Orwell gave these poems a mixed to negative review, comparing them unfavourably to Eliot's earlier works. He suggests that Eliot sold out to religion, as he grew older, as an aid to coping with the meaningless of life with which he had struggled. Nothing too 'shocking' in that, but what really caught my thoughts was the subtle acuity of Orwell's well written reading-between-the-lines. It was so good, I here share an extract from it.
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So long a man regards himself as an individual, his attitude towards death must be one of simple resentment. And however unsatisfactory this may be, if it is intensely felt it is more likely to produce good literature than a religious faith which is not really felt at all, but merely accepted against the emotional grain.
... Mixed up with [these poems being about certain localities] is a rather gloomy musing upon the nature and purpose of life, with the rather indefinite conclusion I have mentioned above. Life has a 'meaning', but it is not a meaning one feels inclined to grow lyrical about; there is a faith, but not much hope, and certainly no enthusiasm. Now the subject-matter of Mr Eliot's early poems was very different from this. They were not hopeful, but neither were they depressed or depressing. If one wants to deal in antitheses, one might say that the later poems express a melancholy faith and the earlier ones a glowing despair. They were based on the dilemma of modern man, who despairs of life and does not want to be dead, and on top of this they expressed the horror of an over-civilized intellectual confronted with the ugliness and spiritual emptiness of the machine age. ... Clearly [his older] poems were an end-product, the last gasp of a cultural tradition, poems which spoke only for the cultivated third-generation rentier for people able to feel and criticize but no longer able to act. E.M. Forster praised 'Prufrock' on its first appearance because 'it sang of people who were ineffectual and weak' and because it was 'innocent of public spirit' (this was during the other war, when public spirit was a good deal more rampant than it is now). The qualities by which any society is to last longer than a generation actually has to be sustained — industry, courage, patriotism, frugality, philoprogenitiveness — obviously could not find any place in Eliot's early poems. There was only room for rentier values, the values of people too civilized to work, fight or even reproduce themselves. But that was the price that had to be paid, at any rate at that time, for writing a poem worth reading. The mood of lassitude, irony, disbelief, disgust, and not the sort of beefy enthusiasm demanded by the Squires and Herberts, was what sensitive people actually felt. It is fashionable to say that in verse only words count and the 'meaning' is irrelevant, but in fact every poem contains a prose meaning, and when the poem is any good it is a meaning which the poet urgently wishes to express. All art is to some extent propaganda [my emphasis]. ...
But the trouble is that conscious futility is something only for the young. One cannot go on 'despairing of life' into a ripe old age. One cannot go on and on being 'decadent,' since decadence means falling and one can only be said to be falling if one is going to reach the bottom reasonably soon. Sooner or later one is obliged to adopt a positive attitude towards life and society. It would be putting it too crudely to say that every poet in our time must either die young, enter the Catholic church, or join the Communist Party, but in fact the escape from conscious futility is along those general lines. There are other deaths besides physical death, and there are other sects and creeds besides the Catholic Church and the Communist Party, but it remains true that after a certain age one must either stop writing or dedicate oneself to some purpose not wholly aesthetic. Such a dedication necessarily means a break with the past...
Eliot's escape from individualism was into the Church, the Anglican Church as it happened. One ought not to assume that the gloomy Pétainism to which he now appears to have given himself over was the unavoidable result of his conversion. The Anglo-Catholic movement does not impose any political 'line' on its followers... In theory it is still possible to be an orthodox religious believer without being intellectually crippled in the process; but it is far from easy, and in practice books by orthodox believers usually show the same cramped, blinkered outlook as books by orthodox Stalinists or others who are mentally unfree. The reason is that the Christian churches still demand assent to doctrines which no one seriously believe in...
I do not know, but I should imagine that the struggle with meanings would have loomed smaller, and the poetry would have seemed to matter more, if he could have found his way to some creed which did not start off by forcing one to believe the incredible (275-8).
A very interesting comment. And, in a curious fushigi*-ness, the section I emphasized corresponds to a comment a made in the web based social group, Goodreads to a poet-wannabe. It involved the purpose of poetry being (or not being) to impart a message:
I elaborated later on:
I have put this as a fushigi because Orwell takes a stand 180 degrees from my argument in the comment he made about writing, as I've emphasized above. So, who's right? Both? Neither? I am tempted to suggest that capital 'L' Life has no problem at all holding contradictory truths simultaneously, and that it is only the limits of rational mind that finds this problematic. And by a great leap of irrational argumentation, I suggest that Orwell's argument, in contradicting my — and, let's face it, not my argument but that of the Taoist philosophers — is in fact the Taoist contention that Tao is beyond words truthful or false:
I elaborated later on:
¡ POETRY ! group. Nov 29, 2010 09:54pm
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And I feel the impulse to comment on your question, with acknowledgement to and affirmation of Julie George's comment — we — meaning the readers — are the message. The need for language to speak a common language is essential to understanding, of course, otherwise words would be gibberish (or babel, if you prefer). But beyond what I am tempted to call 'basic' understanding skills, language of the heart and soul speaks to the individual's heart and soul uniquely. One person's sea of love is another's wave of virility.
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I have put this as a fushigi because Orwell takes a stand 180 degrees from my argument in the comment he made about writing, as I've emphasized above. So, who's right? Both? Neither? I am tempted to suggest that capital 'L' Life has no problem at all holding contradictory truths simultaneously, and that it is only the limits of rational mind that finds this problematic. And by a great leap of irrational argumentation, I suggest that Orwell's argument, in contradicting my — and, let's face it, not my argument but that of the Taoist philosophers — is in fact the Taoist contention that Tao is beyond words truthful or false:
If words were satisfactory, we could speak the whole day and it would all be about the Way [Tao]; but if words are unsatisfactory, we can speak the whole day and it will all be about things. The Way is the delimitation of things. Neither words nor silence are satisfactory for conveying it. Without words and without silence, our deliberations reach their utmost limits.
— Chuang-Tse
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