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<text>
<title>
(1950s) Reflections:Mr. Eliot
</title>
<history>Time-The Weekly Magazine-1950s Highlights</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
TIME Magazine
March 6, 1950
Reflections: Mr. Eliot
</hdr>
<body>
<qt>
<l>How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot,</l>
<l>With his features of clerical cut,</l>
<l>And his brow so grim</l>
<l>And his mouth so prim</l>
<l>And his conversation, so nicely</l>
<l>Restricted to What Precisely</l>
<l>And If and Perhaps and But...</l>
<l>How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!</l>
<l>(Whether his mouth be open or shut.)</l>
<l>--T.S. Eliot</l>
</qt>
<p> Few Americans have had the dubious pleasure of meeting
Thomas Stearns Eliot. To most of them, he is an expatriate,
obscurely highbrow poet who wrote an unreadable poem called The
Waste Land and fathered a catch-phrase about the world ending
not with a bang but with a whimper.
</p>
<p> Thanks to a Broadway hit called The Cocktail Party, his
name at last was beginning to be more frequently encountered.
Some of the higher-browed reviewers had called the play
"esoteric." But the people who crowded to see it night after
night were not predominately highbrows (there are not enough
highbrows in New York to make a play a hit), and they did not,
apparently, find the play esoteric--perhaps because they did
not find Christianity esoteric.
</p>
<p> Mr. Eliot himself was, as usual, far from Broadway. Last
week, just returned from a holiday in South Africa, and with a
slight tan covering his bookish pallor, Mr. Eliot was back in
his accustomed London haunts, primly pacing his familiar round.
His day began at 8 a.m. At noon, after a man-sized breakfast of
tea, porridge, bacon and eggs, he set out for his place of
business, the publishing firm of Faber & Faber, in Bloomsbury.
He left his flat in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea (Expatriate Henry James
used to live in the flat just below) wearing an impeccable dark
blue suit and carrying a tightly rolled umbrella, walked one
block to the No. 49 bus stop. When the bus came, he mounted to
the upper deck, unfolded his London Times to the crossword
puzzle, and fell to.
</p>
<p> Before he did, he might well have shot an apprehensive
glance at his fellow travelers. Not long ago, on this same bus,
a large woman had sat down next to him, had peered at him,
peered again, and exclaimed: "Gracious me, aren't you Mr. T.S.
Eliot?" Aghast, he had looked up, admitted his identity, and at
the next stop, clutching his newspaper, he had fled down the
narrow stairs, hurried to the nearest tube station and gone
underground.
</p>
<p> Why should anybody want to meet Mr. Eliot--even halfway?
More particularly, why should Americans bother about this
Missouri-born American who talks like an Englishman, has not
lived in the U.S. for the past 36 years, and gave up his U.S.
citizenship to become a British subject?
</p>
<p> There are many possible answers. Perhaps the simplest
answer is: Because T.S. Eliot is a civilized man. He is more;
he is a commentator on his age who is considered by some more
important than Gabriel Heatter or Walter Winchell--or even
Walter Lippmann.
</p>
<p> There are many different Mr. Eliots--the shy and the
friendly, the sad and the serene and the Mr. Eliot who expresses
complex thoughts in complex (if catchy) rhythms. There is even
a human Mr. Eliot who loves Bourbon and the Bible, both of which
he used to keep on his night table (in austerity England he
settles for pink gin).
</p>
<p> St. Louis Blues. Thomas Stearns Eliot began his journey
through the waste land in the heart of a land of plenty. The
youngest, most coddled of seven children, he was born (1888) in
St. Louis, a city filled with the disorder of growth and a
booming faith in the nation, in business, in machine-driven
progress.
</p>
<p> The Eliot's were New Englanders; they had come to
Massachusetts around 1670 from East Coker, Somerset. T.S.
Eliot's grandfather moved from Boston to St. Louis, founded the
city's first Unitarian Church, as well as Washington
University. The Rev. William Greenleaf Eliot could be a stern
shepherd; one of his more memorable sermons was entitled:
"Suffering Considered as Discipline." But young Tom Eliot's
Irish Catholic nurse considered Unitarianism too thin a
spiritual cloak against the cold winds of the world; she liked
to take him along to her own church, a block away from the
Eliots' red brick house on Locust Street.
