LIDIA VIANU

T.S. Eliot - An Author for All Seasons

 T.S.  ELIOT  AND  THE  DIGNITY  OF  CULTURE

A long line of innovating poets, playwrights and literary critics seem to have followed in T.S. Eliot's footsteps. Had he thought of his posterity, he may have shrunk away from it as he did in the end with himself, his own statements and earlier moods. Eliot undoubtedly did innovate some things in poetry and literary criticism. Yet, essentially, his way of thinking was not exactly of the innovating type. It bore the deep imprint of Eliot's early partly German rigid philosophical training. It also bore the imprint of the sceptical mobility of Bradley, on whose philosophical work Eliot wrote his never defended dissertation. In Notes towards a Definition of Culture (1948), for instance, Eliot's ideas proceed tamely and cautiously. Even the aggressivity of his earlier volumes of literary criticism hides a stern wish to preserve, to conform, to worship the existing culture. His cultured poetry, his poetic Esperanto of echoes coming from all ages did no less, as a matter of fact. He had a life-long obsession with the unity of European culture. He admitted that his work, in its ‘sources’ and ‘emotional springs’ came ‘from America’ (Paris Review, 1959). But he also wrote the following: 

‘Younger generations can hardly realise the intellectual desert of England and America during the first decade and more of this century. In the English desert, to be sure, flourished a few tall and handsome cactuses, as well as James and Conrad (for whom the climate, in contrast to their own, was relatively favourable); in America the desert extended à perte de vue, without the least prospect of even desert vegetables. The predominance of Paris was incontestable’.

He mentioned the names of Anatole France, Rémy de Gourmont, Lévy-Bruhl, Bergson. He concluded by saying:

‘... an atmosphere of diverse opinions seems to me on the whole favourable to the maturing of the individual’.

(A Commentary, ‘Criterion’, 1934)

In the light of the previous statement it is easy to understand Eliot's veneration for European culture. In 1918 (Henry James: The Hawthorne Aspect) he plainly wrote:

‘It is the final perfection, the perfection, the consummation of the American to become, not an Englishman, but a European – something which no born European, no person of any European nationality can become’.

Eliot touched upon this topic time and again. The Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to him in 1948 confirmed him as a citizen of world literature.

Authors like George Steiner have accused Eliot of not taking direct and active part in contemporary history. While the horrors of the second World War were taking place, Eliot was investigating the meanings of the word culture, or at least so his essay began:

‘I have observed with great anxiety the career of this word culture during the past six or seven years ...’ (1948)

From the despair of the war to the despair of words. From the face of a broken Europe to the dispersing meanings of its once common culture, now forcibly smashed to pieces. Eliot's political unrest wears the robe of language. The verbal insecurity he so often complains of is an indirect expression of his sadness at seeing the culture of Europe deteriorating. The literary review Eliot edited between the two world wars (The Criterion) made his concern with European cultural solidarity and dignity very obvious.

‘The Criterion aims at the examination of first principles in criticism, at the valuation of new, and the re-valuation of old works of literature according to principles, and the illustration of these principles in creative writing. It aims at the affirmation and development of tradition. It aims at the determination of the value of literature to other humane pursuits. It aims at the assertion of order and discipline in literary taste’.

(Quoted by H. Howarth, Figures behind T.S. Eliot)

Eliot was adept at a free circulation of ideas inside a common European culture. His poems tried to illustrate the need for a free exchange of ideas, of images. Much of world literature survives in Eliot's innovation: cultured poetry. He loved to quote from all possible authors and various languages. He actually managed to melt them together. He was by no means insensible to the disasters of the war. The literary review he himself edited had to disappear when World War II broke out because, Eliot said, in Europe intellectual frontiers had begun to appear. He was dreaming of an international intellectual brotherhood. He hated exacerbated nationalistic opinions and provincialism in literature. He did not ignore the fact that any work of art must by all means be particular and national first of all. But it must also have an eye wide open to the horizon of the whole of world literature. In his poetry and essays, Eliot constantly fought narrow-mindedness and provincial aggressivity. He worshipped spiritual peace among countries. He hated intellectual wars, barriers set for the imagination. His veneration for the freedom and dignity of culture, his firm belief in the power of the mind to bring together the beings on this earth make him our very close contemporary. The dignity of culture, Eliot felt, must be preserved at all costs, at all times, for all seasons.