This essay by Jackson Greer recounts the unlikely friendship between C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot. 

To attempt to identify poetry and ideology too closely damages both poetry and whatever ideas it is being wedded to. Poetry becomes a mere tool for propaganda and the ideas being propagandized are shown as insufficient to stand on their own. As Kirk puts it, “No man is saved by poetry.” This is the crux of Eliot’s criticism of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, of which Eliot wrote “it is a glimpse of a theology that I find in large part repellent, expressed through a mythology which would have better been left in the Book of Genesis, upon which Milton has not improved” (SP, 263). Milton failed, according to Eliot, in large part because he did not know when to be a theologian and when to be a poet. 

David Withun, "Making Peace with the World: T. S. Eliot and the Purpose of Poetry"

I have a new essay on Humane Pursuits today: "A Long Winter and the Discipline of Hope."

I first discovered the poetry of T.S. Eliot when I was, I think, in my late twenties. I hadn't really studied modern poetry before then and particularly his Four Quartets which was his last great work and really partly for which he won the Nobel Prize. This has meant an enormous amount to me and many other Christians. It's one of those poems that's inexhaustible, I don't claim to have understood more than bits of it, but there's something about it which is like a great symphony. It carries you along even if you can't necessarily whistle all the tunes as you go down the street. And it's about coming back to Christian faith as a resolution of all of the questions that he's had all throughout his life. As a result of which, he talks about words and meanings – wrestling with those. And the poem itself is wrestling with words and it finally comes back – every phrase and sentence that is right, this is what we're actually aiming for. The last great stanza of the poem is so memorable: "We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." And then he goes on, "All shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well, when the tongues of flame are enfolded into the crowned knot of fire and the fire and the rose are one." 

. . . 

Reading poetry is one of those funny things which different people approach differently. There's a danger of allowing the left brain to take over and say "I want to know what the meaning of every phrase is" but actually with poetry, like with music, you have to tell that bit of your brain to shut up and just feel the music, feel the rhythm, hear and sense the words as a sort of physical reality. Meaning will emerge from that but it will come through a different bit of you from how you would read say a mathematics text book or something. So poetry works at several different levels and Eliot was exploring all those different levels and that's one of the reasons he's so exciting.

N. T. Wright, interviewed by Krish Kandian

I came to these poems as a young man, an aspiring poet with little knowledge of either the wide world or the variety and depth of human experience within it. The poems took me immediately and forever to a deep, mysterious and timeless place where insights seemed as plentiful as stars. I'm more than half a century old, and yet their brilliance impresses, informs and inspires me still.

James Zinsmeister, "T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets: Where Time and Timeless Intersect"

In an essay republished on The Imaginative Conservative, T. S. Eliot gives his views on local culture.

Nearly every country, that has been long settled, is a composite of different local cultures; and even when it is completely homogeneous in race, it will, between east and west, or more often between north and south, exhibit differences of speech, of customs, and of ways of thinking and feeling. A small country of course, is usually assumed by foreigners to be much more unified than it r is: and although the educated foreigner is aware that Britain contains within its small area several races and several languages, he may underestimate the importance of both the friction, and the often happy combination toward a common end, of the different types. It is a commonplace that industrialism (of which totalitarianism is a political expression) tends to obliterate these differences, to uproot men from their ancestral habitat, to mingle them in large manufacturing and business centers, or to send them hither and thither as the needs of manufacture and distribution may dictate. In its political aspect, industrialism tends to centralize the direction of affairs in one large metropolis, and to diminish that interest in, and control over, local affairs by which men gain political experience and sense of responsibility. Against this tendency, “regionalism”—as in the demand, from time to time, for greater local autonomy in Scotland or in Wales—is a protest.

T.S. Eliot, "The Man of Letters and the Future of Europe"

There is an open space in the human heart–a void that seeks fulfillment and a hunger that longs for satisfaction. For the progressive this longing looks to the future. A brave new world is envisioned, an ideology is espoused and an action plan that brooks no dissent is put into place. 

For the conservative that same longing is not for a brave new world, but for a serene, old world. The progressive yearns for utopia. The conservative mourns for Eden. The progressive works for a revolution. The conservative seeks a resolution. The progressive destroys the past to build the future. The conservative restores the past to build the future. 

The driving motivation for the progressive is a gnawing unhappiness he wishes to placate by fabricating an untried recipe for happiness, while the conservative longs for a tried and true happiness he has lost and wishes to rediscover. This longing for a good that is gone or a bliss that can be faintly remembered is the beating heart of conservatism and the motor of its creativity. 

