Frye’s instructions to himself throughout this paper to “read” passages from Eliot indicate that it was prepared for an oral presentation. It is almost certainly a talk Frye gave to the Bodley Club in 1937 when he was at Oxford. It includes several references to Merton College, suggesting a local audience, but the best evidence for the time and place of the paper is in a letter to Helen Kemp (22 February 1937), where Frye says, “I’d spent most of the week trying to write a paper on T.S. Eliot, and for some reason, although I eventually wrote quite a good paper, I took an enormous time writing it—began to worry about the sentence rhythms and echoing vowels and things to the most morbid extent, so I don’t think I shall try to write a paper for [Edmund] Blunden this week.”1 A bit later in the same letter he says, “I got through the paper and a very good discussion followed, although it was mostly a catechism of me. About six of them knew their Eliot well—one who knew him personally stayed and talked to me till midnight afterwards. Then I drank all the beer that was left—two bottles, apart from four left for the scout—and went to bed, still hungry. The Bodley Club means a lot of extra work for the scout, cleaning up and so on.” The title of the paper mimics that of Eliot’s first book of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations. Frye was working from this volume and from Eliot’s Poems, 1909–1925. The poems Frye refers to will be found in the more accessible edition that includes these two early volumes, The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952). The typescript is in the NFF, 1991, box 37, file 4.
Modern literature seems at times to be animated by a spirit of practical communism: those who cannot write read the works of those who can and write an additional book about them. The twentieth century has been well described as l’âge des petits papiers, and the number of books about books is now of astronomical proportions, bound volumes being, of course, only a small part of the total spate. Possibly one source of the modern obscurity so frequently complained of may be the artist’s feeling that, if his work is to support a swarm of scribbling parasites as well as himself, the latter should not have too easy a time. In any case, highbrow journalism is not quite as painless as it was: the commentator in search of a trend has now to grapple with Auden and MacLeish, where formerly he could have got away with Aldous Huxley or Walter de la Mare, but no slackening of output is yet perceptible. Since the war, Lawrence, Joyce, and T.S. Eliot have been inevitable hosts, but as Lawrence is dead and Joyce no longer has much news value, the novelty of Work in Progress as well as that of Ulysses having worn off, Eliot, in more than one sense, carries at present more weight than either. Two slim volumes published by Faber & Faber, at 7/6 apiece, contain practically the whole of his poetry;2 all his prose of any importance would hardly fill a greater space;3 yet the critical encrustation already on this modest output would take a lifetime to examine completely. A few months ago I set down the names of thirty-five books of the type referred to which contained essays on Eliot, apart from three devoted solely to him;4 and as I made no attempt to draw up an exhaustive list, I have no reason to suppose that I collected more than 10 per cent or 15 per cent of the whole. This is exclusive of magazine articles and book reviews, which would run to several hundred, and of shorter references, of which there are many, many thousands. The serious student of Eliot would have to reckon with specialized treatises also, including such exotic items as “T.S. Eliot et la fin de la poésie bourgeoise,” by Prince Mirsky in Échanges;5 “T.S. Eliot and His Relation to T.E. Hulme,” University of Toronto Quarterly;6 The Critical Ideas of T.S. Eliot, by Ants Oras, Tartu, Esthonia, 1932, and scores of others. There are the sociological critics who assert that Eliot is not a revolutionary and ought to be one, or that he is an Anglo-Catholic and ought not to be one; there are the Zeitgeist critics, who point out that he is a modern poet and that, while he is very difficult and very disillusioned, so are all modern poets; and there are the source and influence critics, who establish his relationship to everybody else from Hawthorne to Picasso. And this is not the worst. Whatever the number of superfluous books on any classical poet, at any rate he is dead: he has said all he is ever going to say, and nothing remains but for critical vultures, scholarly hyenas, and pedantic bacteria to annihilate the corpse. But Eliot is still very far from having written himself out. Every important poem he has published so far has been unexpectedly different from any preceding it, and, though his development has been perfectly logical throughout, it has to be reconsidered afresh in the light of every new production. All the tons of pulpwood which announced that Eliot, in The Waste Land and The Hollow Men, was voicing the disillusioned scepticism of the age, looked very silly after he turned Anglo-Catholic and wrote the fervently devotional Ash-Wednesday; and the hasty disgorging of tons more to show that he was a worn-out, decadent romantic, an ingrown lyricist spinning his cocoon among books, looked even sillier after he turned propagandic dramatist and wrote The Rock and Murder in the Cathedral Fully nine-tenths of the critical writing on Eliot is, therefore, already out of date, as ephemeral as the flowers in May, and far less appropriately coloured. However, to write an essay on him, as I have just done, remains a recognized “blest office of the epicene,”7 and one might as well be shameless about it. He provides an unbreakable anvil to hammer on, like Shakespeare and the Prelude in C# Minor. Besides, he has a special claim on our attention as the first poet of English literature to study at Merton College who ever became more notable for anything else. And he is not, of course, hackneyed without good reason. The small volume of his writing keeps its head well above the flood of contemporary literature like an epigram among platitudes, and he has established himself as almost the only living poet whom it is safe to call permanent, which is as close as one can reasonably get to the word immortal. This is largely because he is so pre-eminently readable: of all poets since Keats, while there have been many bigger and bulkier than Eliot, there are none less likely to be left unread by posterity. That of itself would do nothing to establish his “greatness,” whatever that means, but it does ensure his lasting significance and importance.
