Living in Death: A Comparative Critique on the Death Poetry of Emily Dickinson and T.S. Eliot

By T.D. Peter

The uncertainty of ones life and the inevitability of death is a dilemma that has tormented the human mind in all ages. One way of resolving the conundrum has been to imagine, if not firmly believe, that the individual self is immortal and deathless, notwithstanding the fact that the physical body must perish. If nothing, it weans one away from the fear of death towards an earnest hope in a blissful afterlife.

Living in Death is a scholarly critique on the death poetry of Emily Dickinson and T. S. Eliot. By deftly comparing their styles, diction, and motifs, Dr. T. D. Peter unravels the beauty of contemplating and courting the compelling presence of death as an unshakeable ontological reality.

The author looks through the mirror of the death poetry of two signature poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuriesthe former, an inimitable and indwelling poetic genius who defies classification and transcends time and trends; the latter, a trail-blazing and celebrated scion of modern classical poetry who impresses with his erudition and edification, imagism, and symbolism. He finds more by way of contrast than similarity in their strikingly opposite life lines and, no less, to their varying allegiance to faith and reason, religion and spirituality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing India
• Release date: Jul 21, 2013
• ISBN: 9781482801118

T.D. Peter

Living in Death is a scholarly critique on the death poetry of Emily Dickinson and T.S. Eliot. By deftly contrasting their style, diction, and motifs of this rarely handled theme, Dr. T.D. Peter unravels the beauty of contemplating and courting the compelling presence of Death as an unshakeable ontological reality .

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Copyright © 2013 by T.D. Peter.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

1 The Comings

2 Contemporary Thought on Death in English Literature

Dealing with Death

Near-Death Experience

Death in American Literature

Death in British Literature

3 Ontological Incursions into Being and Non-Being

The Reality of Being and Non-Being

Being as Living: Poetic Perceptions

The Ontological ‘I’ and Poetic Expression

4 Death and Immortality as an Existential Continuum

Death as a Doorway to Immortal Being

The Love and Hate of Death

Heaven, Eternity, Time and Space

A Path of Faith to the Light of Being

5 Death in Poets’ Hands: Power and Passion

The Passion of Soul and the Power of Images

Romantic Dickinsonism and Modern Classicism

Marvellous Depths and Magical Details

The Language of Heart and the Lexicon of Culture

6 And the Goings

Bibliography

Abbreviations

To

My dad, Tharappel Mathai Devasia

Mom, Mariam

School-time mentors, Bro. Gerard Turcotte, CSC

Bro. Camille Richard, CSC

My mentor and guide, Dr. Sumita Roy

My dear ones, Mary, Leo, Geo and Matthew

And above all, to the Living God

Who is the author of life and death.

PREFACE

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The uncertainty of one’s life and the inevitability of death is a dilemma that has tormented the mind of men and women in all ages. One way of resolving the conundrum has been to imagine, if not firmly believe, that the individual self is immortal and deathless, notwithstanding the fact that the physical body must perish and be gone. Death’s imposing presence and cruel claim on every human upon the earth, coupled with the inscrutable mystery of what lies beyond death, lay at the root of fertility cults, animism and the birth of religions at different stages in the history of civilisations. If nothing, they nurtured mankind away from the fear of death towards an earnest hope in a blissful afterlife. The mysterious gulf between life and afterlife is indeed unfathomable and strictly un-commutable.

Life and death are but two sides of the same coin of existence, and a contemplation of one can rarely be done without pondering on the other. As the passion and meaning of the profound meditations on the theme of death in the poems of Emily Dickinson flashed revelations of existential insights in my mind, the images of death and decay, decadence and degeneration in the poetry of T.S. Eliot vied to match with their objective correlatives of ontological conceits. Thus was kindled my interest in attempting to probe deeper into the unshakeable mystery of death as an ontological reality by looking through the mirror of the death poetry of these two signature poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—the former an inimitable and indwelling poetic genius who defies classification and transcends time and trends; the latter a trail-blazing and celebrated scion of modern classical poetry who impresses with his erudition and edification, imagism and symbolism.