The nostalgia of the conservative is more than a reverence for past wisdom or an immature desire to return to the comfort of the nursery. It is more than the antiquarian’s interest in the artifacts of a bygone age. It is instead an intense bittersweet emotion that lifts and unlocks the heart and motivates creative and positive change.

Dwight Longenecker, "Looking for Another Country: Nostalgia and Desire in C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot"

I have an essay featured on Humane Pursuits today: "3 Ways Reading T. S. Eliot Can Help You Make Great Art."

Lynn Summer, discussing C. S. Lewis's relationship with T. S. Eliot:

Lewis detested the Modernist innovations apparent in Eliot's poetry. According to Lewis's friend and biographer George Sayer, "He tended to regard the new poetry with its formlessness and lack of poetic diction as a revolutionary movement deliberately directed against the traditions of English poetry." Although Lewis admired Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral (1935), he attacked much of Eliot's poetry and literary criticism, frequently citing The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917) in which Eliot likens evening to "a patient etherized upon a table." Lewis found Eliot's imagery so distasteful that he later wrote his own poetic response (A Confession). In A Preface to Paradise Lost, published in 1942, Lewis argued that the role of poetry is to teach its readers proper reactions ("stock responses") to universal themes such as love, death, and virtue. He maintained that modern poets including Eliot have abandoned their responsibility to elicit "that elementary rectitude of human response," much to the detriment of contemporary society. Hoping to expose what he termed the "Eliotic" style, Lewis and several friends submitted nonsensical poems to The Criterion, the influential journal Eliot edited, but their poems were never accepted for publication. Not until 1958, when the Archbishop of Canterbury invited both men to serve on the Commission to Revise the Psalter, did they become friends. Indeed, Lewis developed a genuine liking for the man whose poetry he had so long reviled, Ironically, perhaps, Lewis's most personal work, A Grief Observed, was submitted to Faber and Faber in 1961, the publishing house where Eliot served as director. Although Lewis never fully appreciated Eliot's poetry, he recognized that their shared faith ultimately transcended their differences, observing, "I agree with him about matters of such moment that all literary questions are, in comparison, trivial."

The C. S. Lewis Readers' Encyclopedia

What writers from our century will endure? Surely the poets T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden will make the list, both informed by Christian sensibility. Solzhenitsyn no doubt will, albeit more for the raw force of his words than for their craft. Perhaps J. R. R. Tolkien will also be read a century from now, his invention of another world still shedding light on this one.

One of those artists, T. S. Eliot, makes an interesting study. Faced with the political crises of communism and nazism, for twenty years he wrote little poetry, concerning himself instead with more “urgent” matters such as politics, economics, and pragmatic schemes to improve society. In such works as Idea of a Christian Society, After Strange Gods, and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, he turned away from firmly embedded nails and toward goads. Yet who reads those works today? Eliot’s poetry easily outlasted his well-intentioned ideas. Can we learn a lesson from Eliot? Perhaps the best way to achieve the values we approve is not to talk about them all the time, or to try and legislate them, but rather to create literature and art in which they are placed as firmly embedded nails.

Philip Yancey, "The Writer as Artist"

This afternoon I read T. S. Eliot's "East Coker," which was written in London during a time of national crisis (WW2). At this point in his life, Eliot saw society as becoming less rooted in the past and becoming more and more fragmented and chaotic, and he believed the only answer for society was Christianity.

Eliot knew that the key to giving modern society a sense of meaning involved re-gaining a deep respect for the past. Eliot believed that for the current generation to see themselves as completely on their own was supreme arrogance. We are always standing on the shoulders of our ancestors, and the desire to throw their wisdom away is utter foolishness.

I love these lines near the end of the poem:

     There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
     And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
     That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
     For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

     Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
     The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
     Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
     Isolated, with no before and after,
     But a lifetime burning in every moment
     And not the lifetime of one man only
     But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
     There is a time for evening under starlight,
     A time for the evening under lamplight
     (The evening with the photograph album).
     Love is most nearly itself
     When here and now cease to matter.

These words by T. S. Eliot remind me of C. S. Lewis's concept of chronological snobbery. Eliot would say we live in an age of chronological provincialism. We live in an age when the past is ignored or seen as inferior, an age of the Now, an age of live tweeting, an age when most people are chronological rednecks, people who can't imagine or even understand any time other than their own.