Until our own generation most of what can fairly be described as American culture was produced by New England. This culture was, of course, chiefly Puritanic in its inception and had become hardened and academic by the time of the Revolution, not because there was anything inherently sterile in Puritanism, but because America was no longer a small enclosed pale on the coast of a savage unexplored continent, but a growing nation whose energies were absorbed in pioneering. In New England an aristocracy developed from a number of families which accumulated wealth and prestige in the course of centuries, tolerant, respectable, Nonconformist, Anglophile, and healthily interested in education, and this aristocracy was the milieu of most of the established writers of the nineteenth century. The bigoted prudery of New England today has nothing to do with this class nor with Puritanism: that was brought to it by Irish Catholics who flooded the country after the potato famine. These immigrants seized all political power and left the aristocrats socially ineffective, though with their wealth and dignity unimpaired. The famous epigram to the effect that
The Lowells talk only to Cabots
And the Cabots talk only to God8
expresses their general attitude well enough, though it is a slight exaggeration: there were a few other families still capable of discoursing on equal terms with all three, and of these the Eliots were one of the most illustrious.
Thomas Stearns Eliot, though born in St. Louis, was educated as a matter of course at Harvard, and from there went to the Sorbonne. He read philosophy with Santayana and Josiah Royce, but among all contemporary thinkers his greatest admiration was for F.H. Bradley, of whom he has written an appreciation based on the thesis that “Bradley, like Aristotle, is distinguished by a scrupulous respect for words,’9 and ranking him higher than Matthew Arnold as a prose stylist.10 It was no doubt the name of Bradley that attracted him to Merton College, where he came in 1914. He had been writing and occasionally appearing in print since his Harvard days, and in 1917 his first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published, which placed him at once among the leading poets of his time.
About the year 1912 the United States, for no ascertainable reason, had suddenly started to write poetry. Where formerly a genuine American poet was a rare and sporadic phenomenon, in the five years preceding the publication of Eliot’s book E.A. Robinson, Frost, Millay, Sandburg, Lindsay, Masters, Amy Lowell, H.D., Ezra Pound, and a dozen minor writers had appeared and had put America on a level with France and far ahead of England as a home of accomplished poets. The main trouble with this poetry was that there was not enough of a tradition behind it. These writers could look back to no American predecessor except Whitman, who was far too intense an individualist to constitute a tradition, and nineteenth-century English poetry was not much help. As a result much of their work was garrulous and overassertive, and much more failed to escape from a self-conscious complexity and a kind of niggling cleverness. But France, for the past century, had been producing a mature and controlled verse, and in this Eliot had steeped himself, so that his book, not in spite of all its echoes from such French symbolists as Laforgue but because of them, spoke with the authority of technical assurance. It was not on the defensive and was not afraid to be simple.