Living in Death is the author’s original study of the daunting subject of death as seen primarily through the poetic eyes of Emily Dickinson and T.S. Eliot. While probing deeper into the motivation, style, content, and approach of these two poets in handling the theme of death in their poems, the author found more by way of contrast than similarity, owing perhaps significantly to the strikingly opposite life patterns and predilections of the poets, and no less to their varying allegiance to faith and reason, religion and spirituality. The author has attempted to unravel the beauty of the poets’ thoughts and diction on the harrowing questions of death and afterlife while appreciating their contrasting styles and approach.

—T.D. Peter

CHAPTER 1

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The Comings

Lo! some we loved, the loveliest and best

That Time and Fate of all their Vintage prest,

Have drunk their Cup a Round or two before,

And one by one crept silently to Rest.

(From The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám)

Man is like the foam of the sea that floats upon the surface of the water. When the wind blows, it vanishes, as if it had never been. Thus are our lives blown away by Death, said Kahlil Gibran (Sheban 17). Death is sure and snappy, though not a stranger to us, as William Carlos Williams finds in a chat with his barber:

Of death

the barber

the barber

talked to me

cutting my

life with

sleep to trim

my hair—

It’s just

a moment

he said, we die

every night—(Wainwright 93-94)

Death has perplexed, if not daunted, every human from time immemorial. Most have dreaded this inescapable phenomenon, some have perceived it with a stoic eye, but few have dealt it with a romantic ardour. Poets have been no exception. T.S. Eliot is one who largely falls in the latter school, while Dickinson stands among the rarest of rare poets who come under the last category. Death is a striking presence throughout The Waste Land that portrays decadence and spiritual deterioration in the life of modern men and women. It begins with The Burial of the Dead and goes on to a description of Death by Water amidst mechanical living by an enervated society that might still take a cue from The Fire Sermon and learn lessons from What the Thunder Said for a renewal, a moving away from the cruel April to the promising Spring of meaningful existence. Eliot treats death with erudition and intellectual élan, with a unique blend of classical scholarship and modern narrative, almost as a stoic observer. On the other hand, Dickinson is a poet who treats awesome Death with a personal and human touch, sometimes ranting and reproving for his coldness and cruelty, often reflecting on his inescapable presence, and at times even visualising a romantic rapport with him as a partner.

T.S. Eliot is widely credited with having ushered in modernism in English poetry in the early twentieth century with the release of The Waste Land (1922) and Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) that included The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. His poems were characterised by a new paradigm of symbolism and surrealistic depiction set against the puff and huff of modern life and urban living coupled with weighted scholarship. Death appears often as a strand that underlies Eliot’s portrayal of decay—both at the individual and collective level—in many of his poems in general and The Waste Land in particular. Consider Phlebas, the sailor in The Waste Land or the evening in the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock that is symbolised as a patient etherised upon a table (SP 11). The repetition of ‘rock’ as an imagery in The Waste Land again points to a state of decadence, a lack of fertility—meaning no water or life, that effectively reduces to a state of death. Yet again, The Hollow Men (1925) presents imagery relating to death in ample measure: Let me be no nearer / In death’s dream kingdom; This is dead land; Is it like this / In death’s other kingdom; In this valley of dying stars (SP 78-79) and so on. The poem Ash-Wednesday (1930) evokes memories of the commencement of the season of Lent that includes April, the cruellest month (The Waste Land), ashes and sack-cloth as tokens of repentance, and a significant Catholic prayer to the Mother of God, Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death (SP 84). Time makes a frequent appearance in Eliot’s poetry, particularly in Four Quartets and Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, signifying the macro-canvas upon which the drama of life enacts and is subsumed through inescapable death.