In our age, when men seem more than ever prone to confuse wisdom with knowledge, and knowledge with information, and try to solve problems of life in terms of engineering, there is coming into existence a new kind of provincialism, not of space, but of time; one for which history is merely the chronicle of human devices which served their turn and have been scrapped, one for which the world is the property solely of the living, a property in which the dead hold no shares. The menace of this kind of provincialism is, that we can all, all the people on the globe, be provincials together; and those who are not content to be provincials, can only become hermits. If this kind of provincialism led to greater tolerance, in the sense of forbearance, there might be more to be said for it; but it seems more likely to lead to our becoming indifferent, in matters where we ought to maintain a distinctive dogma or standard, and to our becoming intolerant, in matters which might be left to local or personal preference.

T. S. Eliot, "What is a Classic?"

In the early mornings for the last month, I've been spending time with T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, the collection of four poems that Eliot considered to be his masterpiece. For years, I've been fascinated by several passages in the poem (portions of  "Little Gidding" in particular), and I wanted to finally come to understand the poem deeply. Written just before and during World War 2, the poems are expressions of hope in a dark time. I've found it relevant for our own time in many ways.

I've enjoyed this process of reading/studying the poem. I'm actually writing the poem out by hand. On the left-hand side of a notebook, I'm copying the text of the poem, and on the right-hand side, I'm annotating, with help from a study guide. This process has helped me to slow down and connect with each line. It's a great way to start the day, and I find that it prepares me to meet with God in His Word and in prayer a few minutes later. So far, I've made it through "Burnt Norton," "East Coker," and "The Dry Salvages," and at last I'm into "Little Gidding," my personal favorite of all that I've read of T. S. Eliot.

I've especially found this essay by Roger Scruton to be helpful in summing up Eliot's vision.

Roger Scruton explains why the modern poet/critic must be essentially conservative:

For let us ask ourselves just what is required of “one who knows” [the poet/critic]. Should he, in the modern world, devote himself like Sartre or Foucault to undermining the “structures” of bourgeois society, to scoffing at manners and morals, and ruining the institutions upon which he depends for his exalted status? Should he play the part of a modern Socrates, questioning everything and affirming nothing? Should he go along with the mindless culture of play, the post-modernist fantasy world in which all is permitted since neither permission nor interdiction have any sense?

To answer yes to any of those questions is in effect to live by negation, to grant nothing to human life beyond the mockery of it. It is to inaugurate and endorse the new world of “transgression,” a world which will not reproduce itself, since it will undermine the very motive which causes a society to reproduce. The conservative response to modernity is to embrace it, but to embrace it critically, in full consciousness that human achievements are rare and precarious, that we have no God-given right to destroy our inheritance, but must always patiently submit to the voice of order and set an example of orderly living. The future of mankind, for the socialist, is simple: pull down the existing order, and allow the future to emerge. But it will not emerge, as we know. These philosophies of the “new world” are lies and delusions, products of a sentimentality which has veiled the facts of human nature.

"T. S. Eliot as Conservative Mentor"

Roger Scruton on T. S. Eliot's "Little Gidding":

These lines take us back to the core belief of modern conservatism, which Burke expressed in the following terms: Society, he wrote, is indeed a contract; but not a contract among the living only; rather, it is a partnership between the living, the dead, and those yet to be born. And, he argued, only those who listen to the dead are fit custodians of future generations. Eliot’s complex theory of tradition gives sense and form to this idea. For he makes clear that the most important thing that future generations can inherit from us is our culture. Culture is the repository of an experience which is at once local and placeless, present and timeless, the experience of a community as sanctified by time. This we can pass on only if we too inherit it. Therefore, we must listen to the voices of the dead, and capture their meaning in those brief, elusive moments when “History is now and England.” In a religious community, such moments are a part of everyday life. For us, in the modern world, religion and culture are both to be gained through a work of sacrifice. But it is a sacrifice upon which everything depends. Hence, by an extraordinary route, the modernist poet becomes the traditionalist priest: and the stylistic achievement of the first is one with the spiritual achievement of the second.

"T. S. Eliot as Conservative Mentor"

For Eliot, therefore, conversion was not a matter merely of acknowledging the truth of Christ. It involved a conscious gesture of belonging, whereby he united his poetical labors with the perpetual labor of the Anglican church. For the Anglican church is peculiar in this: that it has never defined itself as “protestant”; that it has always sought to accept rather than protest against its inheritance, while embracing the daring belief that the truths of Christianity have been offered in a local form to the people of England. It is a church which takes its historical nature seriously, acknowledging that its duty is less to spread the gospel among mankind than to sanctify a specific community. And in order to fit itself for this role, the Anglican church has, through its divines and liturgists, shaped the English language according to the Christian message, while also bringing that message into the here and now of England.

