T.S. Eliot Materialized. Eliot... · 2020. 1. 18. · T.S. ELIOT AND THE ESSAY: From Th e Sacred...

DOI: 10.1057/9781137301321

T.S. Eliot Materialized

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

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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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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vii

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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.

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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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

T.S. Eliot Materialized. Eliot... · 2020. 1. 18. · T.S. ELIOT AND THE ESSAY: From Th e Sacred...

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