Tradition and T.S. Eliot: A Journey to the East?

We shall not cease from exploration
T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

What is tradition? What is orthodoxy? Wherein lies the greatness of poetry? These questions not answered, Eliot moves forward in time to new formulations, new questions. Why tradition? Why orthodoxy? Why “great” poetry? These questions easier to answer, yes, though answers no less convincing.

Why not? T.S. Eliot believes in tradition but not Tradition. He selects what is appropriate for today on the basis of his historical sense, his sense of connectivity to that which preceded him, which ultimately prevents him from reaching the beyond — Tradition as a living concept. The tension in his mind, appropriate, is between religious form and dogma and poetry, which must extend beyond it. There is very little great religious poetry, he avers, because the gifting of the poet and religious sentiment are different. This true, but what he fails to recognize is that his connection is nothing but a broader set of forms, not amounting to Orthodoxy in a sense distinct from orthodoxy, because the impulse for them is different from either truth or beauty. Community remains preeminent; poetic feeling he describes is a method of forging and maintaining such. The fire and the rose never appear in their full luminosity.

Eliot protests at the ascription that he is describing the feeling of a defeated generation in the Wasteland, but the critics are right. His orthodoxy is the remnants of religious feeling found in the neglected wainscot, in an country church, barely attended and in disrepair, not missionary monks or warriors ready to fall under the sign of the cross. It is a quaint clutching feeling, and, when it attempts to be more, fails except when in defensive posture (“gun rather loose in the holster”), or stating the problem (“farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust”).

Nowhere is this failure more apparent than in Eliot’s colossal contradiction in “Goethe as Sage” — European poetry is great because it is universal. But how can Europe, or America for that matter “invaded by foreign races,” or with its native culture “effaced,” be a representative of a universal culture? Eliot falls into a quantitative assessment. Greatness is a matter of numbers, not of the mass of men, but of the elite: scholars and men of culture. They have told me Goethe is great, the last great representative European poet, and thus I must grapple with this at, perhaps, the expense of my “orthodoxy” and Puritan sentiment.

Both are thusly abandoned as despair gives way to sentimentality and a new category, “wisdom,” that supersedes orthodoxy and does not correspond to truth, the embrace of quantity of cultured opinion, and the death of that which Eliot claims to love, Europe.

Perhaps Eliot’s failure comes early as he attempts to “confine [himself] to such practical conclusions” as are immediately ascertainable and applicable (TatIT) — this wonderful American pragmatism, which forces him ultimately to a shallow conception of greatness, consisting of nothing but abundance, amplitude, unity — and an abundantly shallow “universality” (GaS).

Did not Eliot already say on such:

“The trouble of the modern age is not merely the inability to believe certain things about God and man which our forefathers believed, but the inability to feel toward God and man as they did. A belief in which you no longer believe is something which to some extent you can understand, but when religious feeling disappears, the words in which men have struggled to express it becomes meaningless. It is true that religious feeling varies naturally from country to country, and from age to age, just as poetic feeling does; the feeling varies, even when the belief, the doctrine remains the same. But this is a condition of human life, and what I am apprehensive of is death. It is equally possible that the feeling for poetry, and the feelings for poetry and the feeling which are the material of poetry, may disappear everywhere, which might perhaps help to facilitate that unification of the world which some people consider desirable for its own sake.” (oPaP)

Thus Eliot condemns himself and his own unified conception of wisdom — the modern age began a long time ago. We are not apprehensive of death. Death is the beginning. Seeking has no limitations, backwards, outwards, and ultimately forwards, through our abandonment of our shallow sentiment and necessary deaths. Our battle not to save the Europe of Goethe, but to find what jade remains in the ash and use it to forge new parapets — the question not whither, but whether and how to use found jade in this divinely sanctioned task.

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T.S. Eliot, After Strange Gods
T.S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock
T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland
T.S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets
T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

 

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