The Moral Commitment

...It is interesting to see that, though the mature Eliot was a profound critic of the 20th century, Ehot the boy had a kind word for it His Poems Written in Early Youth (first printed m Stockholm in 1950 by Albert Bonniers in an edition of 12 copies) has now been edited by his wife, Valerie Ehot, and John Hayward As a youth of 17 attending the Smith Academy in St Louis, Ehot had the customary teenage optimism about the future In some lines written in 1905 on the occasion of the graduation of his high school class, he sounded this call to his generation Great duties call??the twentieth century More grandly dowered than those which came before, Summons??who knows what tune may hold in store, Of what great deeds the distant years may see, What conquest over pain and misery, What heroes greater than were of yore1 But if this century is to be more great Than those before, her sons must make her so, And we are of her sons, and we must go With eager hearts to help mold well her fate, And see that she shall gain such proud estate As shall on future centuries bestow A legacy of benefits??may we In future years be found with those who try To labor for the good until they die, And ask no other guerdon than to know That they have helpt the cause to victory, That with their aid the flag is raised on high What an astonishing passage' So incredibly confident and American' It is difficult to believe that Ehot was the author Ehot himself, on re-reading these lines many years later, was astonished In a note to his friend and editor John Hayward, he wrote, "I hope you will be impressed by the pathos of the hopes which I expressed for the twentieth century " Nevertheless, the moral commitment is characteristic Eliot clearly cast his lot with those who "labor for the good until they die," and who can deny that he worked for the good of society all his life, however differently from his intellectual contemporaries he construed that good9 Although neither Eliot's high school graduation ode nor the remaining 12 poems (one appears in two different versions) are very good, the collection does reveal his early skill and grace in handling traditional measures, notably in the poems he wrote for the Harvard Advocate??such poems as "Circe's Palace," "Song," and "Spleen " Yet the elegance of these poems seems, somehow, shaky and derivative, one detects Laforgue's irony m the urban d?¦cor...

...The Moral Commitment POEMS WRITTEN IN EARLY YOUTH By TS Eliot Farrar, Straus & Giroux 38 pp $3 95 Reviewed by STEPHEN STEPANCHEV Professor of English Queens College, author, "American Poetry Since 1945" Two years have passed since the death of T S Ehot Now only Ezra Pound and Marianne Moore are left of the remarkable generation of poets that included Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, E E Cummings, Hart Crane, and Carl Sandburg Among these poets, Eliot was pre-emment for the complexity and intellectual rigor of his work, for his extraordinary philosophical scope, and his sense of the present simultaneously conditioning and being conditioned by the past...

...This is not to say, however, that Ehot is operative as an influence m the poetry of the 1960s The fact is that the young poet, intent on discovering his own voice and his own melody in the rhythms of American speech, does not find Ehot particularly "useful" He is much more likely today to study Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams among the older poets or Charles Olson and Robert Bly among the younger ones In assessing Eliot's achievement, one inevitably comes to the observation that it is essentially and beautifully Romantic, though Ehot would no doubt frown and grumble at the characterization But to love the classics is not to be a Classical poet, necessarily, and to love Royalty and the Anglican Church is, it seems to me, to be as nostalgic and Romantic as S T Coleridge, John Keats, and Sir Walter Scott were in their medievalism??their love of pageantry, ruined castles, and zealous monks Eliot's love of the past and its visible reminders, like the Church, was made urgent by forces of the age in which he came to manhood, the decade of the First World War And it should be remembered that Eliot was not the only poet of the time who believed the center could not hold and that things were falling apart...

...His answer was a Romantic answer with the pathos and charm of Romantic aspiration He wanted the beauty and order of a unified, hierarchic state m which all men worked for the common good, and for the glory of God under the guidance of a divinely inspired Church How else can one read The Waste Land with its great dramatic image of the 20th century as a spiritual desert where men move about hopelessly, mechanically, burning m the fires of lust, preserving a few fragments of the past which they find unreadable, meaningless7 It is a longing for the past that we find here, a desire for some Golden Age from which the present iron or brass age has declined, it is a longing, really, for a return to the Garden from which man was expelled and thereafter doomed to have in time, a dying animal...

...As early as 1917, when he was shaping a rationale for his poetic experiments with stream of consciousness, free verse, and resonant imagery of the "objective correlative" variety (his love of privacy led him to extol "anonymity" as a poetic ideal), Ehot declared "The existing order is complete before the new work arrives, for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered " I think it can now be said that the novelties he introduced??none more striking than the reappearance of ideas m poetry??have been assimilated and become part of that marvelous order, now slightly altered, of imperishable works in English Such poems as The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock (written when he was 23 years old, just out of Harvard), The Waste Land and Four Quartets are part of the English curriculum m most colleges, both here and abroad, isn't it a sign of immortality, after all, to be "required reading" among the young, among those who can so easily be distracted by a blue eye or long hair...

...Clearly, Ehot was engaged in a moving attempt to restore the symbols of the tribe, for he hoped to induce faith by means of these symbols The emotional origin of the attempt is obvious, but Ehot was too much a man of intellect to disregard the power of reason in the struggle In fact, he was famous for his criticism of the "dissociation of sensibility" in this century, that is, the separation of mind from feeling, and he worked to restore their harmonious cooperation in literature as m life Yet it must be said that, while Ehot by exercising his reason, argued himself into a need for faith in order to build the kind of social and religious order that he envisioned it is still not altogether clear that he actually (and not just symbolically) made the transition from reason to faith and achieved the psychological harmony he always said every man needed...

...The poems date from 1904-1910, except one, "The Death of St Narcissus," which seems to have been written somewhat later and was suppressed in proof after having been accepted for publication by Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry The opening line of this poem is curiously reminiscent of a passage in Part I of The Waste Land "Come under the shadow of this gray rock " Ehot evidently cannibalized this line (and the succeeding six) for his masterpiece...