While Hilda Doolittle was living a life of exploration, across London a bank manager fretted about his marriage. Thomas Sterns Eliot, a Missourian who spoke with considerable British affect, earned a reputation as a poet, a classicist, and a critic for his depictions of urban life in the 1920s and ’30s. As famous as a poet can be, T.S. Eliot garnered publicity in the literary and traditional press. He assumed the imagined qualities of the London haut-bourgeoisie. An early advocate for the disruptive force of the new, Eliot eventually settled into the conventions which his poetry challenged.
T.S. Eliot was born in 1888, and raised in the semi-frontier of St. Louis, Missouri. Like many young Americans enchanted with literature, his imagination was drawn across the Atlantic. For one whose reputation would soon be linked to modernity, his life and works reveal an impulse toward constant return. Re-turn to the classics in order to find one’s place in the world. Paris and London afforded him celebrity and acclaim, from which he never extricated himself.
War is a subject often associated with Eliot’s poems: the “great” war of 1914–1917; the second “world” war of 1933–1945. The characters in his poetry express desperation in the face of uncertain circumstances in a changing world. Two wars marked the parentheses of his intellectual life. Life in Europe at the time was defined by one’s relation to war. For all the promises of modernity, industrialization proved incapable of delivering an irenic new reality from which society may flourish. True of all moments in time, the individual was caught within a web of competing circumstances, often pulled in tragic directions, through no fault beyond their merest being-there. Eliot sought to express the anxieties felt across the social spectrum.
Time — instead — is Eliot’s fructifying subject. In the Four Quartets, the voice of Qoheleth is channeled.
“In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur, and feces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.”
Impermanence has been interpreted across time with fear and wonder. The impermanence of suffering provides comfort — all things must pass. On the other hand, the eventual loss of our collective endeavors fills many with dread. T.S. Eliot’s apprehension is palpable, expressed with bitterness, often fixated on loss. Despite the comforts of his life — his career, his accolades, his contributions to literature — Eliot’s preoccupations circled around the madness infecting him, his wife, and the society around him. The world stumbled into war, indifferent to the words of protest he expressed. His relationships suffered his pretenses. His prejudices betrayed his professed faith. From his perspective, the impermanence of the past defined the shape of history.
And yet, the time for living and generation has not passed. Life perseveres.
Ideas of time were transforming during this period, most notably with Einstein’s theories of relativity. The link between time and matter could be described in mathematically simple terms. Motion and gravity warped the fixity of time, which caused much consternation in those who worry. But time was being liberated from clocks, calendars, and watches. Time became mutable. It changed for objects in relation to one another. Although the difference is infinitesimally small, the time experienced for the newly minted aviators of the twentieth-century varied measurably from the time experienced by those bound to the earth. Physics internalized time within the individual in a new way. Our actions, perhaps our thoughts, alter time. Our experience of time is directly related to how we spend that time.
And so, Eliot was right. One’s relation to the still point of the turning world determines one’s relation to the dance.
