Out of This Nettle: T. S. Eliot's "Little Gidding III" and the Environment of What Grows

T. S. Eliot's unresolved pursuit in aesthetic and critical writings prior to Four Quartets might aptly be ascribed to a throwback dissatisfaction encountered during his doctoral studies: philosophical ideologies failed to offer a "clear conception of what the word human implies."¹ For a post-conversion Eliot, accomplishing this "clear conception" required reconciliation of the encountered quotidian, the revealed sacred, and the combined ethical, historical, and cultural aspects of how we are as humans. In 1941, amidst writing Four Quartets and pondering how—or even whether—a reader might perceive Eliot's threefold integration as an authentic picture of a human, Eliot mused that "there are really three roses in the set of poems: the sensuous rose, the socio-political Rose (always appearing with a capital letter) and the spiritual rose: and the three have got to be in some way identified as one."² Since the teleology of Eliot's Christianity ordains the earthly journey as intrinsic to eternal outcome, uncovering what Eliot shows in his culminating poem about the integrity of what we are as humans dictates attention to the environment in which the journey occurs. Eliot's reconciliation of the sensuous, sociopolitical, and spiritual aspects of environment can be unfolded through a single image in "Little Gidding III"—not of a rose, but of its less exotic plant kin, "the live and the dead nettle" (Eliot, Poems, 206). The image of nettles (diversely portraying medicinal qualities, food or supplement for humans and animals, conservationist source for textiles or wartime resources, analogy for war or food policies, connection to British history, and more) represents an environment saturated with a broad array of modernist concerns: societal, political, cultural, aesthetic, and theological, among others.

Examining readers' reception of Quartets's environmental connections as influenced by Eliot's choice to serialize in the New English Weekly serves as a counterpoint to Jeremy Diaper's declaration of Eliot's organicism. The early 1939 issues of NEW are representative of the contemporary cultural discussions circulating as Eliot conceptualized the aggregated whole of Four Quartets.³ Immersed in these ongoing cultural conversations, contemporary readers could discover in Eliot's dramatized art more about the human condition than they might from a social diatribe, a political manifesto, or a commissioned report.⁴ Readers could perceive the nettles in "Little Gidding III"—and the whole of Quartets—as rightly conversant with contemporary social and political movements such as those of the British organicists, soil conservation movements, and the Christendom drive for proper environmental stewardship. Rethinking reader receptivity allows a reimaging of Eliot. Rather than isolated from wartime and other pressing contemporary issues, an Eliot perceived as writing his environment would instead be at the forefront of local and national culture and global concerns. Indeed, at least one reader received Eliot's work as he intended—author and naturalist Elyne Mitchell. Mitchell recognized Eliot's integrations of the mundane, the cultural and political, and the sacred, and aligned her own environmental writings and understanding of the human person through analogous referencing of Eliot's creative works. Thus, while centered in "Little Gidding III," my argument not only shows historical, canonical literary modernism as allied with social justice movements of environmental activism, but also that the contemporaneous readership of modernist authors such as Eliot would have discerned this alliance.

Art and the Human: Tethering the Sociopolitical, the Sensuous, and the Sacred

New works on environment such as Diaper's detailed examination in T. S. Eliot and Organicism (2019) explicate Eliot's engagement with the British organicist movement through his involvement with New English Weekly. It is in NEW, subtitled Review of Public Affairs, Literature and the Arts, that during the thirties, Eliot and Ezra Pound carried on a public spat about aesthetics that ranged into politics, religion, and petty grammar usage and sentence construction. More importantly, in the early forties, Eliot serialized "East Coker," "Dry Salvages," and "Little Gidding" in NEW. Eliot elected a publication in which the arts are featured, but "Public Affairs" is prioritized in both its title and its coverage: policies...