</p>
<p> Tom's father was a wholesale grocer who became president
of the St. Louis Hydraulic-Press Brick Co. There was neither
smoking nor drinking in the Eliot household. The Eliots were a
literary-minded family; evenings, Tom, his brother and his five
sisters would cluster around father as he read Dickens to them.
Tom's mother wrote a dramatic poem on the life of Savonarola.
Tom Eliot was a frail and quiet child. Often, when friends
wanted him to come out and play, they found him curled up in a
big leather armchair, reading.
</p>
<p> He went to Smith Academy in St. Louis, later moved on to
Milton Academy near Boston. Wherever he was, he felt out of
place. He wrote later: "I had always been a New Englander in the
Southwest and a Southwesterner in New England. In New England
I missed the long dark river, the ailanthus trees, the flaming
cardinal birds...of Missouri; in Missouri I missed the fir
trees, the hay and goldenrod, the song-sparrows, the red granite
and the blue sea of Massachusetts."
</p>
<p> At 18 Eliot went on to Harvard.
</p>
<p> Babbitt & King Bolo. Professor George Santayana taught him
philosophy and Professor Irving Babbitt, the ardent revivalist
of the classic past, taught him French literature, got him
interested in Sanskrit and Oriental religions (Eliot later
devoted two years to their study); Bertrand Russell taught him
logic and later introduced him to the London literary world as
his "best pupil." Eliot breezed through his course in three
years, spent the fourth year working for his M.A. But he was no
bookworm. Although he was shy, he made a point of going to
dances and parties; Poet Conrad Aiken, a fellow student, recalls
seeing tall, dapper Tom Eliot for the first time reeling out of
the office of the Harvard Lampoon, where a punch party was in
roaring progress.
</p>
<p> In his junior year Eliot decided that he was too puny,
took boxing lessons, once proudly sported a lustrous shiner. He
also delighted his classmates (including Walter Lippmann,
Heywood Broun, John Reed, Stuart Chase, Alan Seeger) by writing
risque doggerel about a mythical King Bolo and his Queen ("that
airy fairy hairy-'un/ Who led the dance on Golder's Green/ With
Cardinal Bessarion"). In addition to chronicling the doings of
King Bolo, he contributed romantic verse to the Harvard
Advocate. After Harvard, Eliot went to study in Paris for a year
("on the old man's money") and in a Left Bank flat wrote his
first significant poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the
portrait of an aging man reviewing a life frittered away between
timid hopes and lost opportunities:
</p>
<qt>
<l>For I have known them all already, known them all,</l>
<l>Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons.</l>
<l>I have measured out my life with coffee spoons...</l>
<l>Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?</l>
<l>I shall wear white flannel trousers, and I walk upon the</l>
<l>beach.</l>
<l>I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each...</l>
</qt>
<p> Did 23-year-old Tom Eliot feel his own life slipping away?
He returned to Harvard for three more years' graduate work. In
1914, of all years, he won a traveling fellowship and went to
Germany. He barely managed to avoid being caught by the war, and
went on to Britain.
</p>
<p> It turned out to be a long stay.
</p>
<p> Sweeney & the Nightingales. After a year at Oxford, Eliot
taught history, Latin, French, German, arithmetic, drawing and
swimming in English schools, where he was known as "the American
master." He also tried to teach the boys baseball while they
tried to teach him Rugby and cricket. In 1915, he married a
pretty ballet dancer, Vivienne Haigh, daughter of a British
artist. He volunteered for duty with the U.S. Navy, but his
ensign's commission did not come through until after the
Armistice. He gave up teaching and went to work for Lloyds Bank
of London. Friends think that, had he stayed in the City, he
might have risen to be a director of the Bank of England.
(Later, he gave up his bank job to join the publishing firm of
Faber & Gwyer, now Faber & Faber).
</p>
<p> But Eliot the banker, in his bowler hat, black coat and
sponge-bag (checked) trousers, was only one of several
simultaneous incarnations. There was also the dreamily
peripatetic Mr. Eliot who walked on the beach wearing, like
Prufrock, white flannel trousers and reading Virgil or Dante.
