Craig Raine, TS Eliot and Renunciation

Craig Raine of New College, Oxford, argues in his new book TS Eliot - Image, Text and Context that one of the central themes of Eliot's poetry is what might be termed 'the failure to live'. Which is to say, many of his poems speak of, or in the voice of, characters who, through fear, are unable to fulfill their own buried longings. They fail to live through failure to seize hold of either evil or good (even). They just refrain.

A significant shift occurs with Eliot's conversion, however: he begins to see that renunciation might not indicate a failure to live, but rather quite the opposite. Here is Raine:

The romantic Eliot regretted the buried feelings left unfulfilled and rued the cautious circumspection of our sluggish hearts. The ascetic Eliot, though, could see the virtue of renunciation - and its difficulty. He writes, therefore, about the failure of feeling in poems like 'Gerontion' 'Animula' and The Hollow Men. At the same time, in Ash-Wednesday, he shows us the worthy obverse of this position - the ascetic renunciation which chooses to turn its back on pleasure, on the temporal, on sensuous emotion, on the self itself, the better to embrace eternal verities. And finds that his will to renounce the temporary illusion of the temporarl is weaker than his helpless passion for the natural world.... p. 40

This feeds directly into Eliot's thinking about martyrdom, which might well be termed a 'failure to live'. But the problem comes with the will, doesn't it? Who can really honestly will his own martyrdom over against the natural world? Who is strong enough to renounce it on his own? Eliot himself later recognises that renunciation is not a triumph of the human will, but rather a free submission to the will of God...

(One of the other great virtues of Raine's book is a defence of Eliot from the charges of anti-semitism.)