The nineteenth century gave us the idea of “culture” as the broadest framework in which the forms of life of a society, whether a tribe or a national state, can be located. From cooking to clothing, from poetry to dance, to marriage, to religion, these and every other aspect of a society's customs, practices, and beliefs are part of something we have come to call its “culture.” This is an idea that began in embryo in Giambattista Vico's Nuova Scienza (1725) and came fully into the light of day in Germany and France decades later in the work of Johann Gottfried Herder, Georg Hegel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the brothers Grimm, and others. The primacy of culture is an idea that has in the last two hundred years evolved into the social sciences as we know them today and, most brightly, in the discipline of anthropology. It found one of its strongest voices in England in the cultural criticism of Matthew Arnold in the nineteenth century. Arnold's was one of the first English voices to put the matter of “culture” on the intellectual agenda of his time.

To say that culture encompassed a whole series of pursuits such as football matches, cheese-making, and brass bands was one thing, but it was quite another when Arnold wrote that religion and the spiritual life of a people were also part of culture. Objections to this characterization of religion as merely a part of a people's culture were quick in coming. The counterclaim that culture derived ultimately from religion and that the spiritual truths of a people gave birth to any serious notion of culture was put forward in the nineteenth century by those who were seen to be defending an old idea. Progressive opinion already accommodated to the scientific cast of mind and to secularism applauded Arnold's bold claim. All the momentum of persuasion was on the side of the arguments of the secularists and the quick growth of anthropology, sociology, and political economy in the later years of the nineteenth century anchored the proposition in the academy. There were objecting voices of course – John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, and any number of bishops of the Church of England – but the force was with “culture,” not religion, as the nineteenth century ended. For all intents and purposes, the argument was over.

The nineteenth century gave us the idea of “culture” as the broadest framework in which the forms of life of a society, whether a tribe or a national state, can be located. From cooking to clothing, from poetry to dance, to marriage, to religion, these and every other aspect of a society's customs, practices, and beliefs are part of something we have come to call its “culture.” This is an idea that began in embryo in Giambattista Vico's Nuova Scienza (1725) and came fully into the light of day in Germany and France decades later in the work of Johann Gottfried Herder, Georg Hegel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the brothers Grimm, and others. The primacy of culture is an idea that has in the last two hundred years evolved into the social sciences as we know them today and, most brightly, in the discipline of anthropology. It found one of its strongest voices in England in the cultural criticism of Matthew Arnold in the nineteenth century. Arnold's was one of the first English voices to put the matter of “culture” on the intellectual agenda of his time.

To say that culture encompassed a whole series of pursuits such as football matches, cheese-making, and brass bands was one thing, but it was quite another when Arnold wrote that religion and the spiritual life of a people were also part of culture. Objections to this characterization of religion as merely a part of a people's culture were quick in coming. The counterclaim that culture derived ultimately from religion and that the spiritual truths of a people gave birth to any serious notion of culture was put forward in the nineteenth century by those who were seen to be defending an old idea. Progressive opinion already accommodated to the scientific cast of mind and to secularism applauded Arnold's bold claim. All the momentum of persuasion was on the side of the arguments of the secularists and the quick growth of anthropology, sociology, and political economy in the later years of the nineteenth century anchored the proposition in the academy. There were objecting voices of course – John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, and any number of bishops of the Church of England – but the force was with “culture,” not religion, as the nineteenth century ended. For all intents and purposes, the argument was over.

Today when people are asked what they know about T. S. Eliot, most mention three things: he was the librettist of the enormously popular Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats; he wrote one of the most celebrated and difficult poems of the twentieth century, The Waste Land; and he was an anti-Semite. This last tag, fastened to him after the end of the Second World War, has been the focus ever since of a sometimes acrimonious debate among critics, scholars, and, occasionally, in the popular press. Although Eliot's offending works were written before the Second World War, it wasn't until after the war that anyone thought the anti-Semitism was significant enough to make it the topic of public argument. It seems that before the war, the incidental anti-Semitism of many Europeans and Americans camouflaged attitudes that after the war took on a more sinister and menacing colouring. Two things contributed to the appearance and persistence of the charge against Eliot: firstly, the new position of Jewry in the public sphere after the Holocaust and, secondly, Eliot's own fame and celebrity as a poet and cultural spokesman. After his Nobel prize in 1948, he was a leading public intellectual in the English-speaking world. It did not help that he spoke for a conservatism that some people mistook for the virulent, right-wing authoritarianism of Fascist Germany, Italy and Spain. Although his visibility as a public figure brought greater attention to his work, it also made him a target.

Ezra Pound's career comes in three acts. This chapter deals with Act Two, the period between his forsaking of London in 1920 and before he is returned to the United States from the Italian city of Pisa as a traitor in 1946. There is no doubt that tragedy dominates Act Three in Pisa and beyond, but Act One, the London years, can be cast in epic terms, as a heroic struggle to rid Mount Helicon of both the beefy bluster left over from the Victorians and the genteel prissiness of Edwardian and Georgian literary culture. The undercurrent of aestheticism that runs from the Pre-Raphaelites in the 1850s, through Walter Pater, to the nineties, the Rhymers Club, and, finally, to the martyrdom of Oscar Wilde on the altar of Victorian moralism, is still, in Pound's London years, in very bad odor. “Yeux Glaques,” the sixth lyric in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (Life and Contacts)(1920) captures precisely the soft, sexualized underside of aestheticism and the bullying Victorian response:

It was easy to dismiss the Buchanans and to proclaim a new kind of heady, virile aestheticism that apologized for nothing and gave back as good as it got.