Emily Dickinson is mostly known as a reclusive poet who shied away from society and socialising, name and fame, pomp and publicity. She lived a life of her own in her ancestral house in Amherst, with few friends or fanfare. The fact that her poems were published years after her death suggests an archetypal detachment to social life and living that she exhibited in many of her poems. No doubt she declared the joys of this transient life in its little and seemingly inconspicuous things, such as the morning dew or the wind and the storm, the bird that came down the walk or the rare evening light. Merged into this mystery of life is the persona of Death that makes a compelling presence in many of her poems—not often as the terrorising tyrant that most people or poets visualise, but as the welcome gallant, the gentle knight who takes her out on a ride to eternity (Because I could not stop for Death), where time stands still, or rather is a continuum (D-59). Immortality for the poet is inseparable from death and life, but is the endless canvas on which the nuances of living are etched (The Infinite a sudden guest D-128). While Dickinson finds ecstasy in living (SPL 19), the sorrows of death and the strength of her solitude combine to metamorphose her soul into a wounded deer that leaps highest finding ecstasy in death (SPL 62) as well. She represents Kahlil Gibran’s sorrowful spirit [that] finds relaxation in solitude. It abhors people, as a wounded deer deserts the herd and lives in a cave until it is dead (Sheban 90).

Death runs as a motif in many of Dickinson’s poems, the most acclaimed of them being Because I could not stop for Death (D-59). Was it a result of her own traumatic experiences in life—of being separated from her near and/or beloved ones, most often in quick succession, particularly towards the concluding years of her life? She lost her father, mother, a dearly loved little nephew Gilbert, and obviously many others in the neighbourhood. In June 1884 she was taken ill and died on 15 May 1886. It is obvious that she felt deeply tormented by the harsh reality of the death of dear ones, which appeared to her as a rude and undeserved punishment that the Dispenser meted out to her (I never lost as much but twice SPL 29), provoking her to describe God as father, banker and burglar, all in one breath. Dickinson wrote in one of her letters:

I had a terror—since September—I could tell to none—and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground—because I am afraid… . When a little Girl, I had a friend, who taught me Immortality—but venturing too near, himself—he never returned—Soon after, my Tutor, died—and for several years, my Lexicon—was my only companion—Then I found one more—but he was not contented I be his scholar—so he left the Land. (Reeves, x)

What has often puzzled critics and scholars is the fact that Emily Dickinson seemed to be obsessed with death. Her poems can be broadly categorised under five major groups: Death; Life; Self; Pain; and Nature. The poems that touch upon death, either as the main motif or in passing, stand out as the most impressive, profound and mystical as well. We know from her biographers that from the age of thirty Emily Dickinson chose to stay as a recluse in her ancestral home in Amherst, secluded from friends and society, shunning strangers and rarely talking to her friends, often hiding behind a door ajar (Brinnin 8). During her childhood days, the bedroom she used gave her a clear view of a cemetery located right across. Images of death and funeral, tombs and graveyards leave a deep impression on the minds of children. Did those images form a subconscious wellspring of ‘conceits’ that inspired her death-poems? Does her seclusion have any relation to her obsession with death? Or, was the latter spawned by the former?

Notwithstanding the fact that Dickinson lived in seclusion for the most part of her life, it is evident from her poems that much like Keats, she was a passionate poet with a rare intensity of feeling and emotion, an ardent heart, a suffering soul, a sharp eye and a keen mind capable of observing—rather experiencing—apparently insignificant things around her sentient spectrum, such as the fly (I heard a fly buzz when I died D-36), the spider, and the bird. She so earnestly experienced the miracles of life in every little thing she found in and around her cloistered environment that she told Higginson in their first meeting in 1870: I find ecstasy in living; the mere sense of living is joy enough (SPL 19). However, Dickinson’s poem It struck me every day (D-22) suggests that the vision of Death torments her like the maddest, quickest tempest every day of her life and does not spare the poet even in the night, least of all in her dreams. It comes on, albeit brief like a storm with scorching tongues of fire from a perennially new flash of lightning:

It struck me every day;

The lightning was as new

As if the cloud that instant slit

And let the fire through.