Above all, dogging the steps of the other Messrs. Eliot, was
the increasingly cynical young man who writes verse as polished
and as sharp as a Guardsman's sword. He created a gallery of
unforgettable characters; Mr. Apollinax, the faun-like, fragile
embodiment of the dry intellect (whose "laughter tinkled among
the teacups"); Apeneck Sweeney, the dumb incarnation of a brutal
age; Grishkin, the musky, eternally feline feminine:
</p>
<qt>
<l>Grishkin is nice: her Russian eye</l>
<l>Is underlined for emphasis.</l>
<l>Uncorseted, her friendly bust</l>
<l>Gives promise of pneumatic bliss.</l>
</qt>
<p> More and more clearly, Eliot saw and recorded the crumbling
of European civilization; more and more sharply, his verse
photographed the human ruins--an old man waiting for death in
a rented house; a tuberculous courtesan calling for lights in
decaying Venice; Apeneck Sweeney at an all-night party where,
in a soaring descant above the all-erasing vulgarity, "the
nightingales are singing near/ The Convent of the Sacred
Heart..."
</p>
<p> Few people were listening to nightingales, in the dawn
after World War I, when Eliot began to work on The Waste Land.
Their song came only faintly to Eliot himself, whose sense of
general calamity was intensified by private troubles. By 1920,
partly because of overwork in his dual career of banker and
poet, Eliot was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. While
resting under the care of a specialist at Lausanne, he finished
The Waste Land. He sent it for criticism to his friend,
brilliant, erratic Poet Ezra Pound (Eliot's avowed admiration
for Pound [who "discovered" him] has provoked bitter criticism.
Last year a jury of fellows of the U.S. Library of Congress,
including T.S. Eliot, awarded the annual $1,000 Bollingen Prize
for the "highest achievement of American Poetry" to Ezra Pound,
who was then in an insane asylum and under indictment for
treason [he had spent the war in Italy as propaganda broadcaster
for Mussolini]. Some critics attacked Eliot as being chiefly
responsible for the award, but the jury emphatically denied that
Eliot had nominated Pound for the award, or had exerted any
influence on his behalf.), who blue-penciled it down to half its
size. The poem first appeared in 1922, in the first issue of The
Criterion, the small literary magazine which T.S. Eliot was
editing with Lady Rothermere's backing (Until it folded on the
eve of World War II, The Criterion, though its circulation never
exceeded 900, was one of the most distinguished literary
magazines in the English-speaking world.) The Waste Land turned
out to be the most influential poem of the 20th Century.
</p>
<p> The Patched Mirror. The Waste Land is easier on the ear
than on the mind. It is like a kaleidoscopic mirror held up to
the age--a patched mirror which at first seems to reflect only
a heap of broken images, but which, to a longer view, blends
them into a single bizarre picture, at once as strange and as
familiar as one's own face (or one's own city) seen in a
recurring nightmare. The broken bits of mirror reflect
bittersweet scenes of past summers, and brown, foggy glimpses
of London; a hysterical woman in an ornate boudoir like a
candlelit tomb; women in a pub talking of postwar problems ("Now
Albert's coming back, make yourself a bit smart./ He'll want to
know what you done with that money he gave you/ To get yourself
some teeth...").
</p>
<p> Some of the splinters mirror images from other poems, from
legend or from history. These references invite the reader to
measure the squalor of his day against past splendors--Elizabeth and Leicester in a red and gold barge on the Thames
contrasted with an anonymous London girl of today, in a canoe
on the same Thames, being seduced without pleasure, without
interest ("My people humble people who respect/ Nothing...).
</p>
<p> Determining the tableau of aimlessness, decay and sterile
joy is the image that gives the poem its name: the parched
desert through which a wanderer struggles in search of an oasis.
When he comes upon a chapel in the arid mountains, he
significantly finds this symbol of faith broken and deserted--"There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home." But at the
deepest point of despair, the rumble of thunder brings promise
of rain to the waste land. The poem ends with the Hindu
incantation, like the first shower of long-looked-for rain,
shantih, shantih, shantih, meaning: "The Peace which passeth
understanding."