Act Two, the middle years, are neither tragic nor heroic. They are not so easy to characterize. Perhaps they have elements of the tragic and comic about them. Or perhaps they constitute a kind of Purgatorio, but they do not, as in Dante, lead to Paradiso. In a reversal of Dante’s plot, the London years may have been more of a paradise than what follows after 1920. And certainly at Pisa in 1945 Pound entered a real Inferno. In the London years, Pound seemed to be in heaven, to borrow the words of William Wordsworth in another context, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive” (The Prelude, 11.108).

Walk into any university or college library, look up T. S. Eliot in the catalogue, and you will be confronted with many shelves and banks of books by and about him. Most of the books about Eliot, however, are scholarly studies looking at specific aspects of his work. Many of these are written for specialists. This Introduction, on the other hand, is written for readers who are, perhaps, new to Eliot but would like an overview of the life and work in order to know more about the man and understand something about his poetry, his ideas, and his place in twentieth-century literary history.

There is as much interest in Eliot now as at any time in the past seventy or eighty years, yet what today's community of readers and critics has to say about him reflects current issues and concerns. Past introductions and companions have helped readers in previous generations to come to grips with a poet whose work can be difficult, but from perspectives that are grounded in their time. This book owes a great debt to those earlier scholars and critics who have contributed so much to our knowledge of the poet. We can say of our understanding of this wealth of scholarship and commentary what Eliot said about a poet's relationship to the writers of the past. We know more than they do, but they are what we know.

T. S. Eliot was a poet first and a critic second. We remember Eliot the poet more often in our time because of the steady interest in his poetry. With the evolution of critical thinking, his criticism is studied for its historical importance rather than for its own sake. But we cannot conceive of the contemporary critical milieu without acknowledging his important early role in creating it. His critical writings were not limited to the study of literature or literary culture – he was also a social critic and commentator on politics and religion. Although we normally divide his work into two broad categories, poetry and prose, we ought to resist the temptation to make this division hard and fast. In fact, Eliot's poetry and prose are of a piece; one is really inconceivable without the other. An account of the leading themes in his work must therefore join the poetry and criticism together, while at the same time being sensitive to the differences that make them distinct.

Their differences originate in Eliot's two earliest intellectual passions, his personal interest in poetry and his academic interest in philosophy. Poetry and philosophy are quite obviously distinct modalities of thought and feeling, yet the two are not entirely disconnected. Both tackle the fundamental questions of existence, namely the nature and course of experience and knowledge.

Early influences

T. S. Eliot, as we have seen, was born on the banks of the Mississippi River in St. Louis and it is wise when considering his life and work to remember his American origins. He certainly never forgot them. He may have felt an abstract or ideal relationship to Britain and Europe, but St. Louis was, on the other hand, all too real. This was Eliot's first and most enduring context. In 1888 the city was still the gateway to the western frontier and a river city in close touch with the American South. The Civil War had not yet faded from living memory and the consequences of the South's defeat and the formal end of slavery were still very much in evidence. Although slavery had disappeared from the southern states, the systemic racism of American society as a whole, which persisted well into the twentieth century, colored every aspect of social life in St. Louis. The surrender of the South in the Civil War signified more than a political defeat; it also heralded the end of a closely knit, rural, and deeply communal society. It had been brought to its knees by the emerging industrial might of its northern adversary. Eliot's later social and cultural conservatism had its origins in the nostalgia for a South brought down by the disintegrative power of the industrial North.

Early life, 1888–1914

At East Coker in the English county of Somerset, St. Michael's parish church, situated on gently rising ground, looks out over a benign setting of trees, fields, and a scattering of ancient-seeming cottage roofs. On a warm, sunny day in late summer, it is easy to imagine oneself standing before a landscape unchanged for centuries. Only the presence of one or two cars in the church carpark and the encroachments of a new housing estate just visible in the far distance remind travelers that they are still very much in the twenty-first century. Inside, stained-glass illuminates, here and there, the dark interior. At the back, in the right-hand corner, a modest memorial marks the place in the wall where T. S. Eliot's ashes are interred. The poet himself chose this place for the deposition of his remains. The choice is significant. Here in this modest, virtually anonymous place, he enjoys eternity in an old village off the main track, in a church difficult to find, and in a place where no public sign or fanfare trumpets the presence of a celebrated author. Only when you enter the church do you know that you have arrived.

A visitor without any knowledge of the literary culture of the twentieth century might be excused for thinking that the “Thomas Stearns Eliot, Poet” remembered in St. Michael's was a minor figure, of limited importance, memorialized by an obscure parish in a small, out of the way village only for want of more famous native sons.

It was The Waste Land that launched Eliot as a public man. Overnight he was known to a readership wider than the small bohemian coterie in London with which he was associated after his arrival there in 1914. His 1917 volume, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Observations, had gained the notice of the avant-garde poetry scene in London and to some extent in the United States. But it was the longer poem in 1922 that brought him the wider celebrity, including the notice of daily newspapers and popular magazines. His title, “the waste land,” entered the public consciousness as a catchphrase that caught the new mood of modernity and the post-Great War period. Looking back to that moment in time, one cannot help but be surprised by the interest which the brainy young American suddenly provoked in Britain. Admittedly this attention was due, at least in part, to the notoriety of the modernist avant-garde with which Eliot was identified. Mainstream society was easily scandalized and the popular media did their part by playing up the antics of artists and writers they considered radical and even dangerous, especially in their influence on public and private morality. But this kind of media-fueled balloon usually deflates as quickly as it is blown up. Someone or something else, more shocking and scandalous, comes along to crowd out the last best thing. The furore moves on; everyday people shake their heads and are deliciously scandalized anew.