut to the strangeness without the reality.”11 Both instances of unmediated directness fl out Incarnation.



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Let Barry Spurr’s recent comments sum up Eliot’s position on Incarnation as the pattern whereby diff erences and oppositions are breached: what Eliot had long sought, says Spurr (who might have sup-ported his argument with such reference to Th e Sacred Wood as I for one have recently tendered),

was a system of belief in which the juxtaposition of the temporal and the eternal was concentrated in their connection, and ultimately resolved. . . . [W]hat Eliot was searching for was the philosophy embodied in the theol-ogy of the Incarnation (the Word of God being made flesh, in the birth of Christ), which is at the very heart of Anglo-Catholic doctrine and spiritual-ity and the sacraments which are derived from it, Catholic teaching affirm-ing that the entire sacramental system, central to the faith, is an extension of the Incarnation.12

As a result of the Incarnation, according to Th e Rock speaking to the Chorus in Eliot’s pageant-play, at “every moment you live at a point of intersection.”13

We thus discover, willy-nilly, that (the) Incarnation bears more than one meaning. I do not contradict my earlier defi nitions of the Incarnation, or of Incarnation as the supreme pattern of meaning whose paradigmatic instance is God becoming man in the person of Jesus Christ. Rather, I refer to Incarnation in the terms we have just been witnessing: that is, the pattern as “impossible union,” as “way,” and as “intersection.”

Let us begin with perhaps the simplest, the “impossible union,” which is, of course, the hypostatic divine union of God and man in the per-son of Christ Jesus. Eliot puts it this way in his essay “Th e ‘Pensées’ of Pascal”: “Is a case of human parthenogenesis credible?”14 He answers in the affi rmative, of course, and his treatment of “concorde” records his acceptance, deriving from the understanding that Incarnation bequeaths and reveals. As we have seen, such “union” does not necessarily—and oft en, in fact, does not—mean “unity,” for Eliot remains suspicious of any such totalitarianism. He thus posits “tension” and “friction” as posi-tive and productive. Regardless, his essential point is that diff erences and even oppositions belong together, rather than separated—body and consciousness, for example, as well as caring and not-caring, all deriving from the Incarnational pattern of “impossible union.”

“Intersection” accounts for the relation of timelessness with time. It also represents a parallel with that “mythical method” that Eliot identifi ed in Joyce’s Ulysses15 and that he himself employs, with some modifi cation, in



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juxtaposing Chaucer’s time with 1922 in the famous opening verses of Th e Waste Land. In other words, transcendence intersected with immanence, a fateful act captured in the drawing of vertical line meeting horizontal (and forming a cross). Since, moreover, God has consecrated every moment, in every place, every point in our—ordinary—lives bears meaning and sig-nifi cance, not just special or highly charged or so-called epiphantic ones. As a result, we may enter Four Quartets at any point, for every moment “burns” with meaning: “Here,” then, “the intersection of the timeless moment / Is England and nowhere. Never and always” (“Little Gidding”).

Incarnation as way is more complicated, and more prominently represented in Four Quartets. From the epigraph to “Burnt Norton,” we confront a choice, for there Heraclitus is quoted as famously averring that “the way up is the way down.” But Incarnation says, Wait a minute. Is it really that simple? Krishna affi rms the Heraclitean meaning in “Th e Dry Salvages”: “the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.” So—who is right? And how can you tell?

In “East Coker,” Eliot off ers a thoughtful consideration, really an explo-ration of the matter: in order “to arrive” at a place literal or metaphorical, you must go “by a way” that involves no “ecstasy” but, rather, “igno-rance,” “dispossession,” and so forth. Despite the simplicity of the words, the ideas here are immensely complicated, recalling the mystery of the Incarnation, perhaps even embodying it. First, attending closely to the words themselves, you notice both the personal texture of the verses and the emphasis on “way.” What Eliot off ers here is not quite paradox, but something more complex, I think. Th at you proceed in, through, and by means of seems clear enough, complicating and showing the inadequacy of the (mere) conjunction. I, for one, until recently supposed that the words say the following: you go in, through, and by means of what you are, for example, in order to reach what you are not. Th at is to say, if you wish to reach spirit, from where you are as body, you proceed by means of body. What the words say, though, is this: you go in, through, and by means of “the way in which you are not” in order to arrive at “what” you are not. Way is critical, determinative, indeed.