It burned me in the night,

It blistered to my dream,

It sickened fresh upon my sight

With every morn that came. (D-22)

Dickinson wrote hundreds of poems that have death, immortality, infinity, eternity, and heaven as their prime motif. The chief among them are: Because I could not stop for Death (D-59); I heard a fly buzz when I died (D-36); I died for beauty but was scarce (D-32); I felt a funeral in my brain (D-13); It was not death, for I stood up (D-40); I never lost as much but twice (SPL 29); Safe in their alabaster chambers (D-10); I felt a cleavage in my mind (SPL 167); The distance that the dead have gone (D-171); There’s a certain slant of light (D-12); After a hundred years (D-104); A coffin is a small domain (D-80); The lilac is an ancient shrub (D-117); The Infinite a sudden guest (D-128); The life we have is very great (D-106); That it will never come again (D-170); Heaven is what I cannot reach (SPL 78); Death is like the insect (D-167); Departed to the judgment (D-42); Dying! To be afraid of thee (D-69); Elysium is as far as to (D-173); I have no life but this (D-140); I live with him, I see his face (D-35); I measure every grief I meet (D-48); I never saw a moor (D-89); I reason, earth is short (D-16); I taste a liquor never brewed (D-9); I tried to think a lonelier thing (D-45); Immortal is an ample word (D-110); Is Heaven a physician? (D-119); It struck me every day (D-22); It came at last, but prompter death (D-114); I’ve seen a dying eye (D-47); Let down the bars, O Death! (D-92); My life closed twice before its close (D-168); Of all the souls that stand create (D-57); Of Paradise’ existence (D-141); One dignity delays for all (D-4); One crown not any seek (D-169); Our journey had advanced (D-52); Struck was I, nor yet by lightning (D-77); The last night that she lived (D-99); Because that you are going (D-118); The soul has bandaged moments (D-41); There is a finished feeling (D-70); There is a zone whose even years (D-91); Water makes many beds (D-143); The road was lit with moon and star (D-145); This chasm, sweet, upon my life (D-71); A loss of something ever felt I (D-81); Dare you see a soul at the white heat? (D-23); Death is a dialogue between (D-82); This merit hath the worst (D-83); Those who have been in the grave the longest (D-76); Through the straight pass of suffering (D-65); ’Tis so appalling, it exhilarates! (D-14); and so on. These will be counterpoised and compared to some of the poems of T.S. Eliot.

Anthony Cuda, while sketching the life of the poet T.S. Eliot, suggests that the best of his poetry emerged, like the raw metal refined to a perfect gold in the blazing fire, as an outcome that eased the pressure of an artist doubting his talent, an acclaimed poet who wrote more criticism than poetry, ever fearful that the fickle Muse had permanently left him (1). Unlike Dickinson who had a short life (1830-1886) and even shorter span during which she penned her personal poetry in privacy, Eliot had a longer life (1888-1965) and long, successful literary career in the public domain. His first collection of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917 and he wrote the last of his plays, The Elder Statesman, a few years before his death in 1965. Dickinson never published her poems during her lifetime, except a few that her friends and well-wishers managed to coax her into publishing in contemporary literary journals. Her first poem that saw the light of day was A Valentine published in the Springfield Daily Republican on 20 February 1852. The first series of her poems, Poems by Emily Dickinson, was published posthumously in 1890; the second in 1891; the third in 1896; and the Letters of Emily Dickinson in 1894 (Brinnin 22-24).

