T. S. ELIOT: He knew the anguish of the marrow, the ague of the skeleton

VIOLENT contrasts racked his life and art. His poems could be golden and struck by grace, split by the metaphysical hammer of God; but his most golden lines were yoked to an ironic, satanic vision of the meanness of a scrap-iron age. He captured, and still captures, the minds of the young; but he personified himself as "an old man in a dry month," and his characteristic poetic voice was that of a man who seemed at least 50 the day he was born.

He was born a prairie-state American; he made himself the apotheosis of the cultured, conservative Englishman. He was painfully reserved, with a huge store of natural dignity; he delighted in playing schoolboy practical jokes on his friends. The theme of his art was chaos and despair, death-in-life; yet in life he was the model Christian gentleman, kind and good--and in his last years supremely happy. At his death in London last week of pulmonary emphysema, it was clear that Thomas Stearns Eliot, 76, was one of the few major poets of a minor poetic age, and far and away the most influential man of letters of his half of the century.

The published poems of Eliot's long lifetime's work hardly fill 200 pages. He also wrote five major verse plays of varying quality and several volumes of criticism. His strongest admirers recognize that his poetic subject matter and emotional range were limited. But no poet has ever been more fortunate in his time and place: Eliot was uncannily attuned to the moment after World War I when an entire generation was haunted by spiritual despair.

Out of the Enchanted Forest. For that generation, Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was a shock--the bitter, bracing shock of recognition. Prufrock was simply the first modern poem. It abandoned romantic oratory for conversational speech, threw away stately "poetic" meters for the subtle syncopated rhythms of the jazz age, brought poetry out of the misty enchanted forest into the gritty reality of the modern city

Spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table.

Eliot achieved some of his strongest effects by stringing together what seem to be banalities. But the banalities were chosen with such cool precision that they grew in the mind to be images of modern urban alienation. Then, typically, they were thrown into sudden contrast with images of romance and the glories of the past.

I grow old . . . I grow old . . . I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them, riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Prufrock was soon followed by other poems, each one lighting up the postwar literary battlefields like a Very light high above the trenches. Gerontion, Sweeney Among the Nightingales, The Hollow Men, half a dozen others--by 1925, Eliot had already published most of the poems on which his fame is based. Longest and most important was, of course, The Waste Land, beginning with the immortal:

April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain

--going on for 434 lines, by turns jagged, colloquial, classical, lyrical, in a black hymn of the death that stalks life when it is devoid of meaning. It contains glowing lines, followed by shocking discords presented with an almost mocking ease. It contains haunting phrases ("I will show you fear in a handful of dust") and images:

And upside down in air were towers Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

Though it contains famously obscure allusions to other literature, most of The Waste Land's language is simple and accessible. Its racy currency was part of its instant appeal to young and receptive readers in the '20s. No other poem has ever carried such a concentrated consciousness of the weight of the past upon the present; yet the most allusive lines can ring out even when the particular associative bells do not tremble for the reader.

The Ruins in the Soul. Eliot was better at reading his own poems aloud than are most poets, though he had nothing like the great brass gong of a voice that made Dylan Thomas so moving. The thousands who attended his lecture tours and the many thousands more who have listened to him on records heard a deep, husky, somewhat nasal voice, reading slowly with an enormous sadness. One of the most gripping pieces he read was The Hollow Men, that unrelenting expression of death-in-life which he published in 1925. In that voice the symbolism became tenebrous and severe:

Here the stone images Are raised, here they receive The supplication of a dead man's hand Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Later in the same poem, he would startlingly break into a singsong half chant:

This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper--and growl the last line with a hair-raising intensity that actually made it sound new again.

No poet in this century has given the language so many remembered lines. Bang-and-whimper is known instantly; so are the cruellest month, the rolled trouser-bottoms, the undared peach, the hippopotamus who went to heaven "while the True Church remains below," and I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

Equally unforgettable is "Apeneck Sweeney," barbarous symbol-hero of the play fragment Sweeney Agonistes and several poems.

(The lengthened shadow of a man Is history, said Emerson Who had not seen the silhouette Of Sweeney straddled in the sun.)

The poems, particularly The Waste Land, confused many established critics, enraged others. Christopher Morley even suggested that The Waste Land, and its celebrated six pages of notes, was a hoax. W. B. Yeats found Eliot's poems flat, unrhythmical, colorless, "working without apparent imagination." But years later, Rose Macaulay recalled The Waste Land's first impact: "Beyond and through the dazzling, puzzling technique, the verbal fascination, the magpie glitter of the borrowed and adapted phrases that brought a whole chorus of literature into service, enriching and extending every theme--beyond and through all this there was the sharp sense of recognition. Here was the landscape one knew, had always known; here were the ruins in the soul."