Eliot not only gives the lie to the Heraclitean identity of the way up and the way down, but he also renders incomplete and in fact false the classical—and pagan—notion that the pilgrim must undergo purga-tion, by means of a descent to the Kingdom of the Dead, in order to reach home. Th us he writes in “Burnt Norton,” a rhyme with the pas-sage just considered clearly apparent: go lower, into utter darkness, into



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“deprivation,” “destitution,” “desiccation,” and “evacuation,” including of property and sense. Th is, says Eliot, “is the one way, and the other / Is the same, not in movement / But abstention from movement.” Neither of these “ways” is Incarnational; each is perhaps at best “half ” the truth. You do not “transcend” the senses; rather, as Gerontion (already) knows, you proceed via them.

Th is the preceding verse paragraph seems to have been clear enough about, Eliot having ended the preceding section with the words “Only through time time is conquered,” meaning, obviously, that the way to timelessness is only in, through, and by means of time; thus Eliot’s “sub-mission to time” appears with all its implications—the word “investing” here being a new word for the Incarnational pattern. Our time is an in-between time, neither one nor the other, this “a place of disaff ection.” Here there is not the distance necessary to “purify the soul” or “cleanse aff ection from the temporal.”

Th e idea of “purifi cation” here meets “purgation” in the next para-graph, disarming—or deconstructing—it. Purgation entails transcend-ence; purifi cation, maintaining though cleansing. Th ere is a world of diff erence. “Not here / Not here the darkness, in this twittering world,” Eliot writes. So try descending lower, the way down, which, he says, is “the same” as such abstention from “movement” as the mistaken speaker of Ash-Wednesday embodied.

“Burnt Norton” also has the following to off er. Th e words here, too, are those that we see recurring, Eliot turning essential ideas over and over and coming at them from various angles and perspectives. Th e world, as he is thus making clear, is, like words, like desire, ever moving, and that movement constitutes “Th e detail of the pattern,” without which there is no reaching the stillness. Th us you proceed in, through, and by means of the movement to the stillness—Incarnational pattern, once more, with the lurking temptation to understand by half, get it “half ” right.” “East Coker” ends on the same note, with the same words, signifying “impos-sible union”: “We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity.”

In “Little Gidding,” returning (yet again) to the same matter, Eliot off ers an extension via elucidation, using rhyming words. He thus makes the role of desire clear, its diff erence from love explicable, and the mov-ing way of Incarnation more apparent. Th e beginning is straightforward, even prosaic, as elsewhere in Four Quartets: there is attachment, there is detachment, and there is indiff erence. And, writes Eliot, “Th is is the use



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of memory: / For liberation—not less of love but expanding / Of love beyond desire, and so liberation / From the future as well as the past.” Th e “way” you proceed could not be clearer: from lesser to greater, near to far, time to timelessness. And not the purgation or transcendence of love, in ascetic fashion eliminating it, but, rather, purifying and (thus) expanding the desire with which you begin (and which you never leave or forget): “love of a country / Begins as attachment to our own fi eld of action / And comes to fi nd that action of little importance / Th ough never indiff erent.”

And words? Eliot never leaves them behind, or transcends them, in favor of ideas. Rightness, he writes at the end of “Little Gidding,” consists in every phrase and sentence being “right,” and that means, he says, in words that rhyme with so much else he has written, notably including the scene in “East Coker” of Elizabethan rustics dancing around a bonfi re, in “concorde,” an “impossible union”: “necessarye coniunction”—where every, phrase, and sentence supports another. In other words: “Th e com-plete consort dancing together.”

Notes

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943).Barry Spurr, “Anglo-Catholic in Religion”: T.S. Eliot and Christianity (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2010), 32.Nicholas Lossky, Lancelot Andrewes the Preacher (1555–1626): Th e Origins of the Mystical Th eology of the Church of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 47.Ibid., 39. Ibid., 40. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 61. Ibid., 62. Ibid., 62–63. Ibid., 63. Spurr, “Anglo-Catholic in Religion,” 24, 28.Ibid., 21. See my Reading T.S. Eliot: “Four Quartets” and the Journey toward Understanding (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).Spurr, “Anglo-Catholic in Religion,” 229; quoted from T.S. Eliot, Th e Rock (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), 52.T.S. Eliot, “Th e ‘Pensées’ of Pascal,” Selected Essays, 3rd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 408.See T.S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” Th e Dial 75.5 (Nov. 1923): 480–83.



