18 / CHRONICLESnSTILL AT THE STILL POINT by Thomas P. McDonnellnThirty-one years ago, when I had aspirations as annup-and-coming critic in the Cathohc press, I wrote annessay on T.S. EHot that was published in the Jesuit weekly,nAmerica. I thought it daring to suggest that the major poetnof our time was something less than the robust Christiannfigure which an effective propagation of the faith thennclearly demanded. In those days, I saw Art in the service ofnTruth without the former having first served its own needsnand virtues as well. I had the sense, at least, to ask whatnmakes a Christian poet in the first place and settied on annanswer based on practical grounds. I said that “a Christiannpoet is one whose work is Christ-centered,” and with thatnkind of emphasis. It did not occur to me that any authenticnpoem, in harmony with the natural law and certainnThomistic principles, might also be considered a Christiannpoem at large.nStill, there had to be more to it than that; and I went onnfrom there to specify that the Christian poet “must benprimarily a poet of the Redemption, for this is the centernand circumference of everything he writes. Christ must benin his poetry, and most of all the blood of Christ.” It wasnthis latter figure, no doubt, which was supposed to havenclinched the case against Eliot’s very aloof and abstractnorder of the Christian experience. I was emboldened—andnperhaps even rude enough—to suggest some difficulty innour having to imagine Eliot as a follower of Christ in anpurely Franciscan sense. And yet the point was not whollynoutrageous, I modestiy insist, when one considers Francis ofnAssisi as possibly the first great sacramental poet. He beheldnin nature itself the very countenance of Cod the creator;nand in this regard, without question, he was precursor to St.nJohn of the Cross and to Cerard Mauley Hopkins—thenlatter, of course, a sacramental poet without peer in thenmodern age.nIt is therefore legitimate to ask whether Eliot, in our ownntime, was that kind of Christian poet. Frankly, he was notnprecisely that kind of poet—but neither is it required thatnnnhe should have been. In an age of almost completenalienation from Christian doctrine, Eliot’s was not the voicenof the triumphalist. He would not have been heard at all,nmoreover, if such had been either his demeanor or inclination.nEliot was the poet of T/ie Waste Land (1922) before henwas the poet of Four Quartets (1943), and yet the “Shantihnshantih shantih” of the one does not cancel out “the firenand the rose” of the other. In particular, it was not fair for ancritic to have claimed, some years ago in Poetry (Chicago),nthat Eliot was incapable of the type of expression uttered bynMarlowe’s Doctor Faustus: “See, see, where Christ’s bloodnstreams in the firmament! One drop would save my soul!”nThis was not only unfair but inaccurate.nYet there was a very compelling argument in SpencernBrown’s review of Williamson’s A Reader’s Guide to T.S.nEliot which stated in part: “In Eliot’s poetry, neithernChrist’s blood nor any blood streams in the firmament; anthin, beautiful ichor drips quietiy under a rock.” The readerntakes the sense of that for what it’s worth, and we may evenngrant it intellectual assent and nod wisely to ourselves. Andnyet, upon further reflection, this is not to understand Eliotnat all; and it certainly betrays a casual lack of knowledge-,nwith, to say nothing of some want of empathy for, the Eliotntext itself We think at once, for instance, of the verseninterlude in East Coker, the second of the Four Quartets.nReading this section, with its familiar theme—“Thenwounded surgeon plies the steel”—it is astonishing thatnanyone could deduce from it the image of a thin andnbeautiful ichor dripping quietly under a rock. The ChristiannSacrament of the Eucharist could not have been morenexplicit than in Eliot’s lines, “The dripping blood our onlyndrink, / The bloody flesh our only food,” the explicitness ofnwhich has been duly resented by some of the more secularlynminded critics of Eliot.nThe mistake of the Christian advocate is to presume andneven to insist that a poet like Eliot has to go on reiteratingnendlessly what he has already stated succinctly. T.S. Eliotnwas a sacramentalist in the practice of both his art and hisnfaith, and no one has a right to demand of him any morenthan that. It has been little noted, in fact, that one of thengreat achievements of Eliot is that he has been a sign ofncontradiction to Emerson’s denial of the EucharisticnPresence—a rejection which had long since set the tonenfor, as Flannery O’Connor onee said, “the vaporization ofnreligion in America and therefore of its effects in ournliterature.” T.S. Eliot stands against Emerson even as poetsnlike Walt Whitman and, later, Wallace Stevens had sedulouslynembraced him and in whom Robert Frost, fornexample, had early found his predominant model.nSpeaking of Robert Frost, a friend and fellow-journalistnonce asked me which poet I considered to be greater thannthe other—Robert Frost or T.S. Eliot. After offhandedlynevaluating each poet for what I thought he did better thannanyone else of his generation, I answered that in the endnThomas McDonnell is a free-lance writer living nearnBoston.n