S8E29 – AH – “Jack’s Bookshelf: T. S. Eliot”, After Hours with Fr. Dwight Longenecker

Fr. Dwight Longenecker joins us to examine the poet T. S. Eliot, and his complicated – and occasionally adversarial – relationship with C. S. Lewis.

S8E29: “Jack’s Bookshelf: T. S. Eliot”, After Hours with Fr. Dwight Longenecker (Download)

Show Notes

Introduction

Quote-of-the-Day

Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.”

T. S. Eliot, Four Quotets

Biographical Information

Brought up in an Evangelical home in Pennsylvania, Dr. Dwight Longenecker graduated from the Bob Jones University with a degree in Speech and English, he went to study theology at Oxford University. 

Eventually he was ordained as an Anglican priest and served as a curate, a school chaplain in Cambridge and a country parson on the small island just to the south of England, the Isle of Wight. 

After ten years working as a freelance writer and charity worker, he returned to the United States and was ordained as a Catholic priest. He now serves as Pastor of Our Lady of the Rosary Church in Greenville, South Carolina.

He is the author of many books, including “The Gargoyle Code” and “Slubgrip Instructs”, as well as the book we’ll be discussing today, “Reluctant Allies: Essays on Eliot and the Inklings”.

Chit-Chat

• Fr. Longenecker recently completed his autobiography, “There and Back Again: A Somewhat Religious Odyssey”, which details the story of his travels abroad and eventual return, coinciding with his religious experience. The title is, of course, borrowed from the character Bilbo Baggins in J. R. R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit”.

Toast

• David was drinking a nice large cup of Earl Grey Tea.
• Fr. Longenecker had a glass of fruit juice.

Discussion

01. “The Man”

Q. This past month on Jack’s Bookshelf we’ve looked at Aristotle, Wordsworth, and Kenneth Graeme, and we’re wrapping it up with T. S. Eliot.
So who was T. S. Eliot? What are his basic biographical details and where does he fit into the scheme of English literature?

• T. S. Eliot was born in St. Louis, MO to a Unitarian family, with relatives attending and serving in the church.
• Unitarians are a break-off of Protestant Christianity. Gathering from pantheists and utilitarians, they deny the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, believing God to be one person, rather than one God in three persons; thus, the name “Unitarian”. Because of its connection to pantheism and utilitarinanism, the faith became one of general respectability and politeness.
• He traveled abroad to Harvard to study, on track to become a philosophy professor. But rather than return to the U.S., he decided to settle in England. He married an English woman, and began writing poetry.
• His poetry was certainly modernist for his time, the start of the 20th century. It broke many conventional rules of style, and felt disjointed when read, leading Lewis to dislike his poetry at first (once again, David and Lewis agree).

02. “Searching for meaning”

Q. What was Eliot’s religious arc? You mentioned he was raised Unitarian, but what happened to him after travelling to England?

• During his studies, Eliot was diving into the writings of the Christian mystics from the 14th century. Some of these influencers included St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila. However, he also read texts from other faiths, including the Hindu “Bhagavad Gita”. He was searching for something of more spiritual depth than the faith of his family.
• During his time in England, he experienced the horrors of WWI. Following this, he decided to be baptised as an Anglican. His writing from then on was explicitly Christian, and his life took a new turn.

03. “Success?”

Q. Was T. S. Eliot successful early on in his career as a poet, or was he another artist only recognised after his death?

• Eliot was famous by the time he was baptised. Some of the works that made him famous were “The Waste Land”, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, and “Four Quartets”. His fame continued to grow following his conversion, as his poems took on a Christian life and as he branched off into dramas.
• However, this does not mean that his Christian turn wasn’t controversial. Many of his fans did not appreciate this nihilistic, pessimistic, relativistic modernist converting to a religion of objective truth and hope. One of his critics included Virginia Woolf, who castigated him for his newfound faith and traditionalism.

04. “Fr. Longenecker encounters Eliot”

Q. When did you first discover T. S. Eliot, and what got you hooked?

• Fr. Longenecker was raised in an Evangelical home. Though he did not have access to a television, he had books, including the “World Book Encyclopedia Set”. In 1965, he read the annual publication, and came across the obituary of T. S. Eliot. Hearing Eliot’s story at 9 years of age was inspiring to Fr. Longenecker, and other children’s stories made England seem like a wonderful place to live one day.
• His first encounter with the works of Eliot was in college, when his class read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, and he was captivated. Along with being a love sonnet, it is also a satirical poem about polite, upper class, ivy-league society at Harvard.

Shall I part my hair behind?   Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.