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5Th e Word, Words, and the World: Redeeming the Word, or Some Implications of Incarnation for Reading and Writing about Literature

Abstract: Rather diff erent from the other three poems in Four Quartets, “Little Gidding” focuses on “practice”: in writing as well as in living, culminating in statements concerning the proper relation of part to whole and about the need for every word to “Tak[e] its place to support the others.” Attention especially to the relation “the Word, words, the world” reveals an Incarnational and Trinitarian pattern with implications for reading and for criticism.




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The word within a word, unable to speak a word,Swaddled with darkness.

—T.S. Eliot, “Gerontion”

Despite the sameness of concerns, with the reiteration of familiar topics, ideas, and words, “Little Gidding” feels diff erent from “Burnt Norton,” “East Coker,” and “Th e Dry Salvages.” Most readers apparently prefer it, considering it the best of the poems making up Four Quartets. Th e popu-lar and infl uential Norton Anthology of English Literature is a case in point; the editors chose, unwisely in my view, to print only “Little Gidding.”

As we had ample occasion to observe in the previous chapter here, “Little Gidding” ends with treatment of the practice of writing. All four poems treat writing, of course, but “Little Gidding” off ers the most con-crete and particular representation of writing (which feels all the more distinctive, given that “Th e Dry Salvages,” just before it, treats writing only obliquely, in relation to “false” forms of communication). But “practice” is precisely Eliot’s focus in “Little Gidding,” and the essential diff erence from the other poems. Th is all feels right, appropriate, for he has ended “Th e Dry Salvages” with a clear, straightforward statement of the thematic and rhetorical center of Four Quartets; to turn, then, from theory to practice strikes the right, indeed the necessary, note.

“Little Gidding” also feels the most literary of the four poems, despite poetic achievements everywhere else. Th e opening is a brilliant descrip-tion of “Midwinter spring,” itself an instance of the “impossible union” that is manifestly the chief concern of Four Quartets.1 Th e fi rst verse paragraph, strikingly fi gurative, leads immediately to a representation in “may time,” which Eliot proceeds to contrast with “May,” evincing his concern with clarity as he establishes what he is discussing in the preced-ing paragraph: “spring time / But not in time’s covenant.” Th e second paragraph then features a scene at the specifi c setting of “Little Gidding” that is intersected with both King Charles’s visit there in 1642 and the birth of Jesus in a lowly stable, the unexpected Incarnation. “Little Gidding” proceeds to the fi rst developed scene in Four Quartets with the poem’s speaker encountering another “personage,” that of the “familiar compound ghost,” met with in the early dawn on the bombed-out streets of London during World War II.

Among other striking achievements of this last poem is the (character-istically) lyrical fourth section, with its totally surprising union of Love



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and the dark “dove descending” that is the Luft waff e delivering its devas-tating, relentless bombs. Th ere is nothing else close to all this in the Four Quartets. Th us, we may conclude, “Little Gidding” brings to the reader’s awareness and understanding the relation of the literary and practice.

At least by the time of the enigmatic appearance of the “familiar com-pound ghost,” in the second section of “Little Gidding,” personal conduct has emerged as matter. Ethics now replaces epistemology and ontology as the focus: the practice of living in the world, among and with other persons. Th us the “ghost” urges the speaker to let bygones be bygones: “let them be,” adding, “So with your own [mistakes, injustices], and pray they be forgiven / By others, as I pray you to forgive / Both bad and good.” Forgiveness becomes a central theme as the “ghost” proceeds to “disclose the gift s reserved for age / To set a crown upon your lifetime’s eff ort.” Th e entire eff ort of the “ghost” seems directed, in fact, toward urging the poet to forgiveness, but also to self-recognition, notably of his own weakness and failures, including “the shame / Of motives” recently revealed and “awareness / Of things ill done and done to others’ harm,” a stinging (if understated) indictment. Th e lesson appears to “take,” for the speaker almost immediately becomes more understanding and sympathetic: “Sin is Behovely,” he begins, quoting Dame Julian of Norwich, and he goes on to echo the “ghost,” affi rming that “We cannot revive old factions / We cannot restore old policies / Or follow an antique drum,” temptations that earlier in his career sometimes had their way with Eliot.

What can we learn from Four Quartets that applies to, and helps enrich, our ability to enjoy, appreciate, and understand, and thus benefi t from, the reading of literature and the writing of commentary about it? Th at is the large question I pose in this chapter and end this short book with.

