was not appreciated by the proletariat.
"Those new-fangled poems kinda bore us.
He writes like he's sittin' with an open thesaurus."
I openly admit that I've had a love/hate relationship with the poetry of T.S. Eliot over the years. As an English major, I was indoctrinated with the idea of his importance as a modern poet. Intellectually, I understood, but I still never liked the poems that I was required to read - and later even teach. I found them too clever, and too dark. Heck, there's something wrong if, except in the case of verses composed centuries ago, a poem required footnotes to begin to understand it.
My clerihew above summarized how I felt.
It wasn't until many years later that I encountered his "Four Quartets," Murder in the Cathedral, or his "cats."
Recently, I wondered how G. K. Chesterton and Eliot viewed each other, given that their careers overlapped. I suspected there would some differences over poetics given Chesterton's love of traditional forms and Eliot's rejection of them. But they both did share religious concerns, albeit one Catholic and the other Anglican.
So I did a quick search.
As I suspected, they did have some differences.
In 1917, referencing "The Ballad of the White Horse," Eliot observed, “I have seen the forces of death with Mr Chesterton at their head upon a white horse. Mr Pound, Mr Joyce, and Mr Lewis write living English; one does not realize the awfulness of death until one meets with the living language.”
In 1918, Eliot wrote: “Chesterton’s brain swarms with ideas [with] no evidence that it thinks.”
And in 1927, Eliot opined in The Criterion: "Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc sing the same tune together. I cannot admit that either of these writers ‘writes well’. The former's Outline of Sanity is the work of the brilliant but sporadic essay writer, scoring point at the cost of lucidity and cumulative effect. Mr. Chesterton is an inheritor of the older generation of Victorian prophets, with a touch, in fact too many touches, of Arnold's irony. In essays such as Orthodoxy, Heretics, or The Defendant, his style is admirable for his purpose; he often has unique perceptions; but his mind is not equipped for sustained argument."
Yikes.
So far, I have not seem much Chesterton wrote much about Eliot. But he did offer a parody of the "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
To a Modern Poet
Now you mention it,
Of course, the sky
is like a large mouth
shown to a dentist,
and I never noticed
a little thing
like that.
But I can’t help wishing
You got more fun out of it;
you seem to have taken
quite a dislike
to things
They seem to make you jump
And double up unexpectedly—
And when you write
like other poets,
on subjects
not entirely
novel,
such as, for instance,
the Sea,
it is mostly about
Sea-sickness.
As you say—
It is the New Movement,
The Emetic Ecstasy.
I note a few other comments over the years. But then they seem to find some common ground, and even appreciation, spurred in part by faith. In 1929 Eliot wrote to Chesterton: “I should like extremely to come to see you one day…May I mention that I have much sympathy with your political and social views, as well as (with obvious reservations) your religious views?” (I find no record that they actually did visit, however.) And Eliot later praised the Father Brown stories and The Man Who Was Thursday.
In 1935, Eliot even wrote in The New English Weekly, “With Mr. Chesterton I naturally have sympathies which I did not have twenty-five years ago.”
Meanwhile, Chesterton actually contributed a piece (“Is Humanism a Religion?”) to The Criterion, which Eliot edited, and expressed a desire to see a production of Murder in the Cathedral.
In an obituary of Chesterton in The Criterion in October 1936, Eliot wrote, "It is not for his attainments in pure letters that he should be celebrated here: though it may be said that if he did nothing to develop the sensibility of the language, he did nothing to obstruct it. Nor are his religious convictions precisely our affair. What matters here is his lonely moral battle against his age, his courage, and his bold combination of genuine conservatism, genuine liberalism, and genuine radicalism."
I'm there was more interaction between them, at least in writing. I don't find any record of them actually meeting in any formal way. But there are Chesterton scholars who have more knowledge than I.
As for me, I, following Eliot's 1935 lead above, appreciate Eliot more than I did earlier in life. But when it comes to their differences over literature and faith, I, a proletariat sort, clearly fall into the Chesterton camp.
In my beginning is my end.
T. S. Eliot
was not appreciated by the proletariat.
"Those new-fangled poems kinda bore us.
He writes like he's sittin' with an open thesaurus."
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