T. S. Eliot

Ash Wednesday is the most difficult poem I've ever read. It's technically brilliant. Beginning humbly, but quickly spiraling into darkness, it is often cited as support that T. S. Eliot was a man of Faith. It is logical to assume that he wrote "The Waste Land" because he had a kind of crisis of Faith, which is somehow resolved in Ash Wednesday, but later in life he admitted that at the time of its composition he was in a very bad mood, not as result of the War or the condition of civilization, but more because in 1914 he had married a woman that he didn't like; a woman who eighteen years later he would finally separate from completely, abandoning her to a mental hospital until she died in 1948. He never visited her.

I've had to deal with Eliot's work for fifty years. You can't be a committed English major and avoid him. Most of his work certainly seems to be written by someone in a permanent bad mood, even with those cheery last lines of the Waste Land: "Datta... Shantith."  Several of his poems contain anti-semitic remarks or images without apology. Not a call for genocide, just the sort of stuff that an upperclass Londoner would say with a "those people" attitude.  I can forgive Shakespeare for Shylock, the character is a fully drawn human being and the play was written several centuries ago. Eliot, however, lived at a time when genocide was just around the corner across the channel. Casual bigotry says a lot about the essence of a man.

That brings me back to Eliot's Faith and Ash Wednesday. Eliot has some serious problems with staircases. I would reference Freud here, but Hitchcock got it right - big staircases make you dizzy. Is dizziness a signifier of Faith? The Cult of Mary brought much to Western Civilization. Yet, after more than a thousand years T.S.Eliot just can't quite find Hope. I honestly  try not to, but when I finish the poem I parse the last lines as, "Mommy please don't leave me!"  There something definitely Freud-like going on in Ash Wednesday, but again I'm not going to explore it.

I've read many studies of the poem. Some English majors find it fun to compare the poem to Milton, and many more find connections to Dante. I think both Milton and Dante would find Eliot's version of Faith of little worth as a support for living a meaningful life.

After listening to Eliot read it over an over, he seems to me to be stuck, suffering forever in Dante's Inferno.  I'm convinced that maybe this is an expression of some kind of Faith, but it's the kind of Faith that doesn't help much. Faith that  leaves you just a little too cruel and just a little too bigoted. So much talent, so much reading, such a command of language - yet so much a waste.