I start with this reminder from Barry Spurr, in his recent book “Anglo-Catholic in Religion”: T.S. Eliot and Christianity: “practice [is] the incarna-tion of belief.”2 Incarnation thus reminds—or teaches—us, as we have just seen “Little Gidding” do, that understanding counts for little, may ultimately be selfi sh, in fact, if it does not lead directly to action worthy of its insights, in keeping with and analogous to them. In the words of the old saying, you should practice what you preach. Failure to do so probably accounts for a great deal of the current and perennial disen-chantment with organized religions. Th ere is little more off -putting, and discouraging, than hypocrisy.



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In the well-known, posthumous collection of “occasional prose” Mystery and Manners, novelist and short-story writer—and Catholic—Flannery O’Connor posits and defi nes “incarnational art.” She sounds very much like Eliot: “Th e Manicheans separated spirit and matter”—whereas she unites “manners” and “mystery.” To the Manicheans, “all material things were evil. Th ey sought pure spirit and tried to approach the infi nite directly without any mediation of matter.”3 Th e novelist, she says, perhaps in extreme fashion, working with the humblest materials of human life, writes stories, which are “concrete”—you have to be reminded of Eliot’s “objective correlative” and of his emphasis throughout his criticism on the primacy of feelings:

The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal to the senses with abstractions. It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object that they actually see.4

In “Little Gidding,” Eliot does the latter, much more so than in the other Quartets. Facing such art, commentary such as I am writing here turns represented sensory experience into abstract ideas.

But the world of the fiction writer is full of matter, and this is what the begin-ning fiction writers are very loath to create. They are concerned primarily with unfleshed ideas and emotions. They are apt to be reformers and to want to write because they are possessed not by a story but by the bare bones of some abstract notion. They are conscious of problems, not of people, of questions and issues, not of the texture of existence, of case histories and of everything that has a sociological smack, instead of with all those concrete details of life that make actual the mystery of our position on earth.5

I want, now, to consider, however briefl y and tentatively, some of the relations keyed by Flannery O’Connor and, before her and more elaborately, by T.S. Eliot. Let us begin, therefore, with the Incarnational pattern discernible in such a statement as “practice [is] the incarnation of belief.” Pattern is key, as we have seen throughout this book. With especially Ash-Wednesday and Four Quartets in mind, I propose, with all due temerity, that as Jesus is God incarnate, letter is spirit embodied, word (lowercase) is the Word embodied, and, accordingly, literature is word embodied. Is criticism, then, literature embodied? I want to ask.

Th e question is hardly new, but rarely asked. (A recent instance of essaying to do so, from a phenomenological perspective, is Alla Bozarth-



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Campbell’s Th e Word’s Body: An Incarnational Aesthetic of Interpretation,6 the last word here referring to oral performance rather than commentary on literary meaning and signifi cance.) Th e late British writer C.H. Sisson has approached the questions that drive me in his Sevenoaks Essays and his poem Th e Discarnation.7

Literature, representing matters concrete and featuring human rela-tions and feelings, is word embodied, willy-nilly. It has truck with ideas only as they fi gure in, through, and by means of actions and events, incarnate in persons, that is—and even then, persons come fi rst, not abstractions. (Such a struggle to pinpoint the place and treatment of ideas in poetry is Eliot’s concern in Th e Sacred Wood.) In similar fashion, letter embodies spirit.

And literature and criticism? Can we be sure that the latter embodies the former, rather than the former embodying the latter? As my writing here and now, at this moment, should make abundantly clear, commentary—at least as I am able to practice it—is ideational and abstract, a derivative from and of the prior (literary) text in all its concreteness and richness of texture. And yet, given the Incarnational pattern, should not we be about the task of making criticism in the image of literature, embodying what Pope calls “the spirit” of that work on which we are commenting?8

In the few pages I have remaining, I follow some hints and off er some guesses. At best, my words constitute a prolegomenon to a theory of Incarnational reading and should be taken as no more than an essai. Reading has always lain at the heart of my professional concerns—perhaps for reasons that include the fact that I have gained so much from and by it and that my father could neither read nor write. Whatever the case may be, I have been writing about little other than reading—unless it be writing itself and teaching—for nearly fi ft y years, under vastly diff er-ent auspices and dispensations. Whether from a New Critical or a decon-structionist perspective, I have practiced close reading: tweaking inherited theories and procedures here, attempting to forge some new ones there, all the while centrally concerned with practice. I have, I think it fair to say, reported my adventures around texts, trying always to be sympathetic to “my” author but always aware of my own point of view (even if it seemed sometimes that I was engaged in something akin to hagiography). Th ere is, I have come to see, a mystery involved in good, responsive, responsible reading: text intersects with reader. Or is it that reader intersects with texts? Perhaps an “impossible union,” “necessarye coniunction.”



