A Quest for Coherence: T. S. Eliot as Public Intellectual

The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot is, among other things, an exercise in intellectual and critical history, and Eliot's life-long concern with the past and the problems of historicism is ubiquitous throughout. Ronald Schuchard in his 1999 Eliot's Dark Angel made the strong case for a critical edition of T. S Eliot's prose, and those concerns are reflected in his General Editorial Introduction to the series (1.xvi-xix). As a critical edition, the eight volumes each open with an introduction that places its contents within the course of Eliot's life and career, and each selection of his prose has numerous annotated notes, including translations. The indexes are happily also quite thorough. There is much to be said here for the humility and heroism of this task, and with all eight volumes now released in print, we can see holistically the fruit of that scholarly commitment. There is, likewise, a sheer joy which working through all the volumes can bring, for it becomes impossible to read the standard collections (The Sacred Wood, Selected Essays, On Poetry and Poets, To Criticize the Critic) in the same old manner, and the same is true for Eliot's poetry. The fecundity of context is now deeply enlarged for most of us, and this includes the far wider possibility of interactions across Eliot's work.

Admittedly, periodization is always something of an artificial construction, even when dealing with the life of a single person, yet it is also a practical necessity, and the divisions chosen by the series are justifiable, even if some are simply functional. Among various readers, some will be drawn to the more purely literary and cultural criticism of the 1920s and early 1930s, while others will be drawn to the social and political criticism that extends into the 1940s, and yet others to the international speeches and concerns of the 1950s and early 1960s. Undoubtedly, there is discontinuity across Eliot's work, but thematically certain subjects concern him his entire career: the fluctuations of history and culture, the varying developments of literature, the importance of education, poetry and belief, and the summation of a person's work and life. Eliot sought and achieved a career in letters, and his public engagement is seen in numerous ways across his reviews, letters to the editor, speeches, essays, eulogies, and other prose.

Volume 1: Apprentice Years, 1905–1918, edited by Jewel Spears Brooker and Ronald Schuchard (2014)

By its very nature, parts of volume 1 are incomplete—Eliot's juvenilia is limited; much of his undergraduate work did not survive. Even the graduate course work is by no means exhaustive. Yet what remains of the latter is telling. These are the background of his first collections of poetry. The centerpiece of Apprentice Years, 1905–1918 is, of course, Eliot's dissertation, what would become Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, but there are other important essays and early addresses, especially "The Relationship between Politics and Metaphysics," a 1914 address to the Harvard Philosophical Club; "The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual," a 1913 paper for Josiah Royce's course in logic; and "The Relativity of Moral Judgment," a 1915 paper read to the Moral Sciences Club at Cambridge. The 1913 paper for Royce shows a thinker struggling to come to terms with how the anthropologist imports modern assumptions into any analysis; that is, given an outsider's perspective on another culture, what is fact and what is interpretation? The 1914 address, set against the background of World War I, interrogates history, religion, metaphysics, and politics, searching for some stable judgment and reasons for moral restraint. Eliot goes further in the Moral Sciences Club paper, which foreshadows his later disassociation of sensibility thesis, arguing that human systems of belief are built up from cultivated taste and feelings intertwined with aesthetic and ethical judgments. A history of ideas can teach us something about...