Prufrock and its companion poems are localized for the most part in New England, but their prevailing mood is the sick melancholic nostalgia evoked by any grimy metropolis. The respectable class, with its effete and bewildered culture, is presented as fighting a losing battle against squalor and vulgarity because it has nothing to fight for but its own decaying interests. This class is symbolized by Prufrock, a middle-aged man of some education and culture, vaguely sensitive to beauty but too self-centred to absorb it, and tormented by a desire to love but paralysed by nervousness and his knowledge of his own mediocrity. Prufrock is now one of the best-known characters of contemporary literature: in his ambiguous auto-erotic monologue the modern world finds one of its most typical moods expressed. The other pieces are less universalized, but the picture they give of dingy poverty side by side with equally dingy affluence is also typical of civilization as we have it everywhere: (Read Morning at the Window and Aunt Helen.)11 The attitude is satiric, of course; but Eliot’s satire is not confined to direct portrayal of degeneration: he sharpens and heightens the latter by contrasting it with beauty. Thus, in Rhapsody on a Windy Night the romantic stirrings awakened by a glimpse of the moon are mingled with the dirty rubbish of the city from which she is seen: (Read.) Again, the exciting mystery of the world outside of Prufrock intensifies the morbid mystery of the world inside him: (Read.)
Three years later came another volume of poems, in which Eliot expanded his outlook.12 His new characters are the dubious cosmopolitan rabble of all the great cities, the most prominent of them being Sweeney, a character whom Eliot presents with the same trick of making personal hygiene a symbol of animal sensuality, which Joyce uses with such powerful effect in Ulysses. The tone of this collection is set by its opening poem, the monologue of Gerontion, an older man than Prufrock and much more sophisticated, who has done all the things Prufrock wanted to do and whose despair and disillusionment are calm rather than irritable. The symbolism of this poem, therefore, cuts much deeper than that of the earlier one. Obviously the main impression one derives from the Prufrock poems is one of ubiquitous sterility; and the central symbol of this is the large city which is its proper environment. Cities are the carcasses of dead civilizations: they cannot grow; they merely swell. In this fetid, decaying atmosphere the poem of Gerontion opens. (Read.) As opposed to this, there is the longing for some principle of fertility, for something to make things grow and develop. This longing is an immemorial one, as it goes back to the dawn of agriculture, and it has created a host of rituals and gods. The religion which held together our civilization before it lost its grip on it and became spiritually rudderless was Christianity, and of all the symbolism which has gathered around the figure of Jesus not the least important is that concerned with him as a fertility god, an Adonis slain at the height of his powers whose body and blood, when eaten by his worshippers, unites them in a common bond. Thus, Gerontion goes on to speak of the decay of religion in the anonymous cosmopolitan society to which he belongs: (Read.) The same contrast is parodied in Mélange Adultère de Tout, the protean speaker of which announces that after being a professor in America, a journalist in England, a philosopher in Germany, and a “jemenfoutiste” in Paris:
Je célébrai mon jour de fête
Dans une oasis d’Afrique
Vêtu d’une peau de girafe, [lines 16–18]
(Read the Sunday Morning Service.) This is a typical example of Eliot’s technique: the fertility Christ baptized with the rain-giving water in the midst of the wilderness is set before us, but the accompanying summons of the Baptist to unconditional repentance has now passed into the collecting of pennies on a plate. The gaze wanders from the ushers extracting coins from children to the bumble-bees outside taking honey from the flowers. But the parallel between bee and usher is not quite perfect, for although the bee is an epicene in relation to the flower as the usher in relation to his god, still the bee does perform a fertilizing function. The thought of fertility leads us back to the image of Jesus standing in the water; but what rises in front of us instead are the buttocks of Sweeney.
The next step for Eliot was obviously to expand his symbolism into one long poem which should record his complete vision of the contemporary world, and this he did in The Waste Land (1922). The symbolism of the modern city has now clarified. A civilization is conceived as an organic growth rooted in a land which matures and finally becomes exhausted, and, in its last stage, separates itself from the land and enters a deracinated metropolitan phase, in which all sense of community has disappeared and an anarchic individualism takes its place. This is the thesis of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, though Eliot, with his contempt for Goethe and by implication for everything “Faustian,”13 would probably be disinclined to admit that some knowledge of this book is necessary to a complete understanding of his poem. In any case, the sterility of the great city is the “waste land,” and the scene is laid in London. We are shown sample attempts of city dwellers to engage in the only forms of communal activity left to them since the collapse of their belief in religion, love, and commerce. For the latter, a glance at the waste products of the Industrial Revolution is enough: for the former, there are the two upper-class lovers, bored nearly to madness, snarling at each other with their nerves jangling, to represent the courteous chivalry of the aristocracy; the account of the woman whose life was wrecked by a bungling attempt at abortion to represent domestic bliss; and the seduction of a typist by a carbuncular clerk to represent the ecstasy of romance. The remedy for this moral chaos and misery is the abandoning of a selfish individualism, the sterility of which produces the “waste land,” for a communal consciousness, symbolized by the resurrection of Christ and by the coming of rain to the parched land. The past glories of our moribund culture, which contrast with the gloom of the present scene and emphasize its deadness, are suggested by interspersed quotations from famous poets, a scheme which, as Eliot handles it, is not at all as crude as it sounds.