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Th e relationship between literature and criticism—the inexact term by which commentary on literature is familiarly known—has always been complicated, and poorly understood. I have long taken the position that a reader, any reader, must be at the very least sympathetic toward the work or works he or she is discussing: neither identical with nor opposed to and antagonistic toward. In this, I join with such illustrious fi gures as Virginia Woolf and C.S. Lewis. In “How Should One Read a Book?” Woolf goes so far as to instruct her reader: “Do not dictate to your author; try to become him,” and Lewis, similarly, writes, “Th e fi rst demand a work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (Th ere is no use asking fi rst if the work before you deserves such surrender, because until you have surrendered you cannot possibly fi nd out.)”9

None of us means that a reader must always agree with his or her author, for judgment and evaluation follow, but sympathetic engagement comes fi rst, enabling—despite the recent claims being made for oppo-sitional and even antagonistic readings that go “against the grain.” Th e reader occupies a position akin to that which Yeats describes in “Leda and the Swan”: the word, or text, comes and gives, and the reader receives, which act of receiving the critic repeats in responding in writing.10

I cannot, of course, speak for Lewis or Woolf, but I for one believe that the critic, who is, aft er all, diff erent from the reader, being a reader and more, must in his or her writing, which is what turns a reader into a critic and is the diff erence that reading makes—must in that writing engage in what Pope fi nely calls “Gen’rous Converse.”11 Th e critic need not work in a particularly imaginative mode, or indulge in what is oft en called “creative criticism” (which Eliot reprobated as early as Th e Sacred Wood). But he or she owes it to the primary—imaginative, creative—work to be responsible toward it and respectful of both it and his or her own reader alike. And just here the critic’s imagination is fully engaged; it functions, not so much in the writing that follows, but in the discovery and understanding of pattern in the literary work, determining how that work works.

Th e best mode for criticism, it seems to me, is that which it has historically adopted, content until the arrival of the “defi nite article” and all its incivilities and pretense to objectivity (which William H. Gass has brilliantly chronicled).12 So not the “ludicrous” distance of the professional, academic misnamed essay. Th e best mode of criticism is the essay, pacé Geoff rey Hartman:13 familiar, personal, inviting, and well



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written, and practiced by the greatest critics in the language, including Dryden, Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold, Woolf, and Eliot. Such an essay, despite the writer’s scrupulous attention to expression, is rarely a work of literature, for as a form, the essay “hangs between,” between literature and philosophy, between fact and fancy, almost one thing and almost another: the essay instances, in fact, “impossible union” and “necessarye coniunction.” In many ways, all too rarely recognized, the essay thus appears perfectly equipped to handle commentary on literature, which is, itself, an Incarnational art.

What commentary practiced in essay-form is, is, then, a mirror, a refl ection—even a rhyme—of the work that calls it into being and without which it would not be. It must not be detached, and it should not be grace-less in expression, although at the same time it should not whore aft er the creative, even if, on occasion, it makes use of some literary devices and techniques. As a mirror of the primary work, criticism ought, indeed, to embody the point of view, values, and texture—I almost said “spirit”—of that calling poem, novel, or play. Such embodiment would return to criti-cism what it so obviously lacks and so badly needs (now, perhaps more so than ever before), and that is a refreshing breath of the concrete and the sensible (in more than one sense) alongside a forgotten humility and a respectful aura of responsibility toward text, world, and reader.

Literature, I have maintained, is (already) an incarnation, a matter of belief put into practice: spirit embodied in the letter. Criticism carries (that) incarnation a (necessary) step further, giving fl esh and body, as it were, to response, thus extending while elucidating.

