T.S. Eliot Materialized

When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly 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, “The 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 “The Metaphysical Poets,” quoted just above, I place, first, Fitzgerald’s observation, offered near the beginning of his essay “The Crack-Up” and deriving from his own experience: “the test of a first-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 The first sentence rhymes with Eliot’s understanding of the sort of “wit” that he locates in the Metaphysical poets and that he defines as a comparison entailing a “rapid association of thought which requires considerable agility on the part of the reader.”² The second sentence, meanwhile, rhymes with James Baldwin’s hard-earned and moving conclusion 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. The first 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.” The 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 fight them with all one’s strength.”³

Differences certainly exist among the three perspectives on difference 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 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.” The question occurs with particular relevance, or so it certainly seems, to The Waste Land, which is all about the differences between Chaucerian and post–World War I England, fire and water, life and death. In “The Fire Sermon,” the third and central section, we hear, “ ‘I can connect / Nothing with nothing,’ ” despair that rhymes with the speaker’s own declaration at poem’s end that “These 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, “Suffer me not to be separated.”⁵ As we saw in the previous chapter, the poem represents the heinous effects 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 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in 1915, twelve years before his embrace of Christianity, the Church of England, and Anglo-Catholicism. That revolutionary poem opens with the now-famous line “Let us go then, you and I.”⁶ Probably most often, “you” is thought to be a part of that “I,” Prufrock the speaker thus implicitly acknowledging an internal division elsewhere in the poem figured as intense self-consciousness and debilitating self-doubt; in this regard, Prufrock anticipates both that enigmatic figure—called “the third”—encountered “Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded” in “What the Thunder Said” in The 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 significance, of the issue in Eliot’s thinking and writing.

Separation permeates “Prufrock” as it does The Waste Land (1922). Prufrock is not only conflicted and self-divided; he is also distinct and separate from both that world of “one-night cheap hotels” and “lonely men in shirt sleeves, leaning out of windows” that he knows about and that very different 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: “ ‘That is not it at all, / That is not what I meant, at all,’ ” which, though imagined as coming from the woman, could just as easily 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.” These last verses dramatize Prufrock’s separation from reality, for there is precious little likelihood that he ever experienced anything so romantic or thrilling—except in his imagination.

The 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 find themselves, without knowing it, separated from life-sustaining forces, physical, cultural, literary: lust abounds equally with indifference, and abortion is both a literal thing in “A Game of Chess” and a figure for potential nipped even before the bud bursts forth. Thus the unfortunates here crave the rain that only distances them even further from needed refining or purgatorial fires. The 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 five 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 after the Reformation and Inquisition.⁹ Decline is figured in such separation as Gerontion represents. He also makes abundantly clear the power and primacy of the senses.

“The Hollow Men” has to do with the same period, specifically the abortive efforts of Guy Fawkes to blow up Parliament in 1605. Arguably, the most striking word here is “between”: it literally separates and prevents completion or fruition (in Ash-Wednesday, where it is also prominent, it serves, differently, as a sort of mediator); in other words, here it 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 alluding to the Fall)—between them “Falls the Shadow” (possibly Original Sin).10 Certainly embodiment is lacking, these men—us—“hollow” and “stuffed,” 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 figure Tiresias in The Waste Land. Having spent part of his life as woman and part as man, the blind Theban seer—a walking paradox—“perceive[s] the scene” taking place at the flat of “the typist home at teatime” and “foret[ells] the rest”: the sexual encounter with “the young man carbuncular,” which features female indifference and male lust. Tiresias is also gifted with the power of unique sympathy, mirroring Odysseus’s education in the Kingdom of the Dead: “And I Tiresias have foresuffered all / Enacted on this same divan or bed; I who have sat by Thebes 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 [The 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. That “considerable agility,” the ability 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, briefly, to Eliot’s critical introduction 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 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.11

The “logic of the imagination,” operating in Modernist works, would thus appear to call out for more and more on the part of the reader, perhaps 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.”) The work consists, in any case, of putting together: fragments, elements of disparate experience. That work is more difficult, Eliot makes clear, because of what he (also) exposes in “The Metaphysical Poets,” especially the regnant “dissociation of sensibility.” In fact, Eliot expresses, by what he calls “the following theory,” “the difference” 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 influence, “the language became more refined,” but “the feeling became more crude.” Then 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 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

In “The Metaphysical Poets,” Eliot has already ascribed the difference between Tennyson and, say, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, whom he has quoted for comparative purposes, to that cultural change in sensibility, specifically 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 of Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of Tennyson and Browning; it is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective 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 differences, 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.” The 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 first poem. Eliot urges us in the poem to “Be mindful” (“Sovegna vos”), emphasizing how easily and often 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 first poem does misunderstand, whereas the speaker in VI, whether or not he is the same “person,” understands perfectly, despite the entailed difficulty. My students always respond to the line the way the “first” 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 different, and more difficult to grasp precisely and securely, seems to be in play.

