‘The Collected Prose of T.S. Eliot’ Review: Keeper of the Flame

What these men have in common is that all were, in the old-fashioned phrase, men of letters. T.S. Eliot, who may have been the last of the breed, defined the man of letters as “the writer for whom his writing is primarily an art, who is as much concerned with style as with content; the understanding of whose writings, therefore, depends as much upon appreciation of style as upon comprehension of content.” Literature, for the man of letters, who not only writes about it but practices it by himself writing poetry, fiction or drama, provides wisdom beyond all other wisdoms, surpassing science, social science, history and philosophy, while incorporating them all.

The man of letters, like the poet, has a responsibility to the language, for, to quote Eliot, “unless we have those few men who combine an exceptional sensibility with an exceptional power over words, our own ability, not merely to express, but even to feel any but the crudest emotions, will degenerate.” He is also responsible, as Eliot wrote in his essay “The Function of Criticism” (1923), for “the reorientation of tradition” in the arts, and, like the artist, is “the perpetual upsetter of conventional values, the restorer of the real.”

The responsibility of the man of letters is finally for the culture at large. His duty, as Eliot wrote in the 1944 essay “The Responsibility of the Man of Letters in the Cultural Restoration of Europe,” is “neither to ignore politics and economics, nor, certainly, to desert literature,” but to “be vigilantly watching the conduct of politicians and economists, for the purpose of criticising and warning, when the decisions and actions of politicians and economists are likely to have cultural consequences,” for “of these consequences . . . the man of letters is better qualified to foresee them, and to perceive their seriousness.” As he views politics as being too serious to be left to the politicians, the man of letters feels education is hopeless without a clear ideal of the educated individual. “I hope,” Eliot wrote in “Notes Towards the Definition of Culture,” “that we shall not consciously or unconsciously drift towards the view that it is better for everyone to have a second-rate education than for only a small minority to have the best.” Which is, of course, where we are today.

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis to a family with strong New England connections. Charles Eliot, a cousin, was president of Harvard when Eliot attended as an undergraduate and then as a graduate student in philosophy. Eliot set out to become an academic philosopher—he completed but never defended his doctoral dissertation on the British idealist F.H. Bradley—but study in France, Germany and England convinced him that not the academic but a wider world was for him.

In his late 20s Eliot would write of Henry James, whom he much admired, that “it is the final perfection, the consummation of an American to become, not an Englishman, but a European—something which no born European, no person of any European nationality, can become.” Cosmopolitan in interest and outlook though he was, Eliot went on to become an Englishman to the highest power: He applied for British citizenship, at the age of 39, in 1927, the same year he was confirmed in the Church of England. So rigidly English did he seem that Virginia Woolf called him “the man in the four-piece suit.”

The young T.S. Eliot was also a careerist, fully aware what would bring him the prominence and ultimately the fame he craved. Eliot wrote to J.H. Woods, one of his teachers at Harvard, that there were two ways to succeed in the literary life in England: one being to appear in print everywhere, the other to appear less frequently but always to dazzle. Eliot arranged to do both, publishing his dazzling poems at lengthy intervals, propelling himself to prominence with the prolificacy of his brilliant criticism and commentary.

How prolific, and to what impressive effect, is now revealed in “The Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot,” a handsome trans-Atlantic co-publication of Johns Hopkins University Press and Faber & Faber, London. An eight-volume hardcover collection, “The Complete Prose”—edited by many hands under the guidance of Ronald Schuchard, a professor of English emeritus at Emory University—is elaborately but relevantly footnoted, a work of learning and scholarship. The separate introductions to its eight volumes, running to roughly 250 pages, constitute a splendid biography in themselves. This edition of the prose makes plain, as nothing before it quite has, that T.S. Eliot, as the introduction to the seventh volume has it, “lived life large—larger than we have known.”

“The Complete Prose” collects the reviews, essays, lectures and all other official, or public, writings of T.S. Eliot, including several items that have not previously seen print. Among these are the various obituary notices he wrote, and his talks to schools and charitable groups. (And there is apparently still more to come in a future digital edition of Eliot’s writings.) Here too are his previously uncollected letters to editors. His personal letters, meanwhile, begun under the general editorship of his second wife, Valerie Fletcher Eliot, who died in 2012, is a work still very much in progress—the most recent volume, the ninth, deals with the years 1939-41.

If T.S. Eliot’s career marks a straight line of ascent, all onward and upward, his personal life was marred by bumps and potholes along the way. He suffered a nervous breakdown in his early 30s. He made a wretched marriage to an Englishwoman named Vivienne Haigh-Wood, who may well have been bipolar, a marriage that he likened to “a Dostoyevsky novel” and ended in separation in 1933. She would occasionally show up at his lectures or poetry readings carrying a sign that said “I Am The Wife He Abandoned.”

