The making of Eliot
T. S. ELIOT AND INDIC TRADITIONS — A Study in Poetry and Belief: Cleo McNelly Kearns; Samvad India Foundation, N-16/B, Saket, New Delhi-110017. Rs. 450.
"THEIR (INDIAN philosophers') subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys." (T.S. Eliot, After Strange Gods) That Thomas Sterns Eliot was the literary dictator of the 20th Century is just a commonplace now. Eliot scholars and students have marvelled at his extraordinarily wide and diversified reading leading to maturity and profound wisdom.
This book originally published In 1987 by Cambridge University Press and now reissued by Samvad India Foundation with an added chapter "Drama and Dispassion", explores in great detail what kinds of reading and preparation in Eastern systems of thought had gone into the making of Eliot the major poet of our Age.
Consequent on his early exposure to Indic thought through Edwin Arnold's The Light of Asia, whether by chance or by personal bidding, Eliot resolved to go on a passage to India ("reason's early paradise" in the words of Whitman) and imbibe deep the native spring of the Vedas.
Influences
At Harvard Eliot took four courses in Sanskrit and Pali and an advanced course in "Philosophical Sanskrit". His mentors, Irving Babbitt and George Santayana, introduced the young and aspiring Eliot to interpretative problems in Hindu and Buddhist thought, enlarging his capacious mind and filling it with the basics in Indic philosophy.
The author maintains that Eliot's knowledge of Indic philosophy was quite extensive and profound — it was not just a sporadic journey through oriental mazes as some would have us believe — and with this intent forming the basis she devotes the whole book for a closer scrutiny of the specific Indic traditions that shaped the poet's belief, nourished his creative output and informed his poetic practice.
A good example, for instance, would be his absorbing the Mantric tradition from the Vedas and the Upanishads that assisted him in developing what he calls "the auditory imagination" which helps in building up through rhythm an incantatory effect that penetrates "far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word." Imagery and dialectic are clearly drawn from the Indic texts, which fashioned his outlook and faith.
The moral implications of the doctrine of Karma find a powerful evocation in the Murder in the Cathedral. The concept of the nature of true action that does not show any concern for the fruits of action is quite a rendition from the Bhagavad Gita.
Echoes from the Gita
In "The Dry Salvages" there are explicit echoes from the Gita. On the "Tradition and Individual Talent" essay, the influence of Patanjali's Yogasutra is unmistakable. "The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates." The central idea of the Yogasutras is the attainment of concentration through the separation of the body from the mind.
"Of all the moderns" says Kearns, "Eliot had the greatest susceptibility to influence, both conscious and unconscious. He had an uncanny ear, capable of registering and retaining for many years certain nuances of tone and style, and he joined to this gift a capacity for sympathetic and critical reading, an ability to meet a work on its own terms rather than merely appropriating it to some project, which no other poet of his time could match."
Back to wisdom
Finding that British drama had divorced itself from religious themes in the early 1930s, Eliot, through his poetic drama, sought to reunite religion and culture in the manner it existed during the Elizabethan Age. The dark side of human nature and the limitations of human action are explored in his plays and for these Indic metaphysics supplied him with the essential taproots.
Eliot's conviction was that our civilisation has grown complex. A poet of our time, were he to be true to his calling has to be allusive and indirect, and thereby force the reader to earn his meaning. Hence he rejected the vapid musings of the Victorians and turned towards the metaphysical texts of the 17th Century.
Oriental philosophy and metaphysics equipped him with the depth of knowledge so necessary for the "wisdom" mode his poetry is associated with. Undeniably, Kearns's book is the key to unlock Eliot and seek out that wisdom — the wisdom that we have lost in knowledge.
M. S. NAGARAJAN
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