There is no space here to make the full analysis of The Waste Land which would be necessary to clear up these sketchy notes on it: that would require a long paper in itself. The point is that here is a survey of society which can only be described as epic, packed into four hundred lines, of which about fifty are quotations, the economy being made possible by the allusiveness of the symbols and epigraphs and the aptness of the selected episodes. The result is no doubt a bookish, strained, and oversubtle poem, but a poet cannot always choose his own conventions: they are conditioned by the society in which he lives and limit his scope by the very fact that they create its form. A work of art is a synthesis; and a chaotic society no longer responsive to religious symbolism supplies the poet with incoherence and disorder as his primary data. Consequently, a successful poetic presentation of modern life not only has to make a synthesis: it has to reflect the difficulty of making one. The internal form, the natural organic growth of a great poem, is conditioned by an organically growing society: when the latter breaks down, the former can be attained directly only by parody, as it is in the jigsaw puzzle of literary echoes in The Waste Land. Other alternatives, such as subjective lyricism, attachment to the doctrines of some political organization, the attempt to find a communal symbolism in the subconscious, or any combination of these, are equally legitimate, but they are not more so, and they do not avoid the same central problem. Ulysses, published in the same year as The Waste Land, also parodies the idea of internal form by its application of the Odyssey pattern to a by no means heroic contemporary scene, but its method is the converse of that of Eliot’s poem, which is a sort of microcosm of it. Eliot’s technique is visionary, grouping episodes around a central symbol; Joyce’s is dramatic, grouping symbols around an episode. Eliot makes his point by contracting to the limit; Joyce his by expanding to the limit: but both ridicule the disintegration of society by setting the perfected formal achievements of the past beside it, just as Pope showed how silly all the fuss made about cutting a lock of hair from a girl’s head was by telling the story in mock-epic form.14
The symbolism employed in The Waste Land, in which an individualized society is associated with sterility and a group consciousness with fertility, points to a definite attitude toward society which Eliot began to develop in a series of critical writings. The point of view of these was declared to be “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, anglo-catholic in religion.”15 In full revolt against the Rousseauist or romantic heresy, the ancestor of modern humanism, which regards man as inherently good but restrained from being so by bad institutions, he regards man as essentially imperfect, depending for everything of education and discipline he has on a consolidated tradition. This attitude he calls classical. But the only way in which a tradition can remain consolidated is for it to be transmitted by a religion with a definite, solid dogma, an organized Church, and a stereotyped ritual, which by its conserving force gives direction to all historical advance. This religion must be Catholic, for the Protestant tendency is towards the discrete, anarchic individualism he is most concerned to attack: we have already seen how Eliot’s poetry moves from the humanistic New England aristocracy which is the heir of Puritanism to the “waste land” of modern society as a whole. And just as a living culture is bound up with a religion, so it is bound up with a nation, and the political form which best expresses a national consciousness is a monarchy, for royalty provides a central catholic symbol as the more anonymous republic does not, and dictatorship, Eliot feels, represents the Napoleonic ideal, whose only criterion is “success” in the most vulgar sense of the word.
The present paper is concerned with Eliot’s dogmas only as they have affected the form of his poetry. His analysis of the contemporary scene in The Waste Land had expanded the negative aspect of them to the limit. He had now to build up the positive side, to present a view of life in which the grounds for his satiric attack would be made explicit. Part of this would necessarily be concerned with portraying the advance of the individual through chaos to reintegration. He had made an impersonal survey of this chaos: his next step was to clear the ground for the individual’s reaction to it by isolating its horror. This he did in The Hollow Men. (Read.) Then came what has frequently been called the purgatorio to this inferno: Ash-Wednesday, a sequence of meditations on the general theme of purification by suffering, which employs a religious symbolism derived chiefly from Dante and the Catholic Mass, the two most vital sources of Christian imagery.
Ash-Wednesday, however, was necessarily a transitional poem. It presents an individual’s grasp of religious experience and, therefore, remains a lyric. To take full advantage of a Catholic religion, to escape completely, as an artist, from the disintegration of contemporary life, one should move on from the lyric to the communal art form of the drama, the only literary form which is, like music, an ensemble performance for an audience. A society with a flourishing music and drama, like England under Elizabeth, is likely to have a religious and national group-consciousness; and a society from which both arts have disappeared, like England under Victoria, is extremely unlikely to have one. The Hollow Men and Ash-Wednesday, therefore, present only one side of Eliot’s problem of expressing the positive side of his “criticism of life.” All great poets, Eliot points out in one of his essays, are restless until they arrive at the uncompromising objectivity of the dramatic attitude, however they express it;16 and certainly Eliot himself did not, in either of the poems mentioned, attain to the impersonal balance of the poems up to and including The Waste Land, which had been purely dramatic in their approach. But the drama proper, the one genuinely catholic literary art form in which there can really be something for everybody, seemed to him the most satisfying medium of art, however unsuited to it he might be by temperament.
A developing fluency, a growing power over the larger rhythmic outlines of poetry, had been evident in his work ever since he had moved away from the tightly compressed quatrains of the Sweeney poems and the motionless echoing imagery of The Waste Land. Along with the alliance of his poetry with a religious tradition there went the problem of reshaping that tradition in new, vital, and popular forms. When Eliot, lecturing at Harvard, surveyed his cultivated listeners and announced that he himself would prefer an audience which could neither read nor write.17 he was referring to a theme which he had already introduced into his poetry. Popular forms of literature and music in any age usually possess a strongly marked characteristic rhythm common to them all, and the twentieth century, of course, has found the word jazz to describe the one peculiar to it. Sweeney Agonistes is a remarkably successful experiment in jazz: to give any idea of its superb vitality it should be read as a whole, but the final chorus is all we have time for. (Read.)
The next step for Eliot was to combine the religious imagery of Ash-Wednesday and the popular idiom of Sweeney Agonistes into the form of a religious drama, and this he attempted in The Rock, a play intended to speed the project of building Anglo-Catholic churches in London as a means of reestablishing the Church among the common people and as at least a partial cure for unemployment. Finally, there appeared Murder in the Cathedral, a historical drama of the murder of Becket, whose martyrdom symbolizes the inexhaustible life of the Church as well as its contemporary neglect. This play is vastly superior to The Rock, and is undoubtedly one of the finest poetic dramas of our time: the amazing beauty of some of the choruses is unsurpassed in modern poetry. (Read.)
Fine as this is, it is probable that in Murder in the Cathedral the upward curve of Eliot’s development begins to show a slope. The world is apparently developing a new form of society dependent on some sense of group-consciousness: what form this will take it is impossible to say, but many groups are putting forward their claims to represent it, and of these fascism, Communism, and Catholic Christianity are the largest. Now art forms change with the forms of society, and a group-consciousness in society will necessarily produce group art forms, of which two very important ones are music and drama, as already said. Hence, all these groups turn toward dramatic methods of expression; and the medium chosen is vulgar or subtle depending on the nature of the appeal. The circus, of which Eliot gives us an ironic picture in a poem called Triumphal March, seems to be the only one known to fascism, whether in its Caesarean or its Wagnerian form. Crude as it is, a modern Juvenal would find the circus more potent than ever, as it can evidently support a government accompanied by only a vague promise of bread. Soviet Communism elaborates on one of the less inspired logia of Lenin, to the effect that the central art form of the future proletarian state will be the cinema.18 The more sophisticated Marxism of New York and of Auden in London has already a good deal of sound dramatic achievement to its credit. Eliot’s drama, then, is by no means an isolated phenomenon. But there is another group art form infinitely more important than any that I have mentioned, and that is the ballet, which combines music and drama on the basis of the dance, the origin of both, and which is far more intellectually concentrated than the ordinary spoken drama, as every movement is controlled and related to the central rhythmic idea. This, whatever of spoken dialogue or chorus it may absorb, is the most highly organized art form the twentieth century is likely to produce. Auden, particularly in The Dance of Death, realizes perhaps more than Eliot the importance of pantomime, the integration of gesture with the drama; and even the cinema, so stultified by routine technical competence, immediately develops toward pantomime and ballet techniques as soon as an authentic genius, such as Walt Disney or Charlie Chaplin, is given a free hand. What steps, if any, Eliot will take in this direction, remains to be seen, but this is his direction. Possibly he may be hampered by his evident preference for the Latin side of Western culture as opposed to the Germanic tradition, which has produced most of our music. The musical impetus in the poetry of Goethe, Browning, and Hopkins Eliot is inclined to wince at; and perhaps it is best to read Sweeney Agonistes as a parody of this sort of technique.
Though Eliot himself has pointed out that the poet deals not with belief but with the emotional equivalent of belief,19 most of the adverse criticism of him has been levelled directly at his religious and political opinions. I happen to embrace most of the tenets Eliot holds in peculiar abhorrence, but it is no part of my intention to explain in detail why I think them superior to his: still, it might be worth discussing two very obvious points, not because I wish to prove Eliot wrong about them, but because I wish to conclude with some estimate, however tentative, of his relation to contemporary culture as a whole.
In the first place, it might be objected that in forsaking Boston for Canterbury Eliot has merely exchanged one form of humanism for another and has not yet escaped from the overemphasis on social and moral criteria of religious experience, which is the real dilemma of humanism. This I mention because I feel that his close association of religion and morality has had an unfortunate effect on his work: there must be many others besides myself who find the preaching in The Rock irritating and such essays as Thoughts After Lambeth and After Strange Gods unreadable. It is rather ironic, too, that Murder in the Cathedral, which depicts the martyrdom of the Primate of England for withstanding the immoral purposes of his king, should be running in London at the very time when so radically different a relationship was being established between the Visitors of Magdalen and Merton.20
This leads me to the second point, or, if it does not, I am going to move on to it anyway. If the Christian Church is to be regarded primarily as a social institution, it takes its place in a political and economic conflict of reaction and revolution. Now whenever class lines have been sharply drawn in history, poets unable to accept the ideology of either side have found that the Church not only gave them a more acceptable doctrine, but also defined for them an impartial political attitude. That is why, to take a random example, we find a group of clerical and theological poets in England during the conflict of king and Parliament— Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Milton, and the rest. In the nineteenth century the tension of capitalist society produced a somewhat similar situation, but this time the Christian Church as an institution was too disintegrated itself to satisfy many of the great artists of the time who could commit themselves to neither the bourgeois nor the proletarian outlook. But even at that one can hardly deny that the inspiration of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky was theological; and the same tonsure mark is on not only an orthodox Christian like César Franck, or an artist steeped in religious conceptions who later worked apart from them, like Van Gogh, but on those who attacked Christianity violently for essentially theological reasons, like Baudelaire and Nietzsche.
But now, it may be said, the Church affords an even more precarious foothold for the artist, not because it is weaker but because the economic conflict is stronger. There are two answers to this. In the first place, it could be argued that the very heat and fury of the economic struggle makes the Church an essential refuge for the artist who does not engage in it. Those artists of the past generation who remained aloof from religious as well as political groups spent their lives in complete spiritual isolation. That is a terrible price to pay, and many of the greatest geniuses of the nineteenth century paid for it with their sanity. In a world less a chaos than a womb of shaping forces it begins to look as though it were no longer worth paying, and though Eliot’s refusal to do so after writing The Hollow Men has been criticized by many who can be very stark and terrible by proxy, he has definitely gained, as an artist, by declining to strike the expected pose. The sterile introspective abstraction of Picasso in his cubist period, of Joyce after Ulysses, of Stravinsky’s contrapuntal exercises, has so far not been for Eliot. Whether or not that is because his own achievements have been made on a lower level is a matter of opinion. And certainly those who call him a reactionary can point to no D.H. Lawrence type of reaction: no Plumed Serpent with its schoolboyish Naziism, no Lady Chatterley mid-Victorian mamma fighting at bay and brandishing a contraceptive syringe.
The second answer is the stock—almost the automatic—revolutionary one. The economic struggle is rapidly absorbing all middle ground between reaction and revolution. As a social institution the Church is committed to reaction and will throw in its lot with fascism whenever the pressure is strong enough, which makes all Catholic poets today simply muddled fascists, unless they are so fortunate as to be muddled Catholics. But an assertion which depends for proof on future events is obviously impossible to discuss, and, in any case, nothing that Eliot may do will injure the quality of what he has already done. This is so high that it is rather a pity that he has to live in an age which can see no poetry because it keeps nervously peering behind it for lurking sociological hobgoblins. But then the poets are to blame for this as well, for they also belong to an age whose peculiar vanity it is to imagine that everything it does is charged with a portentous historical significance.