Notes

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943).Barry Spurr, “Anglo-Catholic in Religion”: T.S. Eliot and Christianity (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2010), 126.Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 68.Ibid., 67. Ibid., 67–68. Alla Bozarth-Campbell, Th e Word’s Body: An Incarnational Aesthetic of Interpretation (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1979).C.H. Sisson, Sevenoaks Essays, in Th e Avoidance of Literature: Collected Essays, ed. Michael Schmidt (Manchester: Carcanet, 1978), and Th e Discarnation, or,



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How the Flesh Became Word and Dwelt among Us (Sevenoaks, Kent: author, 1967).Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, in Poetry and Prose, ed. Aubrey Williams (Boston: Riverside-Houghton Miffl in, 1969), line 234.Virginia Woolf, “How Should One Read a Book?” Th e Common Reader, Second Series (London: Hogarth, 1932); C.S. Lewis qtd. in Clara Claiborne Park, Rejoining the Common Reader: Essays 1962–1990 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1991), 138–39.See Geoff rey H. Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness: Th e Study of Literature Today (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1980), esp. 21–24.Pope, An Essay on Criticism, line 641.William H. Gass, “Emerson and the Essay,” Habitations of the Word (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 9–49.See, for example, Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness, passim.



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of the Mystical Th eology of the Church of England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.

Menand, Louis. Discovering Modernism: T.S. Eliot and His Context. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

Miller, Vincent E. “Eliot’s Submission to Time.” Rpt. in A Packet for Vincent Miller. Ed. Donald J. Greiner and John Lane. Spartanburg, SC: Holocene, 2002.

Montgomery, Marion. T.S. Eliot: An Essay on the American Magus. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1970.

Moody, A. David. Th omas Stearns Eliot: Poet. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979.

O’Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969.

Park, Clara Claiborne. Rejoining the Common Reader: Essays 1962–1990. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1991.

Pope, Alexander. Poetry and Prose. Ed. Aubrey Williams. Boston: Riverside-Houghton Miffl in, 1969.

——. Th e Poems of Alexander Pope: A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text with Selected Annotations. Ed. John Butt. London: Methuen, 1963.

Pound, Ezra. Th e Cantos. New York: New Directions, 1970.——. Polite Essays. Norfolk, CT: New Directions, n.d.



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Prose, Francine. Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Th ose Who Want to Write Th em. New York: Harper Collins, 2007.

Schneidau, Herbert N. Sacred Discontent: Th e Bible and Western Tradition. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1976.

——. Waking Giants: Th e Presence of the Past in Modernism. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.

Schuchard, Ronald. T.S. Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.

Sigg, Eric Whitman. Th e American T.S. Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.

Sisson, C.H. Th e Avoidance of Literature: Collected Essays. Ed. Michael Schmidt. Manchester: Carcanet, 1978.

——. Th e Discarnation, or, How the Flesh Became Word and Dwelt among Us. Sevenoaks, Kent: author, 1967.

Southam, B.C. A Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot. 1968. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1994.

Spencer, Michael D.G. Understanding “Four Quartets” as a Religious Poem: How T.S. Eliot Uses Symbol and Rhythms to Plumb Mystical Meaning. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2008.

Spurr, Barry. “Anglo-Catholic in Religion”: T.S. Eliot and Christianity. Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2010.

Tate, Allen, ed. T.S. Eliot: Th e Man and His Work. London: Chatto and Windus, 1967.

Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism. New York: Dutton, 1911.Unger, Leonard. T.S. Eliot: Moments and Patterns. Minneapolis: U of

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abortion, abortive, 35, 40Advent, 10amalgamation, 21, 34, 37, 38Andrewes, Lancelot, 6, 19, 20,

24, 28, 48–50Anglo-Catholicism, 8, 20, 22,

34, 51Arnold, Matthew, 61asceticism, 22, 38, 54Atkins, G.D., Reading Eliot:

“Four Quartets” and the Journey toward Understanding, 35

attachment, 53

Baldwin, James, 33, 36, 44Notes of a Native Son, 33

belief, 57, 58, 61between, betweenness,

in-between, 27–29, 35, 53

Blok, Aleksandr, 49Bozarth-Campbell, Alla,

The Word’s Body: An Incarnational Aesthetic of Interpretation, 58–59

Browning, Robert, 37, 38

Carne-Ross, D.S., 7, 8Instaurations, 7“The Music of a Lost

Dynasty,” 7charge, charged, 11, 28, 47, 52Chaucer, Geoffrey, 5, 34, 52

Christianity, institutional, 50Church of England, 20, 34cleansing, 53Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 61common reader, 11, 15communication, false forms

of, 56comparison, 2, 3, 5, 14, 15, 20,

21, 24, 28, 29, 33, 37, 39, 47

concorde, 51, 54conversion, 8, 19, 22conversion poem, 22, 34criticism, 55, 59, 61

creative, 60as literature embodied, 58relationship to literature, 60

dance, dancing, 39, 40, 43, 48, 54

Daniel, Arnaut, 27Dante, 7

The Divine Comedy, 15Vita Nuova, 26

Davis, Walter A., 13definite article, 60depth, in-depth, 2, 3, 6, 10, 23,

39, 47Derrida, Jacques, 10, 43detachment, 53difficult, difficulty, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8,

