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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
Throughout his numerous literary critical and theoretical essays, T. S. Eliot frequently discussed the relationship between a poet's belief—particularly, religious belief—and the sensibility informing the poet's work. Eliot contended that if a poet's belief is truly significant to his poetry the significance should be evident not simply through inclusion or reference to certain dogmatic formulae or symbols but, more profoundly, in how the poet sees and receives the world: belief should have a palpable effect on the sensibility that readers encounter in the literary work.
Now, of course, one of the most conspicuous facts of Eliot's own career is his acceptance, in middle age, of Christian belief. And Eliot's poetry after his conversion is often drenched in Christian motifs and images. But to what extent can Eliot's Christianity be said to have transformed his poetic sensibility?
This paper first rehearses Eliot's theoretical position and then employs that position in considering poems and plays Eliot wrote after he had accepted the Christian witness of faith. The conclusion is that Eliot, in his poetry did not fully achieve the “orthodox” sensibility he posited as the Christian poet's ideal.
1 “Shelley and Keats,” The Use of Poetry and the Uses of Criticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933), p. 82.Google Scholar
2 “The Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Essays, New Edition (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1950), p. 248.Google Scholar
3 Compare Eliot's restatement of this point in an essay written thirty-five years later, “The Frontiers of Criticism”: “Poets have other interests beside poetry—otherwise their poetry would be very empty: they are poets because their dominant interest has been in turning their experience and their thought (and to experience and to think means to have interests beyond poetry)—in turning their experience and their thinking into poetry” (On Poetry and Poets [1957; rpt. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Noonday Books, 1969], pp. 129–130).Google Scholar
4 After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934), p. 40.Google Scholar
5 “Second Thoughts on Humanism,” Selected Essays, p. 438.
6 “Yeats,” On Poetry and Poets, p. 297.
7 “A Cathedralist Looks at Murder,” The World's Body, New Edition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), p. 166.Google Scholar In his “Postscript” to this new edition, Ransom apologizes for his rough treatment of Eliot in “A Cathedralist Looks at Murder”; but it is interesting that he does not modify his original statement of uneasiness about the relation of Eliot's belief to the verse.
8 In employing the terms “pre-conversion” and “post-conversion,” I refer only to Eliot's formal acceptance of Christian belief in the summer of 1927 and to the subsequent articulation in his verse (beginning with “Ash Wednesday” in 1930) of a distinctly Christian perspective. Fora provocative argument that Eliot's turn to Christianity should be dated as early as 1916, see Schuchard, Ronald, “Eliot and Hulme in 1916: Toward a Revaluation of Eliot's Critical and Spiritual Development,” PMLA 88, No. 5 (October 1973), pp. 1083–1094.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
9 For a comprehensive analysis of the redemption theme in Eliot's last plays, see Spanos', William V. thoughtful book, The Christian Tradition in Modern British Verse Drama (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1967)Google Scholar, chap. 7, “T. S. Eliot's Plays of Contemporary Life: The Redemption of Time.” Professor Spanos' chapter is surely the study of the redemption theme in the plays, and, while my argument will indicate that I am far more dubious than he about Eliot's success in treating this theme, his chapter is a lucid account of what Eliot was attempting to do.
10 Selected Essays, p. 34.
11 Eliot expressed his own misgivings about the characterization of Harry, in “Poetry and Drama,” On Poetry and Poets, pp. 90–91.Google Scholar
12 “Poetry and Drama,” On Poetry and Poets, p. 92.
13 After Strange Gods, pp. 34-35.