T. S. Eliot and the Essay

Notes

131 = Notes Introduction 1. Among the many valuable studies of Eliot, I might point to the following as especially suggestive regarding pattern: Drew, Gardner, Kramer, Lobb, Schneider, and Unger. 2. Perhaps I was not wrong to opt for a career studying secular texts rather than preaching the Gospel. Chapter 1 1. Sisson is little known in the United States, although he is an important essayist and poet. The Avoidance of Literature is a convenient introduction to his essays. I have written a so-far unpublished account of his inability to remain true to Incarnational thinking. Chapter 2 1. This is a question that has long exercised readers of John Dryden, particularly his Religio Laici or A Laymans Faith. 2. The second half of that sentence more directly recalls how Dryden’s Religio Laici functions. I mention this poem because it becomes a major concern as a forebear of and precedent for Four Quartets. 3. Eliot himself would, of course, in time write his own poetic drama. 132 Notes Chapter 3 1. Cf. The Dunciad: “Make God Man’s Image, Man the final Cause, / Find Virtue local, all relation scorn, / See all in Self, and but for self be born” (4.478–80). 2. In writing of William Hazlitt, Tom Paulin has recently made essentially the same point. 3. See Violence and the Sacred. 4. As with the individual and tradition or, in Swift’s terms, Moderns and Ancients. 5. Here I echo Vincent Miller, who points to these same passages. Chapter 4 1. Eliot’s first “book” of criticism, Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry (1917—actually 1918), in truth a single essay, was never published separately in England and appeared anonymously. Chapter 5 1. This is another instance recalling and paralleling Dryden’s Religio Laici or A Laymans Faith. Chapter 6 1. For a different, thorough-going biographical interpretation, see Schuchard’s Eliot’s Dark Angel. Chapter 7 1. I cannot but think here of the young Stephen Dedalus, who, following the (non) experience with Emma on the tram, wanders into his mother’s bedroom, reflects, decides to write a poem upon it all, and then stares at himself in her mirror. 2. In a passage the surveyor-essayist Henry David Thoreau quoted at the beginning of the final essay in Walden (559), another great instance of impure art, for all its maker’s quest of purity. 3. See The Faith of John Dryden: Change and Continuity. Chapter 8 1. Of course, I contradict myself, opting for a beginning that promises significance, the figure in the carpet—although the figure in the carpet may be the carpet itself, time conquered in and through time, every woman and man having to choose between fire and fire. Notes 133 Conclusion 1. “Pure” is here descriptive; Eliot is praising Bishop Andrewes for the singularity— that is, the purely religious and theological nature—of his motives and interests. 2. A brief, partly autobiographical interlude might prove illustrative at this point: not understanding very much, as a young man I pondered the possibility of becoming “a preacher” myself—it was my mother’s fondest wish for me. I did not know then, or for a very long time, that the study of secular texts is not only a noble profession but also a necessary one—indeed the one from which you (may) proceed to that of Scripture and perhaps the clerical vocation. I never, in any case, heard or felt the call—perhaps, or so I wrongly imagined, I was not pure enough. Rather like Stephen Dedalus, I figured it was all or nothing, a severe either/or, a vocation demanding purity, which was defined as absence of sinning—even of temptation. Little did I know that purity poses perhaps the greatest temptation and may be, finally, inseparable from the sin of pride, for little matches the egoism, presumption, arrogance, and pride that attend the mistaken notion that our goodness, such as it is and whenever it appears, stems from within us, our (self-)control, our will. 3. In 1927, the year his conversion was formalized, Eliot reviewed Bertrand Russell’s little book Why I Am Not a Christian, this in The Monthly Criterion of which he was editor. Eliot acknowledges the praiseworthy in Russell’s lecture while doubting a good deal of it. He singles out for special agreement Russell’s perhaps surprising claim that people “‘accept religion on emotional grounds...