While T.S. Eliot is has a reputation as a Christian poet and certainly uses oodles of Biblical imagery, I don’t think Christians should read him as a Christian poet.
First an exposition of Eliot’s style:
His post-conversion poems are given a sacred quality by his use of a metaphysical flavor – he uses sensory images to convey a spiritual idea. In Four Quartets, he repeatedly begins with a concrete (if surreal) experience, only to move out of the concrete as the stanzas progress, like a spirit has left his body and gone walking. He spirit-walks for a while, looking foggily back at earth, then jumps into the new world of the brain to start a more abstract discussion, finally returning to the image world in the end.
You can tell his mind is subtle and teeming with questions and ideas. The whole of Four Quartets is difficult to grasp because all the parts are so mind-stretching (much like quartets written by great composers; they are beautiful, but one must listen twice, or three or four times to understand them). Its overarching structure has multiple meanings stacked, and there are isopomorphisms across structure, sound, meaning, and even into his other poems. Eliot’s poetry comprises a universe of its own, filled with recurring themes and recurring characters like the hollow men, Sweeney Todd, variations on Prufrock, and sea women. They wheel about, evading the definitive but painting a lovely picture of our own ambivalences and disillusionments.
This use of recycled and recurring characters, and the way he layers his own ideas matches his use of external sources – the philosophical statements found in Four Quartets borrow from multiple traditions to make a philosophical point; in “Little Gidding” (last part of Four Quartets) Christianity is melded with Buddhism. The liturgical form reflects Anglicanism; the theme matches Buddha’s Fire Sermon.
This is what bothers me. Christian imagery might be there, but other traditions take equally prominent places. Even if T.S. Eliot had faith, his poems do not point to God but to man. The book of the Bible Eliot favors is Ecclesiastes. His work cannot be placed alongside Herbert’s meditations on God’s grace or Donne’s poetry sermons.
Now, a bit on his life. Five years after Eliot converted to Anglicanism (which he did the same year he became a British citizen, in 1927), Eliot arranged to be separated from his wife. He did not even meet with her to discuss his action. Six years later, she was committed to an insane asylum, and he never visited her. She died in 1947. I pity Eliot because he had a mad wife but I pity him more for abandoning her. Here is the shadow version of C.S. Lewis, another retiring literary man who liked mythologies, but less brave and perhaps less honest. C.S. Lewis may have been a sinner, but he was still lightful, with God’s fire in his heart compelling him to saturate his books with Him. Eliot is lukewarm. He wavers like the reflections of a candle in a mug of half-drunk tea.
I wonder if Eliot clung to God as his hope and salvation? I wonder if Eliot believed we ought to “serve the Lord with trembling”? (Psalm 2) Or did he become an Anglican the way he turned English, not in substance but only in name? Not in the blood, but only the brain?
(Perhaps I shouldn’t be so hard on him. It is hard to become a Christian with all sorts of messes in your past, and we all know Christians are fallible; evidence David, Abraham, Paul, and all the great followers of God. But his poetry does not display adequately the faith that could have been in his heart. I get very uncomfortable reading something so close to Christianity yet so distant, especially when he is an author close to my heart. T.S. Eliot appeared to me as a child in a blue hardback book in my dad’s shelves. I read the cats poems and danced to the musical with my sisters on the carpet of our living room, and just this year, I’ve been looking at his “grownup” works. I don’t think my intense admiration for his writing will ever diminish –
All the same, he makes me wonder…)
http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2011/10/12/2972229.htm
http://www.christianitytoday.com/history/people/poets/ts-eliot.html