</p>
<p> The Lost Generation. Some of the critics reviewing The
Waste Land sniffed that it was indeed a piece that passed all
understanding (in its first issue, baffled, brash, bumptious
TIME reported that The Waste Land was rumored to have been
written as a hoax). But it brought Eliot a literary notoriety
that passed into fame. The "lost generation" embraced his sharp,
unsentimental lyricism; they voted Eliot their most
representative poet (a distinction which Eliot himself coldly
rejected). The age recognized itself in the patched mirror;
Eliot had touched a hidden spring in the century's frightened,
shut soul--and that soul began to open up to him a little. One
English girl sums up Eliot's impact on her youth. "Somehow
Eliot put the situation into words for us, and it was never so
bad again. Each in his own prison, but Eliot in the next cell,
tapping out his message, if not of hope, at least of defiance.
We would not measure out our lives with coffee spoons."
</p>
<p> T.S. Eliot, no more than his age, has emerged from the
waste land, but he has managed to rebuild, for himself, the
broken chapel in its midst. For a time, Eliot delighted the
Greenwich Village atheists by seeming to tackle the road of easy
cynicism; in The Hippopotamus (1920) he squirted heavy sarcasm
at the church ("The hippo's feeble steps may err/ In compassing
material ends,/ While the True Church need never stir/ To gather
in its dividends.,.."). Yet it was to the church that Eliot
turned.
</p>
<p> He gives a large but ironical measure of credit for his
final conversion to his former teacher, Bertrand Russell.
Eliot read one of his essays, A Free Man's Worship, in which the
philosopher gushily described the way he--and a lot of other
thinkers--saw the human condition on the hustle and Russell
of the scientific age. Man and his hopes and fears, according
to Russell, are the product of "accidental collocations of
atoms," his sense of sin a trait inherited from the beasts of
prey, his life determined by blind, unfriendly forces without
plan or purpose, his whole existence on his planet--which is
doomed to freeze to death when the sun dies--probably only a
cruel practical joke of God. What can man do in this abysmal
fix? Says Russell in effect: whistle a pretty symphony in the
dark. Man must worship his own visions of beauty and goodness
which now and then pop into his brain. (Russell does not say
whence they pop); in other words, man must worship man. After
reading this arid credo Eliot decided that the opposite
direction must be the right way. In 1927, he was confirmed in
the Church of England.
</p>
<p> The same year Eliot also became a British subject. It was
no more a sudden decision than his deciding to join the church.
Says he: In the end I thought: 'Here I am, making a living,
enjoying my friends here. I don't like being a squatter. I might
as well take the full responsibility.'"
</p>
<p> 1,000 Lost Golf Balls. Critics and fans who had idolized
the bitter, brittle Eliot were appalled when in 1930 he
published his first religious poem, Ash Wednesday, the sternly
beautiful statement of a man who has found his course ("Because
I do not hope to turn again..."). Undeterred, the "new" Eliot
continued to write his faith into his poetry.
</p>
<p> T.S. Eliot, ex-banker and successful publisher, has himself
raised the question: What are poets good for? The 20th Century
is not sure. Eliot thinks that by rights a poet should be
useful; he ought to guard the language against becoming barbaric
and that he ought to be entertaining. But the poet must also,
as Eliot puts it, "make us from time to time a little more
aware..."
</p>
<p> Against the modern heresy of automatic progress Eliot
asserts the Christian insight that sinful man is never safe from
evil. Against the notion of quantitative culture (i.e., the more
you read, the more you know), Eliot asserts that culture means
knowing a few things well rather than knowing many things a
little. In his pageant, The Rock (1934), he has made his
clearest, most striking admonition to his fellow man. Excerpts:
</p>
<qt>
<l>Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?</l>
<l>Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?</l>
<l>The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries</l>
<l>Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust...</l>
</qt>
<qt>
<l>The Word of the Lord came into me saying:</l>
<l>O miserable cities of designing men,</l>
<l>O wretched generation of enlightened men,</l>
<l>Betrayed in the mazes of your ingenuities,</l>
<l>Sold by the proceeds of your proper inventions:</l>
</qt>
<qt>
<l>I have given you hands which you turn from worship,</l>
<l>I have given you speech, for endless palaver,</l>
<l>I have given you my Law, and you set up commissions,</l>
<l>I have given you lips, to express friendly sentiments,</l>
<l>I have given you hearts, for reciprocal distrust...</l>
</qt>
<qt>
<l>In the land of lobelias and tennis flannels</l>
<l>The rabbit shall burrow and the thorn revisit,</l>
<l>The nettle shall flourish on the gravel court,</l>
<l>And the wind shall say: "Here were decent godless people:</l>
<l>Their only monument the asphalt road</l>
<l>And a thousand lost golf balls..."</l>
</qt>
<p> The Door Against Evil. In an age that equals optimism with
faith, it is fashionable to call Eliot a pessimist. Eliot is a
Christian and therefore, in a sense a "pessimist" about the
nature of man. Yet in his "pessimism" Eliot is far more hopeful
about man's future than most of the more secular prophets. On
a recent trip to Germany, German youth enthusiastically
responded to his talks about the need for an integrated
Christian community in Europe. ("The hell with Oswald Spengler!"