30, 37, 38, 47directness, 50disembodiment, 23

Index

Atkins_Index.indd 68Atkins_Index.indd 68 10/13/2012 9:26:44 PM10/13/2012 9:26:44 PM


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Index

DOI: 10.1057/9781137301321

dissociation of sensibility, 37Donne, John, 3, 38doubt, 26Dryden, John, 13, 14, 37, 61

Religio Laici, 13, 15

Eliot, T.S. (works):After Strange Gods: A Primer of

Modern Heresy, 42Ash-Wednesday, 7, 9, 13, 18–31, 34, 35,

38, 39, 47, 48, 53, 58“Perch’io Non Spero,” 21“Salutation,” 21“Som de L’Escalina,” 21

Dante, 25Essays Ancient and Modern, 7For Lancelot Andrewes, 20Four Quartets, 9, 13, 15, 21, 22, 25–27,

34, 37–39, 47, 48, 52, 53, 56–58“Burnt Norton,” 48, 52, 53, 56“Th e Dry Salvages,” 9, 50, 52, 56“East Coker,” 39–41, 43, 52–54, 56“Little Gidding,” 34, 39, 48, 52–58

“Gerontion,” 35, 53“The Hollow Men,” 21, 29, 35, 40, 47The Idea of a Christian Society, 29, 42“Imperfect Critics,” 8“The Love Song of J. Alfred

Prufrock,” 2, 27, 34, 37“The Metaphysical Poets,” 3, 33, 37Murder in the Cathedral, 40–41Notes towards the Definition of

Culture, 43“The ‘Pensées’ of Pascal,” 51Points of View, 5The Rock, 51The Sacred Wood, 2, 3, 8, 21, 51,

59, 60Selected Essays, 26“Tradition and the Individual

Talent,” 3, 21The Use of Poetry and the Use of

Criticism, 5The Waste Land, 2, 5, 9, 10, 25, 30,

34–40, 47, 48, 52“Th e Fire Sermon,” 34

“A Game of Chess,” 35“What the Th under Said,” 34

embodiment, 14, 36, 38, 48, 52, 53, 58, 59, 61

epiphantic moment, 25, 52essay, 47, 60, 61essay-poem, 13, 14, 15, 47Established Church, 14

Fabre, Lucien, 4Fall, the, 36falsehood, 22, 27, 30, 38, 48familiar compound ghost, 34, 48,

56, 57Fawkes, Guy, 35figurative, 3, 9, 10, 47, 56Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 33, 36, 44

“The Crack-Up,” 33forgiveness, 57fragments, 35, 37, 47friction, 43, 51

Gass, William H., 60“Gen’rous Converse,” 4, 60Gordon, Lyndall, 22

harmony, harmonizing, 24, 27, 29, 42

Hartman, Geoffrey, 60Heraclitus, 52

“the way up is the way down,” 52Herbert of Cherbury, Lord, 37Homer, 13

The Odyssey, 5, 25

immanence, 10, 20, 47, 52immanent purposiveness, 13impossible union, 10, 38, 48, 51, 53, 54,

56, 59, 61hypostatic Divine union of God

and man, 51in, through, and by means of, 8–11, 20,

30, 39, 48, 52, 53incarnation, 24, 27, 38, 43, 48,

57–59, 61incarnational art, 58, 61



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Incarnation, 8, 9, 15, 22, 23, 26, 30, 39, 43, 47–53, 56, 57

Incarnational basis of Christianity, 8Incarnational pattern, 9, 51, 53,

58, 59Incarnational theology, 44Incarnational turn, 20Incarnational union, 39

Incarnation, the, 10, 26, 31, 47–52indifference, 53Inner Light, 42Inquisition, 35intersection, 9, 10, 23, 30, 51, 52, 56, 59intra-textuality, 11

Jesus Christ, 9, 39, 49, 51, 56, 58Johnson, Samuel, 61journey toward understanding, 25, 47Joyce, James, 51

