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The Lost Generation. Some of the critics reviewing The Waste Land sniffed that it was indeed a piece that passed all understanding.* But it brought Eliot a literary notoriety that passed into fame. The "lost generation" embraced his sharp, unsentimental lyricism; they voted Eliot their most representative poet (a distinction which Eliot himself coldly rejected). The age recognized itself in the patched mirror; Eliot had touched a hidden spring in the century's frightened, shut soul—and that soul began to open to him a little. One English girl sums up Eliot's impact on her youth: "Somehow Eliot put the situation into words for us, and it was never so bad again. Each in his own prison, but Eliot in the next cell, tapping out his message, if not of hope, at least of defiance. We would not measure out our lives with coffee spoons."
T. S. Eliot, no more than his age, has emerged from the waste land, but he has managed to rebuild, for himself, the broken chapel in its midst. For a time, Eliot delighted the Greenwich Village atheists by seeming to take the road of easy cynicism; in The Hippopotamus (1920) he squirted heavy sarcasm at the church ("The hippo's feeble steps may err / In compassing material ends, / While the True Church need never stir / To gather in its dividends . . ."). Yet it was to the church that Eliot turned.
He gives a large but ironical measure of credit for his final conversion to his former teacher, Bertrand Russell. Eliot read one of his essays, A Free Man's Worship, in which the philosopher gushily described the way he—and a lot of other thinkers—saw the human condition in the hustle & Russell of the scientific age. Man and his hopes and fears, according to Russell, are the product of "accidental collocations of atoms," his sense of sin a trait inherited from the beasts of prey, his life determined by blind, unfriendly forces without plan or purpose, his whole existence on his planet —which is doomed to freeze to death when the sun dies—probably only a cruel practical joke of God. What can man do in this abysmal fix? Says Russell in effect: whistle a pretty symphony in the dark. Man must worship his own visions of beauty and goodness which now & then pop into his brain (Russell does not say whence they pop); in other words, man must worship man. After reading this arid credo Eliot decided that the opposite direction must be the right way. In 1927, he was confirmed in the Church of England.
The same year Eliot also became a British subject. It was no more a sudden decision than his deciding to join the church. Says he: "In the end I thought:
'Here I am, making a living, enjoying my friends here. I don't like being a squatter. I might as well take the full responsibility.' "
1,000 Lost Golf Balls. Critics and fans who had idolized the bitter, brittle Eliot were appalled when in 1930 he published his first religious poem, Ash Wednesday, the sternly beautiful statement of a man who has found his course ("Because I do not hope to turn again . . ."). Undeterred, the "new" Eliot continued to write his faith into his poetry.