5 - The Cultivation of Culture

Summary

By the time Eliot approached his late fifties he had become in many respects an iconic man of letters, which was confirmed in 1948 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and the British Order of Merit. Anthony Cuda—using Yeats's familiar phrase—aptly characterized Eliot's persona from 1943 onwards as that of the “smiling public man;” but, despite his exalted status as something of a literary celebrity, Eliot's focus was still very much drawn to agriculture in the late 1940s and early 1950s. However, his demanding schedule of public lectures, radio broadcasts, and poetry readings did affect his productivity. Eliot himself noted in a letter to Henry Treece that it was these “odd jobs” that caused the delay in the publication of Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. While the original essays appeared in the NEW between January and March 1943, the final book version was not published until as late as November 1948. Yet, despite the five-year delay in the publication of the book version of Notes, Eliot's engagement with organic thought continues to permeate its pages.

A number of scholars have asserted that both versions of Notes are integral to Eliot's agricultural thought. Robert Crawford, for example, rightly points out that Eliot was affirming his support of organic ideas in the 1943 drafts:

Eliot, following the fashion of the day, praises … organicism. “Organicism” suggests close-knit near-to-the-soil values of rural communities whose established tradition and integrated valuesystem are threatened by the sophisticated metropolitan.

More recently, agricultural historians such as Matless and Conford have briefly referred to the 1948 version in their wide-ranging discussion of organic regionalism. All these previous accounts, however, offer no more than a cursory glance at the organic ideas and concerns contained in the final published version of Notes, with Crawford choosing to focus almost exclusively on the original essays. Crawford justifies his methodology as follows:

I have concentrated on the articles, “Notes towards a Definition of Culture,” rather than the less tentatively titled Notes towards the Definition of Culture because the book, while refining and adding to the argument, occludes the argument's clarity through continual divagation and a tendency to over-engage in discussion with Eliot's own contemporaries, many now forgotten.