Anna Livia Plurabelle, 5Finnegans Wake, 5Ulysses, 5, 9, 51

Julian of Norwich, 57

Krishna, 52

lateral, 2, 10, 13letter, 14, 30, 40, 49, 58, 59, 61

“The spirit killeth, but the letter giveth life,” 7, 18

Lewis, C.S., 60liberation, 54literal, 3, 7–10, 12–14, 23, 25, 31, 35,

47, 52literature, as word embodied, 58logic:

of concepts, 4, 36of the imagination, 4, 5, 36

Lossky, Nicholas, 48–50

Manicheans, 58mediation, 20, 21, 23, 24, 30, 31, 50, 58mediator, 21, 29, 35

Mediator as Deity, 27metaphorical, 14, 52Metaphysical poets, 33, 39

Metaxy, 29middle way, 14Milton, John, 7, 37, 48mindfulness, 25, 27, 28, 38

“Sovegna vos,” 27, 30, 38modern, Modernism, 1–3, 25, 32, 37, 48Montaigne, Michel de, 22mysticism, Christian, 50mythical method, 5, 9, 51

“necessarye coniunction,” 10, 23, 27, 31, 39, 48, 54, 59, 61

Newman, John Henry, 26Norton Anthology of English

Literature, 56

objective correlative, 58O’Connor, Flannery, Mystery and

Manners, 58Original Sin, 36

paganism, 25paradigmatic instance, 9, 46, 47, 51paradox, 21, 23, 24, 27, 36, 38, 52parallelism, 49parthenogenesis, human, 26, 51Pascal, Blaise, Pensées, 26pattern, 9, 26, 39, 40, 43, 44, 47, 48, 51,

53, 58, 60Perse, St.-J., 3, 4, 36

Anabasis, 3, 5, 21, 36personal conduct, 14, 57personality, 2Plato, 29Pope, Alexander, 13, 59, 60Pound, Ezra, 7–11, 13, 27, 28

The Cantos, 8Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, 13literalism, 8, 10

practice, 57, 58, 61purgation, 52–54purification, 53, 54

readingclosely, 59comparatively, 2, 3, 7, 47



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Index

DOI: 10.1057/9781137301321

deeply, 2, 5, 11, 12, 14, 15difficulty in, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 30, 37, 38, 47Incarnational, 59laterally, 2, 11–15, 47like a writer, 11literally, 2, 9, 11–16, 20work of, 12

reflection, 3, 37–39, 47Reformation, 35reincarnation, 50restoring (with a new verse), 27, 28, 37rhyme, rhyming, 13, 25–29, 33, 34, 39,

40, 48, 52–54, 61Romantics, Romanticism, 2, 3, 8, 9,

25, 50short cut to the strangeness without

the reality, 9, 50rustics, Elizabethan, 39–41, 43, 48, 54

scepticism, 22Schneidau, Herbert N., 8senses, 35, 58separation, 23, 24, 27, 30, 31, 34, 35, 40,

41, 43, 58seriality without paradigm, 10sermon, 22, 30silence, 28Sisson, C.H., 59

The Discarnation, 59Sevenoaks Essays, 59

speaker, 48, 53in Ash-Wednesday, 21–24, 27, 29, 30,

34, 38, 48in The Waste Land, 22

spirit, 2, 11, 40, 48, 52, 58, 59, 61“The spirit killeth, but the letter

giveth life,” 7, 18spiritual autobiography, 26spirit-ualism, 10, 50

spiritualist interpreters, 20spiritual life, 42

Spurr, Barry, 51, 57“Anglo-Catholic in Religion”: T.S. Eliot

and Christianity, 57symbolist method, 49sympathetic engagement, 60synthesis, 38

Hegelian, 31, 38

Tennyson, Alfred, 37, 38tension, 24, 29, 42–44, 51Tiresias, 36, 48totalitarianism, 44, 51trace (Derrida), 43transcendence, 10, 20, 25, 26, 30, 38,

44, 47, 49, 52–54transcendentalism, 22Transcendental Signifier, 10Trinity, 38turn, turning, 3, 19–24, 27, 28, 48, 56

Virgin, the, 9, 20, 23, 27, 30, 38Voegelin, Eric, 29

way, 51–54middle way, 14

will-fulness, 11Williams, William Carlos, 11Woolf, Virginia, 60, 61

“How Should One Read a Book?,” 60

word, 21, 24, 28, 35, 39, 54, 58–60

Word, 21, 24, 28, 39, 51, 58Wyndham, George, 8

Yeats, W.B., 48, 60“Leda and the Swan,” 60



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