cried one Hamburg student, in sudden rebellion against one of
the century's foremost gods of gloom.)
</p>
<p> Eliot believes that there is only one way out of the waste
land--and that is not the middle way. He believes that the
Western nations must choose between a pagan society and a truly
Christian society. By a Christian society he does not mean rule
by the church, but a society that really lives by Christian
principles, which what he calls the "Community of Christians"
(a kind of spiritual elite) forming "the conscious mind and the
conscience of the nation." In his play Murder in the Cathedral
(1935), a dramatization of the murder of Archbishop Thomas a
Becket in Canterbury Cathedral, Eliot reminded his audience
that a faith can live only if the faithful are ready, in the
extreme of need, to die for it. While lesser men feebly tried
to bolt the door against evil, Thomas conquered evil by
submitting to death and martyrdom. It is a meaningful lesson for
a civilization anxiously trying to bolt the door against evil
whose champions are notable ready to give their lives for its
triumph.
</p>
<p> Eliot does not believe that the world can succeed in
forming a non-Christian, "rational" civilization--though it
is now trying to. Says he: "The experiment will fail; but we
must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile
redeeming the time; so that the Faith may be preserved alive
through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild
civilization, and save the world from suicide."
</p>
<p> The world came fairly close to suicide in World War II.
During the London blitz, Eliot spent two night a week as a fire-
watcher on the roof of his office building. From his perch above
what he has often called the "unreal city," Eliot observed, with
terror and compassion, the relentless fires. Had London's people
(and with them, Western civilization) gone down then, Eliot's
verse would have served as a magnificent and tender epitaph:
</p>
<qt>
<l>...Ash on an old man's sleeve</l>
<l>Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.</l>
<l>Dust in the air suspended</l>
<l>Marks the place where a story ended...</l>
</qt>
<p> Polyphiloprogenitive. The war only slightly disrupted
Eliot's ordered and somewhat lonely life. His wife, who had been
in a nursing home since 1930, died three years ago. Since the
war, Eliot has shared a flat in artistic Chelsea with his good
friend, Writer-Critic John Hayward (brilliant, witty Hayward,
almost completely paralyzed, manages to get about London in a
wheelchair). Eliot has the simple but expensive habits of an
English gentleman (although English gentlemen usually consider
him a typically American gentleman). He dresses well, likes
claret and good cheese. As a church warden at St. Stephen's in
Kensington, he performs his duties conscientiously.
</p>
<p> Now a full partner in the firm of Faber & Faber, he takes
his work as publisher as seriously as his work as poet ("writing
poetry is not a career," he says). He is known as the firm's
best and most prolific writer of book jacket blurbs. He has
little sympathy for poets who starve in garrets (It isn't
necessary"), but he frequently helps out of his own pocket (Not
a badly lined pocket, as poet's pockets go. Friends estimate
that Eliot makes about 4,000 pounds ($11,200) a year, including
some 2,500 pounds of royalties from his books and plays. His
income from The Cocktail Party in Manhattan is about $1,600 a
week.), an aspiring poet who submits work to him.
</p>
<p> As precisely as an Eliot rhyme clicking into place at the
end of the line, 4 o'clock each day brings tea with friends or
business acquaintances in Eliot's rather shabby, faded office,
where he is enthroned on a rickety wooden chair behind a massive
desk. At 6:30, he leaves for home, dines with Hayward unless he
has a pressing engagement, and returns to his room for what he
has called "the intolerable wrestle with words and meanings,"
Eliot admits that he will find numberless little things to
attend to rather than buckle down to work.
