Readers will work out their own statement of Eliot’s theme after they have finished except that my own experience has been that, far from wanting to boil the thing down to any statements, I would wish to say, “Theme? It takes every line in the whole work to enunciate the theme. You can’t boil it down. If you could, then Eliot wasted his time working out these lines”. Thomas Howard
Students want a theme, a paraphrase; they think reading poems is akin to map reading. It is not, if the poem being read is any good. The words matter, each of them, and students can be got to understand that fact, even when dealing with great poetry that condenses language in unexpected, original ways. Many if not most of my students have been able to wrap their minds around the early work of T.S. Eliot; the meaning and imagery contained in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “The Hollow Men,” even “The Wasteland” yield, without too much difficulty, to youthful study. Eliot’s later work is a different matter, both for student and teacher. How to explicate Eliot’s increasing attention to matters metaphysical to people who are either relentlessly materialistic, caught up in vapid New Age “spiritualities,” or as indifferent to metaphysics as they are to physics? How to approach the fundamental truth that Eliot had converted to orthodox Christianity and that Four Quartets is a monument to that conversion?
I pondered the question for some time and, on my own, did not arrive at an answer. I queried several colleagues at universities where I’ve taught, and got one answer, regrettably cynical, to the effect that undergraduates are incapable of even approaching serious poetry, much less metaphysics. Perhaps, but if so then why shrink from the task? After all, isn’t confronting students’ lack of knowledge what professors get paid for?
Thankfully, that question has been answered by author Thomas Howard, who taught English and literature for over 30 years. His new book, Dove Descending: A Journey into T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”, at once exposition, lecture, and meditation and, most importantly, a true pilgrimage via words, is worthy of Eliot’s magnum opus.
Its title aptly taken from a line in the poem, Dove Descending is an extraordinarily personal book, not because it revels in the details of Howard’s life but because it ignores those details, witnessing instead to the truth Howard finds in another’s book. A book such as this can only be successful and a success it is if it is selfless to the point of self-effacing, and as edifying as its subject. Its subject, ultimately, is the genius of T.S. Eliot, his unequaled concentration, its task to mediate between the work of that genius and we readers. Eliot’s conscience is explicitly Christian, his pilgrimage, as laid out in Four Quartets, rooted in common experience, his language, exquisite and uncommonly used. This task, itself, requires a kind of genius, and Mr. Howard exercises his effortlessly.
In his brilliant, feisty forward to the book, George William Rutler says he “was never drawn to Eliot. He does not thrill like Yeats.” He finds Eliot “too precise and buttoned.” Eliot has “an aura of pedantry about him.” Nevertheless, Dove Descending helps Rutler reach this conclusion, regarding Eliot, who he identifies as “the last modern poet”:
In the social disintegration and moral trauma attendant upon the fall of modernity, Eliot paraphrased it in coruscating ways and radiant rays of words. A poet has no apostolic authority, and his prophecy, and his prophecy is by intuition and sensibility to tradition; but when he is true to the truth, aesthetics burnishes his metaphysics and gives him the mantle of an evangelist.
This is precisely the task Howard takes up: to identify the truth Eliot seeks and to show just how masterful a burnishing Eliot put to his enormous poetic diamond, Four Quartets. The problem, as Howard states at the outset:
The students, critics, scholars, and biographers who have addressed themselves to Elioteana, so to speak, constitute a dazzling galaxy. Is anyone calling for yet another meteorite to dash briefly across the firmament?
Probably not, or at least not in so many words. But the present volume makes only the most diffident claims for itself. It certainly does belong to the genre of “scholarship” or even “criticism.” What I have attempted here is known as a “reading.”
And a very close reading it is. Line-by-line, stanza-by-stanza, section-by-section, and quartet-by-quartet. And yet, no special knowledge of poetry is required to follow Howard’s thinking, no specialized theology, and no specialized dictionary. The miracle is that Dove Descending roars along like a top-notch lecture at turns erudite, humorous, and, well, lecturing that this reader wished it could have gone on a few more “sessions” than it did.
Robert Bove is an adjunct assistant professor of English at St. Francis College, Brooklyn Heights, NY and a contributing editor to New English Review.