Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Essays Ancient and Modern
    Essays Ancient and Modern
    Essays Ancient and Modern
    Ebook146 pages3 hours

    Essays Ancient and Modern

    By T. S. Eliot

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    The Nobel Prize–winning author shares his thoughts on literature, religion, and the classics in a series of essays.

    A collection of essays grappling with some of the most significant topics of our time, Essays Ancient and Modern reveals Eliot’s thoughts on his literary contemporaries and predecessors, the role of religion in a secular society, and the continuing tradition of the classics in modern education. Astute and erudite, here we see the inner thoughts of one of our greatest minds, articulated in some of his most eloquent and direct prose.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateFeb 11, 2014
    ISBN9780544358539
    Essays Ancient and Modern
    Author

    T. S. Eliot

    THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He moved to England in 1914 and published his first book of poems in 1917. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Eliot died in 1965.

    Read more from T. S. Eliot

    Related to Essays Ancient and Modern

    Related ebooks

    Literary Criticism For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      Agent Etiquette 101

      Jun 15, 2022

      Jade Wong-Baxter is a literary agent at the Frances Goldin Literary Agency, where she specializes in adult literary/upmarket fiction and narrative nonfiction. You can find her online at goldinlit.com or @jwongbaxter on Twitter. Wong-Baxter’s work as

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A 350th-Anniversary ‘Paradise Lost’ Reading List

      Feb 6, 2018

      Before John Milton could be a visionary writer, first he had to be a visionary reader. All poetry is supported by the accumulated scaffolding of tradition and defines itself in part by subverting that tradition. Milton was simultaneously partisan for

      16 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Three Authors in Search of Melville

      Sep 25, 2017

      "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method." The post Three Authors in Search of Melville appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      We Should All Be Reading Ancient Poetry Right Now

      Aug 2, 2018

      In 1942, the classicist Edith Hamilton acknowledged the “dark spots” which encroach upon the worlds of Greek myth. Reading ancient poetry today makes you realize how those dark spots have grown. They may be sinister, but like black holes, they suck y

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Five Poems

      Sep 1, 2023

      Amber accord of Shalimar arrived before her into a room set like a scene from Scheherezade: Oriental rugs, brass lamps mantled with jujube glass. She entered slightly out of breath, one end of a silk sari afloat behind her, embraced my sister, called

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Eight Books That Will Change Your Perspective

      Jul 7, 2024

      An epiphany isn’t always heralded by trumpets or bolts of lightning. I once had a flash of clarity while unlocking my bike: As if I had also unlocked my mind, I suddenly knew that I had to end the relationship I was in. It was one of those rare momen

      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      KEEPING the STORIES

      Jun 15, 2022

      KEEPING the STORIES
      10 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      NEWS AND Trends

      Apr 12, 2023

      NEWS AND Trends
      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Reactions

      Apr 13, 2022

      Feedback from readers Books sometimes speak to each other in a kind of question-and-answer. My 1980s transnational quest novel, Go Home (Knut House, 2016), reclaims the xenophobic taunt and repurposes it. The opening paragraph of Go Home poses the re

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Three Triple Sonnets

      Jan 1, 2024

      Rosebud asks me if I can just take the moneyand run when I tell her about the Sugar Daddiesof Instagram™ hitting me up, taking me backto my mid-twenties in Tempe, Arizona whenall the single dads of the neighborhood wouldtry to come into my yard—into

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      On War and Literature

      Jun 8, 2022

      War literature, at its best, exists not as scripture but as liturgy, not to explain but to remember. The post On War and Literature appeared first on The Millions.

      19 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      from BLACK PASTORAL

      Nov 1, 2023

      somewheres, some lifetimes ago I have run so far, so long.There is nowhere I haven’t beenBut here, in this field, a bodyLength from the ragged brinkThat gives way to forest.I collapsed here, the thin, hard slipOf me whittled at both ends.I want badly

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      We've Gone Mainstream

      Mar 4, 2024

      Marie Arana’s sprawling portrait of Latinos in the United States is rich and nuanced in its depiction of the diversity of “the least understood minority.” Yet LatinoLand is regrettably old-fashioned and out-of-date. For starters, Hispanics aren’t rea

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      What The Thunder Said

      Sep 14, 2022

      ON Margate Sands./I can connect/ Nothing with nothing.’ Thomas Stearns (T. S.) Eliot crafted these short lines that form a part of his fractured epic The Waste Land in October 1921, as he sat in the inauspicious Nayland Rock Shelter (granted Grade II

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The End Is Only the Beginning

      Dec 1, 2022

      The End Is Only the Beginning
      14 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Essays Ancient and Modern

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Essays Ancient and Modern - T. S. Eliot

      COPYRIGHT, 1932, 1936, BY HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.

