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T. S. Eliot, ex-banker and successful publisher, has himself raised the question: What are poets good for? The 20th Century is not sure. Eliot thinks that by rights a poet should be useful: he ought to guard the language against becoming barbaric; and that he ought to be entertaining. But the poet must also, as Eliot puts it, "make us from time to time a little more aware . . ."
Against the modern heresy of automatic progress Eliot asserts the Christian insight that sinful man is never safe from evil. Against the notion of quantitative culture (i.e., the more you read, the more you know), Eliot asserts that culture means knowing a few things well rather than knowing many things a little. In his pageant The Rock (1934), he has made his clearest, most striking admonition to his fellow men. Excerpts:
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust . . .
The Word of the Lord came unto me, saying:
O miserable cities of designing men,
O wretched generation of enlightened men,
Betrayed in the mazes of your ingenuities,
Sold by the proceeds of your proper inventions:
I have given you hands which you turn from worship,
I have given you speech, for endless palaver,
I have given you my Law, and you set up commissions,
I have given you lips, to express friendly sentiments,
I have given you hearts, for reciprocal distrust . . .
In the land of lobelias and tennis flannels
The rabbit shall burrow and the thorn revisit,
The nettle shall flourish on the gravel court,
And the wind shall say: "Here were decent godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road And a thousand lost golf balls . . ."
The Door Against Evil. In an age that equals optimism with faith, it is fashionable to call Eliot a pessimist. Eliot is a Christian and therefore in a sense a "pessimist" about the nature of man. Yet in his "pessimism" Eliot is far more hopeful about man's future than most of the more secular prophets. On a recent trip to Germany, German youth enthusiastically responded to his talks about the need for an integrated Christian community in Europe. ("The hell with Oswald Spengler!" cried one Hamburg student, in sudden rebellion against one of the century's foremost gods of gloom.)