Eliot and the city

Some of Eliot’s most important poetry addresses and exposes the false security of urban and suburban life. The strongest polemic from an explicitly Christian perspective is found in the Choruses from ‘The Rock’ where he rails aggressively against modern civilization in all its banality as ‘the land of lobelias and tennis flannels’. Eliot declaims against the city in the manner of an Old Testament prophet. However, even his pre-conversion poetry abounds with the same themes: one thinks of the torpor of Prufrock’s bourgeois routines measuring out his life ‘in coffee spoons’ and making an epic of his boredom and petty insecurities; or of the smog that blankets the city of ‘Preludes’; or of the hallucinatory patchwork of encounters in the London, the ‘unreal city’ of The Waste Land. Even before the introduction of an explicitly Christian theme to his poetry we can see the poetry itself as presented as a revelation of the true insecurity and instability of the city of man. The powerful sense of loss and bewilderment that pervades the earlier poems is coupled to a sense of becoming numbed: the sheer grind of urban life is stupefying. What does mark out a change - and which arguably makes the earlier poetry better as poetry - is that this earlier phase you get the sense of claustraphobic entrapment in modern city life which the poet himself cannot evade: This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper. In Choruses from 'the Rock' there is more over-againstness; a more polemical and critical edge, perhaps, but with also an alternative vision offered.

We see this also in Murder in the Cathedral when the chorus - who are in their way voices from Eliot's past poetry, with their description of household drudgery and imprisonment of a life lived in fear - are tempered by the group of Priests and by Thomas himself. Thomas ought to have learnt through bitter experience that civilisation is not enough to secure human life against barbarism; but the temptation to return to that safer path - to share in the construction of an apparently greater shield of protection from the worst that humans can do to one another - is very great.