T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

• David’s own first reading of T. S. Eliot was “Macavity the Mystery Cat”, the inspiration for Andrew Lloyd Weber’s musical “Cats”. One wonders how Eliot would feel about this work being the one to remain popular today…

05. “Influences on Eliot”

Q. What were the books and authors that shaped Eliot?

• Along with the mystics, he was influenced by the ideas and techniques of the French symbolist poets. This sect of poetry was much like the impressionist movement in art; attempting to translate a feeling into visual imagery, giving them a dreamlike quality. French symbolists would try to put images in the minds of readers to evoke emotions; not necessarily the emotions conveyed by the author, but their own subjective emotions.
• One example of T. S. Eliot using this technique is in “Journey of the Magi”. the image of the horse stands out from the poem as something separate from the scene, but everyone has a different interpretation of what that image means.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.

T. S. Eliot, Journey of the Magi”

• This evocative imagery is a good tie-in with Lewis, who always seems to be able to paint pictures in the minds of his readers with few words. The difference being, Eliot uses images for the sake of emotion, while Lewis tries to use imagery for deeper meaning.

06. “Eliot’s importance”

Q. What makes Eliot an important author?

• T. S. Eliot is front and centre to major conflicts in Europe, and as such, he acts a spokesman of the age, offering a Christian solution.
• This is particularly true of “The Waste Land”, which reflects the world events at the time, and “The Four Quartets”, which was written after the second world war.

07. “Eliot’s corpus”

Q. Did T. S. Eliot only write poetry?

• Poetry is what Eliot was most famous for. In between writing “The Waste Land” and “The Four Quartets”, much of Eliot’s work was Christian. He produced works like “Journey of the Magi”, “Ash Wednesday”, and “Marina”.
• However, he was also a literary critic. Along with writing poetry, he was the editor in chief of a literary critic magazine, where he commented on other classical writers. Later in his career, he also turned to writing dramas in an attempt to reach a wider audience, which are not as well known today because they are somewhat dated.

Q. You’ve mentioned some of his most famous works. Are there any other works we should mention?

• Fr. Longenecker believes a good place to begin with Eliot is “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, with a commentary due to its density. You can find some notes on The Imaginative Conservative, where Fr. Longenecker has written extensively on Eliot. In “Reluctant Allies”, he also includes an entire section on Eliot.
• Although he found the poetry confusing at times, David did enjoy some lovely turns of phrase. He and his wife often quote a line when heating a kettle for tea:

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

08. “Influence on Lewis”

Q. What was Eliot’s influence on Lewis?

• There was certainly an animosity between the two authors. First is their nationality, and second is their tradition. As an expert in medieval literature, Lewis is devoted to the preservation and continuation of traditional English poetry, while Eliot was a modernist. What made things difficult for Lewis was his lack of success with poetry, next to Eliot’s famous iconoclastic prose. He expresses his disdain for Eliot’s style in his own poem, “A Confession”, which references “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”.

I am so coarse, the things the poets see
Are obstinately invisible to me.
For twenty years I’ve stared my level best
To see if evening–any evening–would suggest
A patient etherized upon a table;
In vain. I simply wasn’t able.

C. S. Lewis, A Confession

• Lewis and his friends went as far as to send spoof articles to Eliot’s journal that saturised the modernists. Eliot caught on to the hoax and never had them published.
• Finally, in their later years, they had a cordial meeting at Oxford, and eventually became friends; not because of their writing, but because of their devotion to conservative Christianity. They even worked together on the revision of the psalms for the Anglican church.

09. “Reluctant Allies”

Q. Can you talk about the areas that you address in “Reluctant Allies”?

• Out of the Inklings column for the St. Boston Review literary journal, Fr. Longenecker gathered his articles and categorised them according to theme by each author: Tolkien, Lewis, and Eliot.

Q. Describe for us your articles on “The Four Quartets”.

• Eliot began by writing one poem called “Burnt Norton”, but envisioned three others, titled “East Coker”, “The Dry Salvages”, and “Little Gidding”. Though they began as individual poems, he picked out a unity in them, and combined them into one work. Written after WWII, and following the institutionalisation of his wife, the collection is a meditation on life, time, history, and individual connection to history through prayer. A deeply contemplative poem, he often draws from mystics, including Julian of Norwich.

10. “Literary Criticism”

Q. How similar were Eliot and Lewis’ philosophies regarding literary criticism?

• Lewis is much more committed to tradition and standards, while Eliot would have analysed literature through the lens of subjective emotion.

11. “Upcoming Projects”

Fr. Longenecker is working on a book called “Bloodshed and Blessing”, which looks into the meaning and practice of blood sacrifice in the ancient world, and how it connects with the crucifixion of Christ and the re-presenation of Calvary at Mass. He is also working on a few dramas and stage plays as he moves closer to retirement.

Wrap Up

More Information

• Read more of Fr. Longenecker’s writing at The Imaginative Conservative.
• Visit Fr. Longenecker’s website to read his blog and access free media and his bookstore.

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