Eliot and Hulme in 1916: Toward a Revaluation of Eliot's Critical and Spiritual Development

Abstract

MOST RECENT critical studies indicate that as the poetry and criticism of T. S. Eliot move toward their inevitable period of eclipse all of the old critical attitudes are still intact. Since the late twenties there have been numerous charges of inconsistency between Eliot's early and later criticism, and between his criticism and his poetry, and though a few critics have been piecing together the unfinished case for continuity, the cumulative criticism of Eliot's development as a poet-critic-Catholic has led most of us discussing Eliot's work in the classroom to accept the following prevalent assumptions and chronology: that the poems written from “Prufrock” to “The Hollow Men” are those of a despairing, skeptical poet probing spiritual bankruptcy in the modern world ; that from “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) to his conversion in 1927 Eliot's theory of tradition and criticism spring from literary rather than moral concerns; that in 1928, when in the Preface to For Lancelot Andrewes Eliot announces that his attitude is “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglocatholic in religion,” there is a rather sudden turn from an esthetic and literary theory of tradition to a moral and religious doctrine of orthodoxy; that in After Strange Gods (1934) and later Eliot not only sins against literature by employing his dogmatic religious beliefs as the narrow touchstone of his criticism, but yearns nostalgically for the unified sensibility and moral security of a lost medieval world. But these widespread opinions are misleading, for by 1916 Eliot's classical, royalist, and religious point of view was already formulated. A first step toward establishing this assertion, which calls for a full-scale revaluation of Eliot's development and of the primary concerns of his poetry and criticism before 1928, is to examine evidence of Eliot's critical and religious position in 1915–16, and especially the role of T. E. Hulme in defining that position.