From the beginning of his poetry and writing career, T.S. Eliot was considered of a similar mind as the poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold (1822-1888). One of Arnold’s best-known works was Culture and Anarchy (1869), in which he presented culture (and poetry) as the replacement for religion as the bulwark against anarchy.
However associated they may have been, Eliot spent a great deal of time and effort correcting what he saw as Arnold’s misunderstandings, especially about religion and the idea of culture substituting for it. The poet wasn’t so much in the business of substitution as he or she was in recovering the idea that it wasn’t only the natural that composed the world; it was also the supernatural, and it was the supernatural that had been lost.
In the 46-page essay (with 16 pages of notes) T.S. Eliot: Culture and Anarchy, poet and professor James Matthew Wilson explores the similarities and differences between Arnold and Eliot, explains where Eliot sought to correct what he saw as Arnold’s errors, and in the process provides an excellent introduction to Eliot, his poetry, and the thought that lies behind it. Wilson focuses on Eliot’s major poems – The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the poem that made Eliot famous; The Waste Land, which solidified his poetic reputation; The Hollow Men; and Four Quartets, which likely played a major role in Eliot being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
James Matthew Wilson
Wilson, the Cullen Foundation chair in English Literature and the founding director of the MFA program at University of St. Thomas in Houston, is both a poet and a poetry critic. His poems and articles are published in such magazines and journals as The New Criterion, Front Porch Republic, Hudson Review, Raintown Review, The Weekly Standard, Dappled Things, and other literary and political publications. Her serves as poet-in-residence of the Benedict XVI Institute, scholar-in-residence of Aquinas College, editor of Colosseum Books, and poetry editor of Modern Age Magazine.
He’s published 14 books, including his first full-length poetry collection, Some Permanent Things; The Catholic Imagination in Modern American Poetry (2014); The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking (2015); and The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition (2017). The Hanging God: Poems was published in 2018.
The publisher of Wilson’s monograph, Wiseblood Books, has published several of these essays in affordable editions. The essays cover a variety of authors and topics under the general heading of faith, culture, and literature.
Related:
James Matthew Wilson and The Hanging God.
James Matthew Wilson and Some Permanent Things.
James Matthew Wilson and The Strangeness of the Good.
Some Monday Readings
It Didn’t End with Lee’s Surrender at Appomattox, Part 1 and Part II – Tonya McQuade at Emerging Civil War.
George Ticknor: The autocrat of Park Street – Michael Connolly at The Imaginative Conservative.
Bookish Diversions: The Puzzle of Publishing – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.
Things Worth Remembering: Allan Bloom on the “Charmed Years of College” – Douglas Murray at The Free Press.
The London Data Store – A London Inheritance.