Eliot considered poetry not as the communication of ideas but as a means of emotional relief for the artist, a momentary release of psychological pressure, a balm for the agitated imagination (Cuda 1). Pressure is the environment, Eliot said, under which the fusion takes place resulting in the emergence of a work of art (Cuda 3). Cuda explains:

In 1919, he called poetic composition an escape from emotion; in 1953, a relief from acute discomfort . . . . At first, poetry alleviated for him the mundane pressures of a bank clerk who lived hand-to-mouth, caring for his sick wife during the day and writing for the Times Literary Supplement at night; later, it lightened the spiritual pressures of a holy man in a desert of solitude with the devils conniving at his back… . The most intensely creative stages of Eliot’s life often coincided with the periods in which he faced the most intense personal disturbances and upheavals." (Cuda 1)

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born the youngest of seven children in St. Louis, Missouri on 26 September 1888. His family had its early roots in New England colonies and his grandfather was a Unitarian minister, but his father, Henry Ware Eliot, took up a career as president of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company, while his mother, Charlotte Champe Eliot (a teacher, social worker, and writer) introduced the children to art and culture (Cuda 3). Until Eliot turned 14, his family spent time between the industrialized city of St. Louis and Gloucester, a deep-sea fishing port in Massachusetts. Cuda notes that the pressures of Eliot’s creative life seem to have begun somewhere between the hard, claustrophobic inwardness of the city and the open, romantic expanses of the New England shores (3). Eliot admitted that the ‘urban imagery of his early poems’ was that of St. Louis, upon which that of Paris and London have been superimposed (4).

Eliot was not only well-read but well-educated too. He did his early studies at the Smith Academy in St. Louis and then at Milton, and entered Harvard in 1906, where he was initially a lacklustre student but keenly took to literature and philosophy and "joined the editorial board of the Harvard literary magazine, the Advocate (Cuda 4). Three years later he took up graduate work in philosophy under the guidance of eminent intellectuals and professors including Irving Babbit, Josiah Royce, and George Santayana who not only helped him gain footholds in the Western intellectual tradition but also groomed him for a future role as a public intellectual (4) of importance. Eliot’s early readings included Keats and Shelley, Browning and Tennyson; he had a liking for Elizabethan drama and a love for Dante’s Comedia and he even imitated the amalgam of violent spiritual energy and demotic speech that he found in late Victorian English poets like John Davidson and Lionel Johnson" (4). But by far the two major influences Eliot had at Harvard were first, his chance reading of Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) that profoundly changed the direction of Eliot’s creative energies; and second, the courses he took with Harvard professor Irving Babbit, which had a significant impact in moulding Eliot’s avant-garde views of modernism:

Babbit’s mistrust of emotional excess and individualism turned Eliot against the romantic literary tradition and toward classicism, which espoused the need for limitations and discipline to curb the natural human appetites and inclinations. The opposition between romanticism and classicism that Eliot encountered in Babbit’s class deeply influenced his early criticism, especially once he found support for it a few years later in the forceful and uncompromising rhetoric of modernist poet and essayist T.E. Hulme. (Cuda 4)

Eliot also studied for a year (1910-11) at the College de France in Sorbonne, where he attended lectures by Henri Bergson, a provocative French philosopher, apart from studying French, writing poetry, and reading Dostoevsky, Henry James and others. He began a PhD course in philosophy at Harvard in 1911, where he met Bertrand Russell, renowned British philosopher, and his further plans for a fellowship at Marburg University in Germany went amiss due to the outbreak of war in Europe. At Oxford in 1914 he met poet Ezra Pound who was to have a great influence on his literary career and style. Pound who was quick to spot Eliot’s most experimental [and] provocative literary talent and helped him publish The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock commented about it in Poetry magazine: This is as good as anything I’ve ever seen. Pound gave guidance and unflagging encouragement to Eliot and sang Eliot’s praises tirelessly to others (5). Eliot’s friends described him as grave, bookish, reticent—one unforgivingly labelled him ‘the Undertaker’; however, Eliot was also a great lover of popular culture, and his imagination drew as much from forms of ‘low’ culture like contemporary slang and popular music as from conventionally ‘high’ forms like classical poetry, philosophy, and opera (6).