      All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

      For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

      hmhbooks.com

      Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication data is on file.

      eISBN 978-0-544-35853-9

      v2.0421

      Preface

      A VOLUME of essays entitled For Lancelot Andrewes has gone out of print, after some eight years, and a new edition was proposed. I have taken the opportunity of changing the title, which has served its turn, of omitting the preface, which has more than served its turn, and of omitting three essays, those on Middleton, Crashaw, and Machiavelli. On the other hand I have added five essays not previously collected: Religion and Literature, Catholicism and International Order, "The Pensées of Pascal, Modern Education and the Classics, and In Memoriam."

      I renew my acknowledgment of obligation to the editors of The Times Literary Supplement, Theology, The Dial (New York), and The Forum (New York) on account of essays which appeared in the earlier volume. Religion and Literature was originally given as one of a series of addresses arranged in 1934 by the Rev. V. A. Demant and published together as a volume called Faith That Illuminates (The Centenary Press). Catholicism and International Order was an address delivered to the Anglo-Catholic Summer School of Sociology at Oxford in 1933, and was printed in Christendom. "The Pensées of Pascal" appears as the Introduction to the English translation of that work published in the Everyman Library. Modern Education and the Classics is the revision of an address delivered to the Classical Club of Harvard University in 1933, and hitherto unprinted. In Memoriam is the expanded version of an introduction written for the Nelson Classics edition of Poems of Tennyson. To the several editors and publishers I wish to make grateful acknowledgment.

      I am aware that most of these papers date themselves, even when I have forgotten the dates. It may well be that in a few years’ time I may wish to remove some from currency, as I have in the past; but I may remark that nothing that has happened in more recent times has caused me to wish to modify in a more favourable sense my comments on the League of Nations in Catholicism and International Order. The note on Baudelaire antedates the longer paper printed in my Selected Essays, and our time is perhaps over: nevertheless the note seemed to me worth preserving for the moment. I observe that the advertisement of For Lancelot Andrewes advanced the claim that the essays had a unity of their own. I do not know whether my ideals of unity are higher, or merely my pretensions more modest, than eight years ago; I offer this book, as the title implies, only as a miscellaneous collection, having no greater unity than that of having been written by the same person.

      T. S. E.

      Lancelot Andrewes

      THE Right Reverend Father in God, Lancelot Bishop of Winchester, died on September 25th, 1626. During his lifetime he enjoyed a distinguished reputation for the excellence of his sermons, for the conduct of his diocese, for his ability in controversy displayed against Cardinal Bellarmine, and for the decorum and devotion of his private life. Some years after Andrewes’s death, Lord Clarendon, in his History of the Rebellion, expressed regret that Andrewes had not been chosen instead of Abbott to the Archbishopric of Canterbury, for thus affairs in England might have taken a different course. By authorities on the history of the English Church Andrewes is still accorded a high, perhaps the highest, place; among persons interested in devotion his Private Prayers are not unknown. But among those persons who read sermons, if they read them at all, as specimens of English prose, Andrewes is little known. His sermons are too well built to be readily quotable; they stick too closely to the point to be entertaining. Yet they rank with the finest English prose of their time, of any time. Before attempting to remove the remains of his reputation to a last resting place in the dreary cemetery of literature, it is desirable to remind the reader of Andrewes’s position in history.

      The Church of England is the creation not of the reign of Henry VIII or of the reign of Edward VI, but of the reign of Elizabeth. The via media which is the spirit of Anglicanism was the spirit of Elizabeth in all things; the last of the humble Welsh family of Tudor was the first and most complete incarnation of English policy. The taste or sensibility of Elizabeth, developed by her intuitive knowledge of the right policy for the hour and her ability to choose the right men to carry out that policy, determined the future of the English Church. In its persistence in finding a mean between Papacy and Presbytery the English Church under Elizabeth became something representative of the finest spirit of England of the time. It came to reflect not only the personality of Elizabeth herself, but the best community of her subjects of every rank. Other religious impulses, of varying degrees of spiritual value, were to assert themselves with greater vehemence during the next two reigns. But the Church at the end of the reign of Elizabeth, and as developed in certain directions under the next reign, was a masterpiece of ecclesiastical statesmanship. The same authority that made use of Gresham, and of Walsingham, and of Cecil, appointed Parker to the Archbishopric of Canterbury; the same authority was later to appoint Whitgift to the same office.

      To the ordinary cultivated student of civilization the genesis of a Church is of little interest, and at all events we must not confound the history of a Church with its spiritual meaning. To the ordinary observer the English Church in history means Hooker and Jeremy Taylor—and should mean Andrewes also: it means George Herbert, and it means the churches of Christopher Wren. This is not an error: a Church is to be judged by its intellectual fruits, by its influence on the sensibility of the most sensitive and on the intellect of the most intelligent, and it must be made real to the eye by monuments of artistic merit. The English Church has no literary monument equal to that of Dante, no intellectual monument equal to that of St. Thomas, no devotional monument equal to that of St. John of the Cross, no budding so beautiful as the Cathedral of Modena or the basilica of St. Zeno in Verona. But there are those for whom the City churches are as precious as any of the four hundred odd churches in Rome which are in no danger of demolition, and for whom St. Paul’s, in comparison with St. Peter’s, is not lacking in decency, and the English devotional verse of the seventeenth century—admitting the one difficult case of conversion, that of Crashaw—finer than that of any other country or communion at the time.

      The intellectual achievement and the prose style of Hooker and Andrewes came to complete the structure of the English Church as the philosophy of the thirteenth century crowns the Catholic Church. To make this statement is not to compare the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity with the Summa. The seventeenth century was not an age in which the Churches occupied themselves with metaphysics, and none of the writings of the fathers of the English Church belongs to the category of speculative philosophy. But the achievement of Hooker and Andrewes was to make the English Church more worthy of intellectual assent. No religion can survive the judgment of history unless the best minds of its time have collaborated in its construction; if the Church of Elizabeth is worthy of the age of Shakespeare and Jonson, that is because of the work of Hooker and Andrewes.

      The writings of both Hooker and Andrewes illustrate that determination to stick to essentials, that awareness of the needs of the time, the desire for clarity and precision on matters of importance, and the indifference to matters indifferent, which was the general policy of Elizabeth. These characteristics are illustrated in the definition of the Church in the second book of the Ecclesiastical Polity. (The Church of Christ which was from the beginning is and continueth until the end.) And in both Hooker and Andrewes—the latter the friend and intimate of Isaac Casaubon—we find also that breadth of culture, an ease with humanism and Renaissance learning, which helps to put them on terms of equality with their Continental antagonists and to elevate their Church above the position of a local schismatic sect. They were fathers of a national Church and they were Europeans. Compare a sermon of Andrewes with a sermon by another earlier master, Latimer. It is not merely that Andrewes knew Greek, or that Latimer was addressing a far less cultivated public, or that the sermons of Andrewes are peppered with allusion and quotation. It is rather that Latimer, the preacher of Henry VIII and Edward VI, is merely a Protestant; but the voice of Andrewes is the voice of a man who has a formed visible Church behind him, who speaks with the old authority and the new culture. It is the difference of negative and positive: Andrewes is the first great preacher of the English Catholic Church.

      The sermons of Andrewes are not easy reading. They are only for the reader who can elevate himself to the subject. The most conspicuous qualities of the style are three: ordonnance, or arrangement and structure, precision in the use of words, and relevant intensity. The last remains to be defined. All of them are best elucidated by comparison with a prose which is much more widely known, but to which I believe that we must assign a lower place—that of Donne. Donne’s sermons, or fragments from Donne’s sermons, are certainly known to hundreds who have hardly heard of Andrewes; and they are known precisely for the reasons because of which they are inferior to those of Andrewes. In the introduction to an admirable selection of passages from Donne’s sermons, which was published a few years ago by the Oxford Press, Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith, after trying to explain Donne’s sermons and account for them in a satisfactory manner, observes:

      And yet in these, as in his poems, there remains something baffling and enigmatic which still eludes our last analysis. Reading these old hortatory and dogmatic pages, the thought suggests itself that Donne is often saying something else, something poignant and personal, and yet, in the end, incommunicable to us.

      We may cavil at the word incommunicable, and pause to ask whether the incommunicable is not often the vague and unformed; but the statement is essentially right. About Donne there hangs the shadow of the impure motive; and impure motives lend their aid to a facile success. He is a little of the religious spell-binder, the Reverend Billy Sunday of his time, the flesh-creeper, the sorcerer of emotional orgy. We emphasize this aspect to the point of the grotesque. Donne had a trained mind; but without belittling the intensity or the profundity of his experience, we can suggest that this experience was not perfectly controlled, and that he lacked spiritual discipline.

      But Bishop Andrewes is one of the community of the born spiritual, one

      che in questo mondo,

      contemplando, gusto di quella pace.

      Intellect and sensibility were in harmony; and hence arose the particular qualities of his style. Those who would prove this harmony would do well to examine, before proceeding to the sermons, the volume of Preces Privatae. This book, composed by him for his private devotions, was printed only after his death; a few manuscript copies may have been given away during his lifetime—one bears the name of William Laud. It appears to have been written in

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1