What that is, is indeed difficult 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 different forming of a new whole. The 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 The Waste Land, which smacks of both the Prufrockian and the Tiresian. The speaker identifies an indeterminate figure, 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 / There 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 reflection 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 difficult 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 bonfire in an open field, complete with historical spellings. The scene represents a striking contrast to The 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 meaning lies on the surface and is enhanced by comparison with other scenes. The passage means man and woman dancing together; the meaning lies in the pattern in which they happily participate, re-creating it. The 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.” Thus 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 reflection called for. The passage acquires its meaning, or at least some of it, in comparison with The 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 woman

In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie—

A dignified and commodious sacrament.

Two and two, necessarye coniunction,

Holding eche other by the hand or the arm

Which betokeneth concorde.

The 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 figures are also close to death. Enclosed in their own egos, the wastelanders, on the other hand, know only what “The Hollow Men” refers to as death-in-life. Knowing death as such, the rustics celebrate 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.

The strong affirmations apparent in the Elizabethan rustics are present also in the Chorus’s final pronouncements in Eliot’s drama Murder in the Cathedral (1935). Here, they “acknowledge ourselves as type of the common man” (italics added),15 and utter words that rhyme with the later “East Coker”—as they differ from the sensibility rendered in The 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 it

Though 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 earth

Though it is forever denied.¹⁶

There is, of course, no hint of the blood of martyrs, of saints, around the Elizabethan bonfire in “East Coker.” And yet that land, too, somehow feels almost holy because it supports a “type” of “dignified and commodious sacrament.” The Chorus essentially reiterates this point in continuing, 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 acknowledge

That the sin of the world is upon our heads; that the blood of the martyrs and the agony of the saints

Is upon our heads.17

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

In a (dramatic) poem in which binaries figure 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 land

Which is no land, only emptiness, absence, the Void,

Where those who were men can no longer turn the mind

To 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 soul

From 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

The 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 Thomas à Becket’s confrontation with the King. It is one that Eliot explores in several works, though it has received scant attention in the commentary. The Third 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 After 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 offered itself to wandering humanity.”²⁰ The other two books are written from a similar perspective, but focus on the social and political more than the religious.

In The 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 offers 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 difference, the necessary “tension,” that must prevail. The 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 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 Definition 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 accurately describes the relation represented in the Elizabethan rustics dancing around that bonfire 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 attention, 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 others, 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 difficulty in reconciling” his assertions concerning the inevitability, and productivity, of conflict 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 conflict of identity and difference, 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

The 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 succeed 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 differences.

Notes

1F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up,” The Crack-Up, ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1945), 69. Of course, Eliot’s poems are themselves amalgamations of “disparate experience.”

2T.S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Essays, 3rd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 282.

3James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son,” Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon, 1955), 113–14.

4T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922).

5T.S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930).

6T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Prufrock and Other Observations (London: Egoist, 1917).

7T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943).

8T.S. Eliot, “Gerontion,” Ara Vos Prec (London: Ovid, 1920).

9Reading T.S. Eliot: “Four Quartets” and the Journey toward Understanding (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

10T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men,” Poems 1909–1925 (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1925).

11T.S. Eliot, preface, Anabasis, by St.-J. Perse, trans. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1930), 8.

12T.S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Essays, 287–88.

13Ibid., 288.

14Ibid., 287.

15T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral (London: Faber and Faber, 1935), 71.

16Ibid., 84–85.

17Ibid., 85–86.

18Ibid., 69.

19Ibid., 78–79.

20T.S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934), 64.

21Ibid., 95.

22Ibid., 56.

23T.S. Eliot, Notes towards the Definition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1948), 31–32.

24Ibid., 58–59.

25Ibid., 68.

26Ibid.

27Ibid., 68–69.