‘Was there ever a worse year?’

100 years since T.S. Eliot changed poetry. Five years later, he converted to Anglo-Catholicism.

By Michael Cook

Mercatornet

“2022. A deadly pandemic. War in Ethiopia. Civil war in Myanmar. Looming war in Ukraine. Chaos in American politics, in British politics. Woke lunacy. A million Uyghurs interned in China. Sectarian violence in India.

“Was there ever a worse year?

“There are quite a few contenders, but one of them surely is 1922. One hundred years ago, the future looked grim. The world had just recovered from the First World War, in which 40 million people died. Another 40 million or so died in the Great Influenza Epidemic. The Bolsheviks were consolidating their rule in Russia after a civil war in which 10 million died. Americans were suffering under Prohibition.

“Articulating the dread and despair of the 1920s was a poem aptly named “The Waste Land”. It was published in 1922 by T.S. Eliot, a 34-year-old American — although he found Britain so congenial that he spent most of his adult life there and posed as a stereotypical middle-class Englishman with a bowler hat and rolled umbrella.”

Seventeen years after The Waste Land:

“As political philosophy derives its sanction from ethics, and ethics from the truth of religion, it is only by returning to the eternal source of truth that we can hope for any social organisation which will not, to its ultimate destruction, ignore some essential aspect of reality …  If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.” – T.S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society,  1939.

https://mercatornet.com/100-years-since-poetry-changed-for-ever-with-the-waste-land/76954/