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The poems, particularly The Waste Land, confused many established critics, enraged others. Christopher Morley even suggested that The Waste Land, and its celebrated six pages of notes, was a hoax. W. B. Yeats found Eliot's poems flat, unrhythmical, colorless, "working without apparent imagination." But years later, Rose Macaulay recalled The Waste Land's first impact: "Beyond and through the dazzling, puzzling technique, the verbal fascination, the magpie glitter of the borrowed and adapted phrases that brought a whole chorus of literature into service, enriching and extending every theme—beyond and through all this there was the sharp sense of recognition. Here was the landscape one knew, had always known; here were the ruins in the soul."
Liturgy & Prayer. If Eliot spoke for youth's despairs ("I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,/And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,/And in short, I was afraid"), he apparently scarcely knew its exhilarations. Though he was born in St. Louis, the son of a wholesale grocer, his roots ran back to New England and the upright Unitarianism of his clergyman grandfather. At Harvard, he dabbled in Sanskrit and Oriental religions, wrote his dissertation on the philosophy of F. H. Bradley. Prufrock, that lament of the aging, was published in his 20s. Looking back, the hunger for faith in Eliot's early poems now seems obvious and his religious development inevitable. In 1927—the same year he became a British subject—he was confirmed in the Church of England.
Few of his friends were surprised.
But in 1930 his poetic public was taken aback by Ash-Wednesday, his first published poem in five years. Subdued and introspective, it was also religious to the point of being liturgical:
Because I cannot hope to turn again Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something Upon which to rejoice Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still
Suffer me not to be separated And let my cry come unto Thee.
Eliot thus became the only major poet of this century who was intensely and essentially Christian. The development of this poetic theme which seemed so sudden at the time, was accompanied by a more gradual shift in style and manner. Thus, by the time he wrote the Four Quartets, his last major poems, Eliot's style was often densely compact, unitary, monolithic even: much more self-contained except for the recurring Christian symbology. However elevated, the later poems are neither so revolutionary nor so widely pertinent. Naturally enough: the saved man speaks to a resentful audience, the tortured man to a grateful one, since he gives his fellow sufferers a voice.
Sometimes the later poems were simply prosy:
I have said before That the past experience revived in the meaning Is not the experience of one life only But that of many generations.
Such lines are poetry only by courtesy; they justify Robert Graves's sardonic gibe: "What I like most about Eliot is that though one of his two hearts, the poetic one, has died and been given a separate funeral . . . he continues to visit the grave wistfully, and lay flowers on it." But Eliot could still strike off at will his unique amalgam of silver and sudden brimstone: