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ing a particular class position within British society. He was in many ways a
free agent in a society that was keenly attuned to class and social position as
manifested in speech, gesture, and manners. As an obviously intelligent and
cultured representative of the New World, he did not fit in and, for once, this
was a good thing. In a Britain exhausted by war, death, and the physical and
emotional mutilations of battle, Americans in general seemed like saviors,
free of the social and political baggage of old Europe. Woodrow Wilson s
mission to change the old order in Europe at Versailles had raised the hopes
109
110 The Cambridge Introduction to T. S. Eliot
of a battered Continent. America was the promised land of peace, prosperity,
and democracy. Eliot, however, was not a Wilsonian idealist; indeed, he was
very much opposed to the political optimism coming across the Atlantic
from America, He believed that the Wilsonian rhetoric of American-style
democracy and the self-determination of peoples rested on a flawed vision of
society, an idea that he would develop in his social and cultural criticism over
the next four decades. Nevertheless, he enjoyed, along with other trans-
planted Americans, the curiosity and respect that attached to the Wilson
mission in its early days. That the Wilsonian project ended in failure was put
down to the machinations of crafty European statesmen who had no interest
in bringing to light a new world rather than to the naïveté and blindness of
the President.
To the intellectuals among whom Eliot moved at the time, his more
pessimistic diagnosis of the state of the modern world in The Waste Land
struck a chord the emotional truth of which could not be denied. This is an
important point in understanding Eliot s fame. Emotionally, the poem was
immediately comprehended, but what it actually said, its meaning, was not
that easy to decipher. And that is perhaps the second reason why Eliot s fame
extended past the boomlet of general interest that his poem caused. The
poem s sibylline utterances, its enigmatic juxtapositions, fragmentary charac-
ter, and bewildering range of references, including the evocations of the
fertility cults of the ancient Near East and of Asia, harmonized well with an
atmosphere of doubt, confusion, and helplessness. Old values and traditions
were under attack and, in the vacuum, a literary work like The Waste Land,
speaking in the tongues of what sounded like visionary or prophetic experi-
ence, suggested that Eliot had managed to grasp the problems of a disturbing
modernity. That he was able to relate contemporary dilemmas of, say,
sexuality, with ancient paradigms seemed doubly impressive. In an age which
had lost its confidence, the poem seemed a courageous, perhaps even heroic,
confrontation with abject despair.
More impressive still was the fact that it did not describe abjection, but
enacted it, so that the reader could experience it internally as a datum of
feeling rather than as an aestheticized concept. The poem, moreover, did not
oVer facile or programmatic solutions for a wounded age, one increasingly
suspicious of the glib fix, but suggested that salvation was far oV, not easily
attained, and attainable only after great sacrifice. Although the poem is often
described as a quest narrative, it is more like a pilgrimage, a journey of
salvation to the shrine of a mysterious god-figure, or, at a minimum, purga-
tion and cleansing of a soiled subjectivity. That this particular pilgrim s
progress ended in a confusion of tongues and failure also resonated with
Critical reception 111
the time and added to Eliot s authority as a learned visionary. Triumph did
not suit the mood of the time; breakdown, bankruptcy, and obscurity
brought readers closer to their own sense of dejection and in this the poem
succeeded beyond Eliot s, or anyone s, wildest expectations. It was one of
those curious, antiheroic success stories that later become so common in the
twentieth century.
Eliot s fame spread from this first achievement in a number of directions.
The sibylline character of The Waste Land brought Eliot the immediate
attention of a new generation of literary critics and scholars in the univer-
sities. I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, and Helen Gardner in Britain, F. O.
Mathiesson, Cleanth Brooks, and others in America found in Eliot the
exemplary modern poet, the poet for a new age of doubt, skepticism, and
irony. Intense critical examination of Eliot s works has never slackened in the
following decades. At first, his poetry was the primary focus, but this soon
expanded to take in his literary criticism, his cultural criticism, his personal
life, and his activities as a publisher and public figure. With the founding of
the Criterion, his involvement in the London publishing and editing scene
also increased his visibility. More importantly, though, his editorial work for
the new journal and his position with Faber and Faber meant that he was one
of the central figures in the discovery and encouragement of new writers and
new works. In this way, his influence extended well beyond the interest and
authority of his own works. Over the years he became one of the most
authoritative editorial figures on the scene in one of the most important (if
not the most important) publishing centers of the English-speaking world.
The matter of Eliot s declaration of faith in the Church of England in 1927
also brought him attention and to some extent a diVerent kind of notoriety.
This time his act of aYliation with the English Establishment scandalized his
associates in the modernist avant-garde rather than ordinary society. It has
been said that the Church of England is the Establishment at prayer and that
a high-profile conversion signifies more than a religious preference, such as
one deciding on principle alone to become a Buddhist. Joining the Church of
England signaled a wider set of loyalties. That shortly after his conversion
Eliot took British citizenship and defined himself as   classicist in literature,
royalist in politics and anglo-catholic in religion  (LA 15) conveyed to
everyone the reach and depth of his new commitments. This movement
toward mainstream society did not meet with universal acclaim, though
Church leaders were delighted that a prominent poet and cultural figure
had taken so radical a step. It was his former avant-garde comrades-in-arms
in the European culture wars, however, who were most surprised and, in
many cases, disgusted by what they saw as an act of betrayal of the aesthetic
112 The Cambridge Introduction to T. S. Eliot
and cultural aYrmations of their youth. Others in the early 1930s were not
sure how to react to Eliot s act of faith. His use of dramatic monologue as a
form in his early poetry and the ironic timbre of his work led to speculation [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]