Last month I visited the city of St. Louis, Missouri, for a conference titled “Awe and Presence.” It took place in the Church of St. Michael and St. George, and featured a series of lectures on the relationship between faith and the arts. During one talk, it was mentioned in passing that St. Louis was the birthplace of T. S. Eliot.

The poet spent his first sixteen years there. He left St. Louis in 1905 and headed east to the Milton Academy in Massachusetts and then to Harvard, graduating with a BA. Later he traveled to Paris and then to England, where he made his reputation. He only returned to St. Louis occasionally thereafter. 

I wondered about Eliot’s move eastwards. His family’s roots were in New England, but neither Missouri nor Massachusetts could hold him. Eliot was a perennial outsider who, in his own words, “was a nomad even in America.” After arriving In England he met another American poet, Ezra Pound, who provided Eliot an entry into the literary scene. Like the recently departed playwright and fellow outsider Tom Stoppard, Eliot felt comfortable in England and achieved greatness there as a writer. 

Sometimes it takes a foreigner to see with fresh eyes what is unfamiliar to us. Eliot’s vision was wider than most, no doubt due to his erudition but also because of his American upbringing. He was convinced that, had he stayed in the USA, he would not have achieved all that he did. As a Galilean preacher once observed, a prophet is not without honor, except in his home town.

When he lived in England, Eliot wrote lyrically about the America of his youth. “In New England I missed the long dark river, the ailanthus trees, the flaming cardinal birds, the high limestone bluffs where we searched for fossil shell-fish; in Missouri I missed the fir trees, the bay and goldenrod, the song-sparrows, the red granite and the blue sea of Massachusetts.”

Are there any poets who are as famous today as was T.S. Eliot? Maybe Mary Oliver, or Billy Collins, although they are not well known across the pond. The current Poet Laureate of America is Arthur Sze. The Albuquerque Journal describes Sze as "residing somewhere in the intersection of Taoist contemplation, Zen rock gardens and postmodern experimentation.” His poems are dazzling, although some, like Retrieval, groan under the weight of too many images.

I love the poetry of T.S. Eliot, although he is not everyone’s cup of tea. There are poems of his I love and others that leave me cold. Burnt Norton has the lines “Garlic and sapphires in the mud/clot the bedded axle-tree,” which probably mean something to the author, but leave me scratching my head. I have books in my library which explain it, but sometimes I resist the pull of explanation; I want the poem to speak to me without an interpreter. 

My favorite poem of Eliot’s is East Coker. I possess an early copy from 1941, which I found in a bookshop while visiting my cousin George in Cambridge, New Zealand. The poem is like a symphony, with distinctive movements and different voices. It is an uplifting poem, both profound and accessible, even conversational. Eliot’s friend Emily Hale admired the poem so much that she read it to her students "as if it were a love-letter from God.” 

My intention when beginning this meditation was to write about the conference in St. Louis. Instead I have gone down a T.S. Eliot “rabbit hole” (a term I am not sure Eliot would have approved.) Next week I will try again to write about the actual conference itself. In the meantime, for those of you who find Eliot a bit heavy going, the poet Wendy Cope has come to the rescue. Anyone who has read Eliot’s The Waste Land will know how difficult that poem is. Cope has written a neat five limerick summary of the poem. Here is the fifth and final limerick.

No water. Dry rocks and dry throats,
Then thunder, a shower of quotes
From the Sanskrit and Dante.
Da. Damyata. Shantih.
I hope you’ll make sense of the notes.

Father David