Our Greatest Pilgrim Poet?

“The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound—that he will never get over it.”
—Robert Frost                                                             

When T.S. Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, it was not on the strength of the plays he had written that determined the choice of the Committee in Stockholm. Leaving aside Murder in the Cathedral, his moving dramatization of the death by martyrdom of Thomas Beckett, which came out in 1935, he’d scarcely written any plays at all. It was, rather, the poetry that justified the award, among which may be found the finest blooms in the English language.  

Not since the great Metaphysical Poets of the Elizabethan Age, in fact, has there been such a flowering of creative genius as seen in the verse of just one 20th century poet. And the summit to which all the poems point, without question, is Four Quartets, that lyric-strewn meditation, published in 1943, upon whose inspiration stands the whole meaning of time and history in their continuing collision with eternity and Heaven. “A people without history,” warned Eliot, 

Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern 
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.

Here at “Little Gidding,” the culminating section of the poem, we are introduced to one of several places where Eliot’s imagination took root, where it found its nourishment for flight. But, as he reminds us early on in the poem, “Here and there does not matter,” it could be any place and at any time. What matters is the disposition of the soul, that its guiding resolution remain “still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion.”

What finally matters, then, is that whatever the time or place, its optimal point of terminus can only be 

At the still point of the turning world, 
Where past and future are gathered.  

Because without that intersection of time and the timeless, the mysterious coming together of history and Heaven, God and the world, we shall miss the choreography of the dance, which is to be found only at the still point. Again, as he plainly tells us, “Except for the point, the still / point,                         

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

And for all that human forgetfulness or sin may cause us to miss the dance, thus failing to learn the steps, nevertheless it is the end point toward which we are meant to move, to situate ourselves at every turn. Of course, concedes Eliot, mindful of the fallen world in which we live, it remains an ever-elusive end, 

Never here to be realized;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying…

So there is hope for us, after all, despite all our failings. Because, at the end of the day, what matters most is that we try, that we be willing to soldier on, that we not desist or grow weary in making the journey. “There is only the fight to recover what has been lost,” he explains. “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.

What a strange paradox with which to surround ourselves. The fact that what we are asked to do—indeed, we are enjoined no less by God Himself to do it—is to aim for a sanctity we cannot reach on our own. Hitting the bullseye of beatitude is not a skill set we possess; nature’s arrows are neither accurate nor sharp enough to strike the target. Even as we are given to understand that here is a project on which we are expected to begin right away. 

Quick now, here, now, always—

We simply cannot pull it off in the absence of grace, a free gift we so often resist, falling down on the job. Still, the high road we are to set out upon in search of sanctity beckons us at every moment and in every place we find ourselves. It is a journey that must be made in conformity to Christ, who became one of us, concretely incarnate in the human being Jesus, in order to show us the way. Indeed, he is the way we are to be shown. Such a life spent in ardent and unremitting pursuit of “the still point of the turning world,” is nothing less than “an occupation for the saint—

No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love,
Ardor and selflessness and self-surrender.                      

And so (to summarize), it has always been Four Quartets that represents the peak moment in the achievement of T.S. Eliot. Accordingly, to parse the mind of the nominating committee, it would always be the poetry, the verse, that would account for Eliot getting his award. And if, after Four Quartets, the poetic juices appear to have run dry, leaving little more than twenty years until his death in 1965, the sense of drama was far from dead. 

In fact, in the following year, 1949, there appeared a play called The Cocktail Party, which would prove to be the most widely acclaimed of all Eliot’s dramatic works. From the splash of its initial success, wave upon wave of applause would follow. Likewise with the two remaining plays, that of The Confidential Clerk and The Elder Statesman, which, while generating rather less of a persisting and popular splash, nevertheless endure as works of art. 

And here a distinction needs to be made, one on which I will close this essay. The art of poetry, of which Eliot has remained so magisterial an example, is largely a private affair, and the pleasures imparted are likewise mostly private. But plays are not like that at all. The voice of drama is not a private exercise, nor are the pleasures we associate with dramatic performance intended for private consumption. There is always an audience, one whose attention needs to be arrested straightaway and then sustained throughout the entire performance.  

A wonderful Shakespearean performer by the name of Ralph Richardson used to say, “Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing.” Having witnessed not a few productions of The Cocktail Party, I can confidently say that no one coughed. 

And the reason they don’t is because the material of the play remains too riveting to turn an audience’s attention away from it. The play, like the poetry, holds them in thrall, not just due to the magic of the language, the words spoken, but to those intersecting moments of mystery evoked by the words—moments when the timeless touches time, and the characters, along with ourselves who live vicariously through them, are moved by “a grace of sense…still and moving.” At such grace-filled moments, we find ourselves bathed in the beauty and the light of God. And we never quite get over it. 

[Image Credit: Keystone Press/Alamy Stock Photo]