The drift of your argument is pretty clear, David. Equally concerned, Eliot must have found kindred souls in Brother Every, Charles Williams and others like them. No wonder all this forms a backdrop to his poetry. He subsumes much of it in his work but, IMHO, in a manner congenial to his notion of art. I haven't read poetry written by Br. Every and others who are in the vanguard to assert Christian values. FR Leavis does not seem to have a high opinion of it. I'm not sure, but if it is any of your concern to project their poetry as a viable medium of Christian reclamation, you will have to, I'm afraid, project it as works of art parallel to Eliot's. I should be sorry if I got you wrong. Regards, CR |
| I haven't yet taken in the whole of his book, but I think that Bro Every was advocating a return to mainstream Christian values and attitudes, which he felt largely had been lost or abandoned since about the end of the eighteenth century. He saw greed and pursuit of profit replacing Christian propriety; trivial and meaningless pastimes and diversions replacing worthwhile recreation (cf perhaps Eliot's 'distracted from distraction by distraction'). He pointed to contemporary buildings and vernacular architecture as victims of these forces - comparing the mock-Tudor speculative boxes of suburbia with modest, utilitarian, medieval and Georgian buildings and settlements. He advocated that the discrimination should be Christian not as of righteousness but simply because it provided a time-honoured code of values of assured goodness, which modern society he argued was largely bankrupt in. He didn't absolve the Church though from having somewhat lost its way, too. His outlook seems much the same as eg John Betjeman's revolt against 'ghastly good taste' in architecture and his ridiculing of concrete boxes with a steel girder cross on the front and a Saint Ecumenicus sign on the front as absurd and ugly compared with traditional church architecture, which was put up for the glory of God. Michael Roberts too (another pal of Eliot) approached similar from a geopolitical perspective and Charles Williams and perhaps CS Lewis from a theological one. Generally, if one views the whole canon of immediate prewar English cultural thought as a carnival procession, this seems to have been one of the main bandwagons. It was just such a great pity that Roberts and Williams both suddenly dropped dead and fell off the float not far from the start. It was a far poorer event without them. On 7 October 2012 22:45, Chokh Raj <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
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