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COPYRIGHT 2005 Marquette University Press
When T. S. Eliot revealed in 1928 that the viewpoint of his forthcoming work would be "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, anglo-catholic in religion," (Andrewes ix) many critics were not amused. Or else, like Sherry Mangan, they were very amused indeed: If even certain Anglo-French circles in Paris which are in close touch with the English scene still consider the best joke of the past three years Mr Eliot's "daring" in proclaiming himself a royalist in politics (and after all, for England, it is pretty funny), of
how much less interest to our present generation in America are Mr Eliot's however sincere preoccupations with out-cocteauing M Cocteau in what is to American-born eyes the so much swankier English Church. (296) Who could begrudge such critics their cynicism? The poet they had come to revere as the voice of daily death in modern America was now to be identified not just with Christianity, but with England? It is little wonder that, as Eloise Knapp Hay notes, "Van Wyck Brooks and other patriotic American critics scathingly paired him with Henry James as another failed American" (15). To such critics it was inconceivable that Eliot would ever again enjoy the admiration he had merited in such works as "Prufrock" and The Waste Land.
It is noteworthy that when Eliot officially acknowledged his conversion, it was in his preface to a collection of critical essays entitled For Lancelot Andrewes. In the years leading up to this event, the seventeenth-century Bishop of Winchester had become something of an obsession for Eliot. Two years before his baptism into the Anglican Church, he had written the leading essay of the collection named above, in which, notwithstanding his great fondness for the metaphysicals, he extolled Andrewes's prose style above that of Donne. And of course, as is readily acknowledged, the first lines of "Journey of the Magi," written only one year before, were an almost word-for-word borrowing from a sermon on the Nativity that Andrewes preached at Whitehall in 1622. Critics have been comparatively silent, however, about the voice of Andrewes in Ash-Wednesday, the first of Eliot's major poems to follow his public conversion.
This is not to say that readers of the poem fail to apprehend Andrewes's influence. It is not unusual for someone to note that Eliot adopts the concepts of "turning" and "turning again" from the bishop's Ash-Wednesday sermon of 1619. But this allusion is not of the sort that can be catalogued and put to rest in the same way as might, for example, a nod to the Rubaiyat in Four Quartets. Rather, it marks a thoroughgoing identification of a modern poet with an early modern churchman, and this at the most important "turning point" in Eliot's life thus far: his conversion.
In an unpublished dissertation on Eliot and Andrewes, Brad Dale Gooch seeks to account for the relationship between the two by tracing through Eliot's works a sort of poetic drama in which the poet eventually comes to expropriate the bishop's traditional and public persona as a symbolic "mask" to his own political, religious, and literary allegiances. "I have come to realize," Gooch concludes, "that the relationship between these two writers can finally be reduced to one irreducible word. At first I supposed this word to be 'influence'--that Andrewes' sermons influenced Eliot's own writing style and theology. But I now feel that the key word is, rather, 'use,' and the activity reversed" (287).
This conception of Eliot's "use" of Andrewes is compelling, but Gooch employs it primarily to emphasize the continuities between the early writer of such poems as "The Hippopotamus" and the mature poet who wrote "Burnt Norton." As a result, he tends to understate the one detail that Eliot and his severest critics would have agreed on: that since he now deemed himself a fundamentally different person, his future work would necessarily be different from The Waste Land. Thus the Andrewes we discover in the later work is not simply a "mask" for Eliot--as is, for example, the voice of Baudelaire among so many in The Waste Land, or of Gerontion in the poem that bears his name. Rather, Andrewes is to Eliot a kind of teacher--a spiritual and artistic model for the newly converted poet.
ASH-WEDNESDAY is a poem about repentance and conversion, and one that undertakes to portray the kinds of changes the soul must undergo in true penitence. Accordingly, its tone is often dreary,...
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