Liturgy & Prayer. If Eliot spoke for youth's despairs ("I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,/And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,/And in short, I was afraid"), he apparently scarcely knew its exhilarations. Though he was born in St. Louis, the son of a wholesale grocer, his roots ran back to New England and the upright Unitarianism of his clergyman grandfather. At Harvard, he dabbled in Sanskrit and Oriental religions, wrote his dissertation on the philosophy of F. H. Bradley. Prufrock, that lament of the aging, was published in his 20s. Looking back, the hunger for faith in Eliot's early poems now seems obvious and his religious development inevitable. In 1927--the same year he became a British subject--he was confirmed in the Church of England.

Few of his friends were surprised.

But in 1930 his poetic public was taken aback by Ash-Wednesday, his first published poem in five years. Subdued and introspective, it was also religious to the point of being liturgical:

Because I cannot hope to turn again Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something Upon which to rejoice Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still

Suffer me not to be separated And let my cry come unto Thee.

Eliot thus became the only major poet of this century who was intensely and essentially Christian. The development of this poetic theme which seemed so sudden at the time, was accompanied by a more gradual shift in style and manner. Thus, by the time he wrote the Four Quartets, his last major poems, Eliot's style was often densely compact, unitary, monolithic even: much more self-contained except for the recurring Christian symbology. However elevated, the later poems are neither so revolutionary nor so widely pertinent. Naturally enough: the saved man speaks to a resentful audience, the tortured man to a grateful one, since he gives his fellow sufferers a voice.

Sometimes the later poems were simply prosy:

I have said before That the past experience revived in the meaning Is not the experience of one life only But that of many generations.

Such lines are poetry only by courtesy; they justify Robert Graves's sardonic gibe: "What I like most about Eliot is that though one of his two hearts, the poetic one, has died and been given a separate funeral . . . he continues to visit the grave wistfully, and lay flowers on it." But Eliot could still strike off at will his unique amalgam of silver and sudden brimstone:

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained In the hollow round of my skull.

His imagery could still compel:

The wounded surgeon plies the steel That questions the distempered part; Beneath the bleeding hands we feel The sharp compassion of the healer's art.

Shuffling Memories. Eliot had always felt a drive toward theater and a fascination with the problem of bringing verse back into drama. In the judgment of E. Martin Browne, who directed all of Eliot's plays, Murder in the Cathedral is the one most sure of a lasting place in the repertory. But the one that 1,500,000 people (1,000,000 in the U.S.) went to see was The Cocktail Party (1950), that odd, gently versified comedy with its insistent message about sinners and the nature of saints. Three decades after The Waste Land, Eliot's central concern was still

The final desolation Of solitude in the phantasmal world Of imagination, shuffling memories and desires.

Less visibly than his poems or plays, Eliot's criticism transformed the taste of his generation. Almost singlehanded Eliot launched such shifts in taste as the revival of John Donne and the turning away from Milton. Even today and even when it is disputed, Eliot's critical judgment has in most cases defined the grounds of argument.

As a man, Eliot was modest, kind, immensely loyal to his friends. He was thought to be formidably reserved, but that was because he did not like casual chatter and hated to be lionized. Among close friends, he was unfailingly good company. His grave courtesy concealed astringent wit; he also liked jokes of the kind where the cushion, when sat on, makes a rude noise. He was tirelessly, patiently encouraging to young poets who wrote or sent manuscripts to him at Faber & Faber, the London publishing house where for many years he was a partner.

He loved light verse. He would lampoon his friends in clerihews, sometimes addressed letters in rhyme. He put normally light-verse techniques to deadly serious use in Prufrock, The Waste Land and elsewhere. Example:

I shall not want Honour in Heaven For I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney And have talk with Coriolanus And other heroes of that kidney.

The effect is startling: funny but instantly sad.

Eliot married Vivienne Haigh, an artist's daughter, in 1915. After 1933, she was almost constantly in an asylum. During the difficult years of her illness, Eliot never spoke of her, but never failed to visit her once a week unless he was out of the country. She died in 1947. In 1957 he married his secretary at Faber & Faber, Valerie Fletcher, a plumply attractive woman nearly 40 years younger. He blossomed. They went dancing, held hands at plays. He even wrote love scenes into his last play, The Elder Statesman (they were eased out by the producer).

End & Beginning. This week, following Eliot's long-standing directions, his ashes are to be placed in the parish church at East Coker, the Somersetshire village from which, in the 17th century, his ancestor Andrew Eliot had set out for America. East Coker is also the title Eliot gave to one of the Four Quartets; the poem's first line is

In my beginning is my end.

Interesting as he was as a playwright, influential as he was as a critic, yet it is his poetry, finally, that will survive. In five lines of the poem Whispers of Immortality he really said more about Donne than in all of his famous essay on the metaphysical poets:

Expert beyond experience, He knew the anguish of the marrow The ague of the skeleton; No contact possible to flesh Allayed the fever of the bone.

It could be his own epitaph.

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