International: 1,000 Lost Golf Balls

The 20th Century needed a poet (at least) to explain it to itself, and a good place for a 20th Century poet to be born was St. Louis, Mo. Early, Thomas Stearns Eliot left this American heartland to strengthen at Harvard his ancestral New England roots. His output there was conventional verse, but his intake was metaphysics, logic, science and heavy drafts of European and Oriental culture.

His main effort was to be the construction of a bridge of insight between his time and traditional Western culture. He spanned a small part of that gap when he went to live in London, became a British subject. Before the building began, however, and probably before Eliot had any notion of where he was going, he had to tap, test and question the world around him.

The early questions had a satiric turn:

For I have known them all already, known them all:-

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,

And in short, I was afraid.

As Eliot, with pity as well as derision, exposed its vulgarity, its self-doubt, its confusion and frustration, the 20th Century had no difficulty in recognizing itself. Eliot became one of the strongest influences on two generations of writers—his own contemporaries, and their immediate successors.

By 1922 Eliot had assembled his picture of the contemporary world in The Waste Land, which, like most of Eliot’s earlier poetry, had the immediacy of a headline, the memorableness of a song that is easy to hum because it is reminiscent of other songs:

She turns and looks a moment in the

glass, Hardly aware of her departed lover;

Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:

“Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.”

When lovely woman stoops to folly

and Paces about her room again, alone,

She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,

And puts a record on the gramophone.

The Waste Land was not mere poetic journalism. Eliot found the world in bits & pieces, reported it in snips & snatches of allusions to the Grail legend, to Frazer’s Golden Bough, to Hindu philosophy. At the end, he says: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” The shoring was not shoveling; it was the orderly construction of a mosaic. His purpose was not merely to describe disorder and frustration, but to contrast it with the possibility of a return to order and fulfillment.

That was how Eliot, a “revolutionary” poet, became without inconsistency the foremost literary champion of tradition. Everybody quoted him as saying that he was “classicist in literature, royalist in politics and Anglo-Catholic in religion.” That would have sounded less smug if they had added, as Eliot did: “I am quite aware that the first term is completely vague, and easily lends itself to claptrap; I am aware that the second term is at present without definition, and easily lends itself to what is almost worse than claptrap, I mean temperate conservatism; the third term does not rest with me to define.” Years later he regretted that he had given “some critics the impression that … all these three were inextricable and of equal importance.”

Beginning with Ash Wednesday (1930), Eliot left little room to doubt that the religious element was the most important to him, and that there was nothing temperate about his approach to this subject. He said: “If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.” His criticism of democracy was not aimed at its defects, but at its inadequacy, its incompleteness. Democracy without Christianity was not so much the opposite of the police state as it was its forerunner. “Liberalism can .prepare the way for that which is its own negation: the artificial, mechanized or brutal control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos.”

He documented his premise:

In the land of lobelias and tennis flannels

The rabbit shall burrow and the thorn revisit,

The nettle shall flourish on the gravel court,

And the wind shall say: ‘Here were decent godless people:

Their only monument the asphalt road

And a thousand lost golf balls.’

And he projected his conclusion into the search for order which reached its climax in Four Quartets:

But to apprehend

The point of intersection of the timeless With time, is an occupation for the saint—

For most of us, there is only the unattended

Moment, the moment in and out of time,

The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,

The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning

Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply

That it is not heard at all, but you are the music

While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,

Hints followed by guesses; and the rest

Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.

The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.

By this time the doubting Bloomsbury Hamlet had grown to a reduced Dante. He had also become (with Yeats dead) the greatest living poet. Last week the Swedish Academy clothed T. S. Eliot with recognition of that fact by awarding him the Nobel Prize for Literature “for his remarkable efforts as a trail-blazing pioneer of modern poetry.”

For once, the word “efforts” applied. It had all come hard for Eliot. He had had to get all the way from the complex pretensions of his time to

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire

Is the wisdom of humility . . .