While at Oxford, Eliot met vivacious artist Vivien Haigh-Wood and married her in June 1915. Soon after, he published his early poems—Prufrock, Rhapsody on a Windy Night and Portrait of a Lady. In the same year he returned to America. When he came back from America began a low, dark period of his life as he learned about Vivien’s lifelong battles with chronic physical and mental illness that, apart from a vibrant and wildly creative nature, made her also a prey to nervous collapses, bouts of migraine and exhaustion, prescription-drug addictions, even suicide attempts, all of which grew increasingly severe (6). Under the burden of physical and mental exhaustion, Eliot himself began to sink into depression and physical enervation and to make matters worse, Bertrand Russell, philosopher and mentor—and a notorious womanizer—who befriended Eliot and offered the young couple accommodation in his London flat soon began a sexual affair with Vivien that would continue for four years (6). The discovery of this treacherous double betrayal by his new wife and his trusted teacher, who treated Eliot ‘as if he were my son’ . . . exacerbated the disgust and revulsion toward sex and the spirit of savage, biting satire that together pervade the poems composed during this period (Cuda 6). Eliot suffered something like a nervous breakdown in 1921 and went to Lausanne in Switzerland for treatment. Cuda notes that "it was during this period of collapse and convalescence that he began to assemble fragments of old poems and to compose new segments that would eventually coalesce to become The Waste Land" (7). After many revisions and editing by Pound, who excised several redundant sections from the original draft, The Waste Land went to print in 1922. Yet again, the fact that the pressures of his personal life in terms of physical illness—his own and that of Vivien—and mental stress provided impetus to the sources of his creative energy is evident.

Around this time Eliot renewed contact with Emily Hale whom he had met and fallen in love when he was a graduate student in Boston in 1912 and was was now a teacher of drama and literature (8). While he was unsure whether Emily shared the same flame of love after all these years, he realised that the only way out of the ‘chaos and torment’ that he and Vivien inflicted upon one another was separation, though years passed before he acted upon this knowledge… (8). He joined as literary editor of Faber & Faber in 1925, a position that offered him a highly influential position in the London literary community and a ready forum for publishing the authors he most admired, including Joyce, Pound, and Marianne Moore (8). In 1926 he gave the prestigious Clark Lectures at Cambridge (published in 1993 as The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry), which throws light on his "preoccupations with the seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry of John Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Crashaw, tracing their imaginative lineage back to Dante and the Italian poets of the dolce stil novo and his views on ‘a tendency toward dissolution’ that first began to divide thought from feeling in the English poetry of the seventeenth century (8). In these lectures Eliot also applauded the intellectual and emotional superiority of medieval religious leaders like Richard of St. Victor, Thomas Aquinas, and John of the Cross. This was a time when Eliot’s imagination gravitated strongly toward the intellectual structure and emotional self-scrutiny of religious thinkers like these and the poet held fast to the conviction that art could not be a substitute for religion, . . . but religious sentiment could be a potent catalyst for artistic and emotional forces (8). He was so drawn by the unity of thought and feeling of such religious writers, including St. Augustine, that he seemed to be surely heading towards a conversion from a philosophical skeptic and poetic ironist to a firm believer who shocked his companions by descending to his knees in front of Michelangelo’s Pieta at St. Peter’s on a visit to Rome in 1926, showing his unprecedented gesture of devotion and surrender. Obviously his friends never knew that this was not a new and odd occurrence and that during a walking tour almost a decade before, he had startled Pound in the same way by confessing unexpectedly: ‘I am afraid of the life after death’ . . . (9). His regular meetings with William Force Stead, chaplain at Worcester College, Oxford eventually led to his secret baptism and confirmation in the Church of England in 1927, as Eliot knew that his conversion would be greeted with dismay by the literary public, for whom he was still the seemingly nihilistic, iconoclastic author of ‘Gerontion’, The Waste Land, and ‘The Hollow Men’" (Cuda 9). Nonetheless, in 1928 he made a public disclosure of his conversion in For Lancelot Andrewes, a collection of essays, in which he declared himself a classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion. Anthony Cuda sums up the impact of his conversion in the following words:

To many, it seemed an effortless escape from the spiritual devastation and ruins of modernity that he had once so fiercely recaptured; to him, it was the most demanding path possible, a way to face not only the ruins but the vast abyss that lies beneath them. In effect, Eliot chose to follow his beloved Arnaut Daniel, the soul in Dante’s Purgatorio who voluntarily plunges into the fire that refines (XXVI. 148). In his eyes, this demanded a life of sacrifice, devotion, and celibacy. (9)

The sacrifice that Eliot was undergoing by virtue of Vivien’s illness and infidelity, and his own physical and mental suffering, made him turn first to the solace of faith and religion, and second, to his old flame, Emily Hale, though he was unsure of her reciprocity of feeling. The poems that Eliot wrote during this period (1927-35), especially Ash-Wednesday (1930), show a move toward a pulsating moment or a vision of radiant light (Gordon 241) and "they do so slowly, arduously, and with the same fear and hesitation that characterized his earliest poems of circuitous disbelief and self-torment in Inventions of the March Hare (Cuda 9-10). In 1932, on a visit to America, Eliot met Emily Hale and found tremendous relief in their long-awaited reunion as he admitted to Pound in a letter that he felt torn between his thriving career in England and the peaceful domestic pleasures he had discovered across the Atlantic (10). He finally decided to divorce Vivien and, before his return from America, he sent her a formal request for separation, which she received with shock, desperation, and outright refusal (10). Although, when Eliot returned to England in June 1933, he looked 10 years younger and almost like a hard, spry, [and] glorified boy scout, yet in private Eliot was committing himself to an ascetic, prolonged solitude (Woolf 178). He adopted a chastened daily routine of reflection, prayer, and atonement and led an austere life while he stayed in the presbytery of St. Stephen’s Church in the company of an Anglican priest, Eric Cheetham (Cuda 10). Emily Hale visited him in England and they took a walking tour of the magnificent grounds at the English manor house Burnt Norton [which formed the background for his poem of the same name in Four Quartets]—during which he apparently experienced a visionary sense of release and rejuvenation. However the presence of Hale only intensified the conflict and self-division that he suffered, more so as he found himself torn between the simple, shared happiness he desired and the chastened, rarefied ideals he associated with the spiritual life (10). During this time Eliot transcribed his internal pressures by transmuting them into the desperate spiritual struggles that confront his protagonist, the medieval English Archbishop Thomas Becket, in Murder in the Cathedral (1935)—a play that received wide-spread acclaim and was boldly experimental and steeped in the vocabulary of self-doubt and temptation (10). Despite his growing success in literary career, Eliot’s personal life continued to be in a tailspin with Vivien being sent to a sanatorium called Northumberland House in the summer of 1938 after she grew desperate and inconsolable over Eliot’s abandonment and refusal to return to her and was spotted by the police wandering the streets nightly in distress. To add to his woes, Emily Hale realized before long that he did not intend to marry her, and the two drifted apart (11). Eliot’s strife-filled years" (1939-42)—during which he even served as an air raid warden in World War II—yet again saw him completing his more seriously philosophical and spiritual collection of poems, Four Quartets, that he named after Beethoven’s Quartets, and comprised of Burnt Norton; East Coker; The Dry Salvages; and Little Gidding (12).

After the war ended, and especially after 1948, Eliot lived the life of a sixty-year-old smiling public man (Yeats 216) by sharing a flat in London with John Hayward for nine years, appreciating both the solitude and the social life that Hayward’s friendship permitted and switching between the two extremes—often being intensely solitary and reclusive, keeping to his part of the shared flat, a sparse bedroom with a large crucifix and writing desk and at other times being "surprisingly jovial and social, giving private readings of his poetry or reciting from memory long passages from Sherlock Holmes, one of his