Then there were—and remain to this day—the many accusations against Eliot of anti-Semitism, these owing to his coarse references to Jews in his poems “Burbank With a Baedeker: Bleistein With a Cigar” and “Gerontion,” and his remarking in his book “After Strange Gods” (1934), reprinted here in volume 5, on the undesirability for a culture of “any large number of free-thinking Jews.”

Yet an argument can be made that Eliot was nevertheless far from anti-Semitic. Many of his friends were Jews. He expressed “the gravest anxiety” over the treatment of French Jews under the Vichy regime, and was appalled by the revelations about the Holocaust. True, he did his best to preserve the literary reputation of Ezra Pound, who had been so helpful to him as a young writer, but he separated himself from Pound’s anti-Semitism during World War II, an anti-Semitism of which Eliot, in his own words, “strongly disapproved.” But he never removed or publicly apologized for the offending bits in the poems or the single sentence from “After Strange Gods,” and these leave, in the words of the editors of “The Complete Prose,” a “jarring and ugly stain in his work.”

After settling in England, Eliot taught for a few years at English public schools. Finding teaching children not to his liking, he took a job at Lloyds Bank, translating and working on foreign documents. He remained at Lloyds, because he thought (ever the careful caretaker of his career) working there gave his literary work added cachet. He left Lloyds in 1925, to join the publishing firm of Faber & Gwyer—later Faber & Faber—where he remained until the end of his life. He published and single-handedly edited the Criterion, an international quarterly of small circulation—some say the journal never had more than 400 subscribers—but powerful influence, which he began in 1922 and closed down only at the outset of World War II. All this while he gave lectures, wrote “The Waste Land” and other of his famous poems along with an immense number of reviews and essays, and accepted the leadership of such good causes as that of the survival of the London Library and of various struggling charities.

T.S. Eliot famously described himself as “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, anglo-catholic in religion.” Of the three, his Anglo-Catholicism was most important. (Not to be confused with Roman Catholics, Anglo-Catholics are a group within the Church of England that emphasize the connection of the Anglican Church with Catholicism.) This comes through with especial force in “The Collected Prose of T.S. Eliot” as nowhere else. As Eliot himself needed religion to conquer the feeling of isolation after his breakdown and the sad crash of his marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, he felt that a culture without religion is never fully a mature culture. The point comes up again and again throughout “The Collected Prose.” “It is not science that has destroyed religious belief,” he wrote apropos of Darwinism, “but our preference of unbelief.” Communism, fascism, secular humanism were for him little more than false substitutions for true religion. Like Pascal, his own “intellectual passion for truth was reinforced by his passionate dissatisfaction with human life unless a spiritual explanation could be found.” Life without religion was, for Eliot, life without meaning.

Citing Aristotle as an example in his essay “The Perfect Critic” (1921), Eliot notes that for criticism “there is no method except to be very intelligent.” To intelligence Eliot added wide learning and a tone of easy authority that has not been matched in formal criticism since his death. In his essay on Pascal, for example, he remarks that Pascal’s “Letters to a Provincial” are unsurpassed as polemic, “not by Demosthenes, or Cicero, or Swift.” With supreme confidence, he writes in 1921 that “all first-rate poetry is occupied with morality.” He writes about Shakespeare as if he were a contemporary. He writes, in other words, as he hoped the contributors to the Criterion would, “with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer . . . has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.”

Eliot also claimed that “a literary critic should have no emotions except those immediately provoked by a work of art.” This call for the impersonality of the critic and of the artist comes up again in his perhaps best-known essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), where he wrote that “the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates,” and “poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”

For all his talk about the need to shed personality, perhaps no literary figure in the modern age excited wider curiosity about his own personality than did T.S. Eliot. In “The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters,” John Gross notes the contradictions in him, not the least of which was that “he advocates an impersonal art, and at the same time succeeds in making one more curious about his own personality than he would have done if he had been a whole-hearted Romantic egoist.”

In 1948, T.S. Eliot had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1950, his play “The Cocktail Party” ran for more than 300 performances in London and more than 400 on Broadway. In 1956 he gave a lecture, “The Frontiers of Criticism,” at the University of Minnesota that drew a crowd of 14,000 to the college sports arena. (Eliot remarked at the time that he “had no notion that so many people cared or even knew about literary criticism.”) His final years were in good part given over to receiving awards, honorary degrees, invitations to lecture round the world, to writing introductions, prefaces, forewords, blurbs for the books of others. He died at home in London, in January 1965, at the age of 76.

This magnificent set of books, “The Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot,” published at considerable expense and with great care, is a tribute to an important poet and a powerful critic who exerted a genuine influence on the culture of his day. Reading in it, one longs for the time to return when the detritus of the digital age disappears and literature once again occupies a central place in our culture.

—Mr. Epstein is the author, most recently, of “Gallimaufry: A Collection of Essays, Reviews, Bits.”