Roger Scruton, "T. S. Eliot as Conservative Mentor"

For Eliot, religion in general, and the Christian religion in particular, should not be seen merely in Platonic terms as an attitude towards what is eternal and unchanging. The truth of our condition is that we are historical beings who find whatever consolation and knowledge is vouchsafed to us in time. The consolations of religion come to us in temporal costume, through institutions that are alive with the spirit of history. To rediscover our religion is not to rise free from the temporal order; it is not to deny history and corruption, in order to contemplate the timeless truths. On the contrary, it is to enter more deeply into history, so as to find in the merely transitory the mark and the sign of that which never passes: it is to discover the “point of intersection of the timeless with time,” which is, according to Four Quartets, the occupation of the saint.

Roger Scruton, "T. S. Eliot as Conservative Mentor"

Eliot was brought up in a democracy. He inherited that great fund of public spirit which is the gift of American democracy to the modern world and the cause of so much ignorant hatred of America. But he was not a democrat in his sensibility. Eliot believed that culture could not be entrusted to the democratic process precisely because of the carelessness with words, this habit of unthinking cliché, which would always arise when every person is regarded as having an equal right to express himself. In The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism he writes:

When the poet finds himself in an age in which there is no intellectual aristocracy, when power is in the hands of a class so democratised that while still a class it represents itself to be the whole nation; when the only alternatives seem to be to talk to a coterie or soliloquize, the difficulties of the poet and the necessity of criticism become greater.[2]

Hence, the critic has, for Eliot, an enhanced significance in the modern, democratic world. It is he who must act to restore what the aristocratic ideal of taste would have spontaneously generated—a language in which words are used with their full meaning and in order to show the world as it is. Those nurtured on empty sentiment have no weapons with which to deal with the reality of a god-forsaken world. They fall at once from sentimentality into cynicism, and so lose the power either to experience life or to live with its imperfection.

Eliot therefore perceived an enormous danger in the liberal and “scientific” humanism which was offered by the prophets of his day. This liberalism seemed to him to be the avatar of moral chaos, since it would permit any sentiment to flourish and would deaden all critical judgement with the idea of a democratic right to speak—which becomes, insensibly, a democratic right to feel. Although “human kind cannot bear very much reality”—as he expresses the point, first in Murder in the Cathedral, and then in Four Quartets—the purpose of a culture is to retain that elusive thing called “sensibility”: the habit of right feeling. Barbarism ensues, not because people have lost their skills and scientific knowledge, nor is it averted by retaining those things; rather, barbarism comes through a loss of culture, since it is only through culture that the important realities can be truly perceived.

 Roger Scruton, "T. S. Eliot as Conservative Mentor"

[T. S. Eliot] believed that his contemporaries’ use of worn-out poetic diction and lilting rhythms betrayed a serious moral weakness: a failure to observe life as it really is, a failure to feel what must be felt towards the experience that is inescapably ours. And this failure is not confined, he believed, to literature, but runs through the whole of modern life. The search for a new literary idiom is therefore part of a larger search—for the reality of modern experience. Only then can we confront our situation and ask ourselves what should be done about it.

Roger Scruton, "T. S. Eliot as Conservative Mentor"

Roger Scruton on T. S. Eliot' lifestyle and his calling as a poet:

Eliot was also a man of the world. He worked first as a teacher, then in a London bank, and then in the publishing house of Faber and Faber, which he made into the foremost publisher of poetry and criticism in its day. His unhappy first marriage did not impede his active participation in the literary life of London, over which he exerted an influence every bit as great as André Breton over the literary life of Paris.

His refusal, through all this, to adopt the mantle of the bohemian, to claim the tinsel crown of artist, or to mock the “bourgeois” lifestyle, sets him apart from the continental tradition which he otherwise did so much to promote. He realized that the true task of the artist in the modern world is one not of repudiation but of reconciliation. For Eliot, the artist inherits, in heightened and self-conscious form, the very same anxieties that are the stuff of ordinary experience. The poet who takes his words seriously is the voice of mankind, interceding for those who live around him, and gaining on their behalf the gift of consciousness with which to overcome the wretchedness of secular life. He too is an ordinary bourgeois, and his highest prize is to live unnoticed amidst those who know nothing of his art—as the saint may live unnoticed among those for whom he dies.

"T. S. Eliot as Conservative Mentor"