</p>
<p> Eliot types all his verse. He is a slow worker and tireless
reviser. He loves words, and when he comes across a particularly
fine specimen he stores it away for future use; sometimes he
also makes up words, e.g., "polyphiloprogenitive" (Eliot refuses
to say what he meant by it. Literally, "loving numerous
offspring.").
</p>
<p> To his friends (who call him Tom or "Old Possum"), T.S.
Eliot is a considerate, avuncular Puck who writes rhymes about
cats to entertain their children and likes to address letters
in verse ("Postman, propel thy feet/ And take this note to
greet/ The Mrs. Hutchinson/ Who lives in Charlotte Street..."). Eliot is a devoted Sherlock Holmes fan, is apt to emerge
from his room clad in Holmesian dressing gown and slippers, and
address his startled friend: "My dear Hayward, I am put in mind
of the incident in Bosnia, at the time of our struggle with the
Professor over the Crown Prince's jewel..."
</p>
<p> He also loves practical jokes. For years, Eliot patronized
a small store which specialized in exploding cigars, squirting
buttonholes and soapy chocolates. Once, on the Fourth of July,
at a solemn board meeting of Faber & Faber he set off a bucketful
of firecrackers between the chairman's legs.
</p>
<p> In a Harvard class history, Eliot has made some frank self-
revelations: "...I play a bad game of chess and like such
games as poker, rummy and slippery Ann for low stakes...I
never bet because I never win...I cannot afford yachting,
but I should like to breed bull terriers. I am afraid of high
places and cows..."
</p>
<p> Civilization and Poetry. Today, at 61, Mr. Eliot is secure
and honored in his high place as one of the foremost men of
English letters. In 1948, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for
literature and the Order of Merit (one of the highest British
orders, limited to 24 members). In his critical essays, he has
rendered Olympian judgments. Fellow critics swarm about Critic
Eliot like an army of Lilliputians, trying to tie him down to
some systematic "school"; when he stirs to reverse one of his
previous unfavorable decisions (as he has been known to do,
notably in the case of Milton), the swarm is agog for months.
</p>
<p> As a playwright, Eliot is still a little dazed by the
footlights. He resorts to chalk and blackboard to work out his
plots. Says he: "My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up
and down." (The Cocktail Party is his first play to be produced
on a large commercial scale. His only other full-length play,
apart from Murder in the Cathedral; The Family Reunion, the
story of a modern Orestes haunted by the Furies.)
</p>
<p> His collected poems fill only a thin volume--he believes
that a poet ought to write as little as possible--but they are
as different from most other 20th Century poetry as the sound
of bronze-pure bells from the shrilling of a telephone. An age
which reads in a hurry and likes to understand familiar meanings
with headline speed has accused Eliot of being obscure; much of
his poetry does require close attention, but none of it is as
catchy as a song hit.
</p>
<p> Is Eliot a great poet? His own age would not call him so,
and doubts that posterity will. In his revulsion from vulgarity
and muddled sentimentality, he has perhaps moved away too far
from the heat of emotion and the sweat of action. His attitude
toward the U.S. is significant. He remembers it fondly,
sometimes signs his name Tom (Missouri) Eliot, and like to sing
U.S. folk ballads, though he has a hard time staying on key.
But he does not seem to understand America (although he comes
to the U.S. on frequent visits), shrinks from its materialistic
gusto.
</p>
<p> If it ever was, civilization is nothing now to write poems
about. T.S. Eliot is a thinking and a feeling man, and a
Christian; he is not a happy man. The commentator on a tragedy
cannot be expected to sound like a radio announcer lip-deep in
molasses. He may sometimes crackle, but he will never snap or
pop.
</p>
<p> Eliot's indirect influence is wide and deep, but
incalculable. He has shown two generations of poets how to
write. He has shown that a man can be both clever and religious.
More interesting than Eliot's influence on others, however, is
the influence of others (notably his Christian predecessors) on
Eliot. One compelling reason why the audiences crowd his
Cocktail Party is that they recognize it, in the sense that
people always recognize it, in the sense that people always
recognize a compelling restatement of the old and certain
truths. They like Eliot for being clever, and at the same time
clear; but what counts most is the common sense, the humility
and the hope expressed in such lines as these:
</p>
<qt>
<l>The best of a bad job is all any of us make of it,--</l>
<l>Except of course, the saints...</l>
</qt>
</body>
</article>
</text>