4 March 2024
David Strong, University of Glasgow
In this article, I argue for the re-examination of T. S. Eliot’s dramatic work using a theopoetic approach to excavate the transcendent potential of collaboration and community present in Eliot’s Christian social project. Taking Eliot’s pageant play The Rock (1934) as an example, I will demonstrate that, while disappointing to his modernist contemporaries, the play embodies a form of new speech that articulates Christian community through its network of collaborators, cast of hundreds of amateur actors, and melding of dramatic forms.
Theopoetics is a theory of religious art whereby the aesthetic experience of religious truth and beauty substantiate the presence, possibility, and value of the divine. L. B. C. Keefe-Perry describes theopoetics as ‘the practice of making God known through text.’[1] Summarising the work of modern theorists of theopoetics Stanley Hopper and Amos Niven Wilder, he writes that ‘reclaiming theology for the masses requires the creation of a new theopoetic’ that engages ‘perennial Christian questions […] in a way that is fresh and grounded in the particulars of experience more than philosophical abstraction.’[2] Theopoetics, then, is a method of imbricating the aesthetic and the theological, of seeing art as communicating a truth about religion lost in the proofs and argumentation of modern theology and instead finding a new way to communicate with a modern population.
This approach, I argue, is prefigured by Eliot’s verse drama and particularly the aforementioned play The Rock. Eliot anticipates the philosophical rethinking of the relationship between modern theology and aesthetics and provides an early artistic model for the new theopoetic theorised by Hopper and Wilder. I argue Eliot’s drama is an example of Heather Walton’s contention that theopoetic ‘art may often embody what conceptual frameworks are, as yet, unable to articulate.’[3] It is through The Rock’s imbrication of music hall practice and religious verse drama that Eliot’s new theopoetic takes shape as he strives to engage the public with a presentation of religious life that is both transcendent and rooted in contemporary experience.
The Rock follows the construction of a new church in modern London by a group of three bricklayers, Ethelbert, Edwin, and Albert. Over the course of the play, their work is continually interrupted by forces opposed to the Church such as fascists and communist agitators. They also bear witness to scenes from the history of the Christian Church that show the need for perseverance in the face of opposition. Taken on as a commission for the Forty-Five Churches Fund of the Diocese of London, the performances of The Rock at Sadler’s Wells were massive productions featuring hundreds of amateur actors and numerous collaborators as well as incorporating elements of verse drama, pageant plays, and the music hall. E. Martin Browne, who was to direct many of Eliot’s plays going forward, was then the Director of Religious Drama for the Diocese of Chichester and put forward Eliot for the commission despite fears from church organisers that he was ‘too modern: too difficult.’[4] Concurrently, Eliot was in the process of formulating his idea of the poet who ‘would like to be something of a popular entertainer.’[5] This move towards poetry with a social utility had drawn him to the theatre and The Rock was to provide a testing ground for the combination of popular drama with the evocative verse of Eliot’s earlier work. Given this, fears that Eliot’s The Rock would be too difficult were misplaced and the verse choruses (the only parts of the play that remain in print) provide the only modern and difficult expression of the play’s themes. The opening lines, for example, are more imagistic and allusive than the dialogues:
The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.
O perpetual revolution of configured stars,
O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying![6]
Reminiscent of Eliot’s poems of the 1930s such as Ash-Wednesday, the concern of the play with cyclical time and the persistence of tradition within it is invoked through celestial and seasonal movement. The merging in the play of Eliot’s modernist verse with the popular form of the music hall answers Wilder’s call in Theopoetics (1976) that ‘[r]eligious communication generally must overcome a long addiction to the discursive, the rationalistic, and the prosaic.’[7]
Eliot’s conscious imbrication of aesthetics and theology is demonstrated in an interaction between the play’s protagonists, three Cockney bricklayers, and the 12th century Anglo-Norman priest Rahere. Meeting Rahere, the jester-turned-monk responsible for building St. Bartholomew’s Church and Hospital, provides both an opportunity for comedy and a connection between that comedy and religious experience using what Randy Malamud identifies as one of the ‘heavy-handed setups’ that make bricklayers typical of the music hall.[8] Upon being told by Rahere that he had been a jester for King Henry, Edwin responds to Alfred’s explanation with a comic response:
ALFRED. […] You ought to know a jester’s a man what comes on and does the comic turn.
EDWIN. Oh, like George Robey.
ALFRED. You ought to be ashamed of yourself Ted, to liken this gentleman to George Robey. Robey’s on the ‘alls; but this gentlemn’s meanin’ is as ‘ow ‘e used to hentertain the toffs, at Buckin’ham Palace and such like.[9]
The invocation of George Robey, one of the most well-known music hall performers of the early 20th century, draws a connection between Robey, Rahere, and Edwin as well as between theology and popular culture. Indeed, what precedes those lines is Rahere stating that his ‘temptation’ and source of sin was his association with ‘ease’ and ‘courts and the company of the great.’ When considering both Rahere and Robey as entertainers, Alfred’s contention that Edwin should be ‘ashamed’ to compare Robey and Rahere makes Robey seem the injured party. Alfred’s distinction relies on Rahere’s elite audience compared to Robey’s popular appeal, however as this audience was the source of the former’s sin, a sin Robey is innocent of. This distinction between elite and popular audience was key to Eliot’s own attempt with The Rock to move to being ‘something of a popular entertainer’ from his position as a central high modernist. This explicit connection of the music hall with 12th century Christianity and modern church building through Robey, Rahere, and Edwin, alongside the music hall revue style of The Rock demonstrates that desire to engage modern audiences with an experience of Christianity that is, as Keefe-Perry says of theopoetics, ‘fresh and grounded in the particulars of experience.’[10]
Approaching The Rock from a theopoetic perspective re-enshrines religion as one of the animating forces of Eliot’s turn away from the complex modernist poetry of his earlier career and provides a way of understanding his drama as radical in its own way. It also emphasises the communal principles of his Christian thought that are often overshadowed by his tendency towards authoritarianism. Eliot’s religion informs both the propagandistic elements of The Rock along with the absolutist and often reactionary principles found in his Christian politics. At the same time, these principles came into being in service of creating meaning through community, a facet of Eliot’s work made clear through a theopoetic approach.
Ezra Pound, in a 1914 letter to Harriet Monroe, wrote that Eliot had ‘modernized himself on his own.’[11] It was the aesthetic rendering of modern life that Pound found in Eliot’s poetry that led to this exclamation, Eliot had worked to create a new way of communicating the experiences of urban modernity in its alienated and fragmented state. In The Rock, Eliot brings that effort of modernisation to Christianity, expanding the meaning of creating a new Church beyond the raising of new buildings to the mode engagement of the Church with the world. In seeking a ‘new speech’, understandable as the play itself, Eliot pre-empts Wilder’s emphasis on newness in theopoetics, that ‘[i]t is at the level of the imagination that the fateful issues of our new world-experience must first be mastered. It is here that culture and history are broken, and here that the church is polarized. Old words do not reach across the new gulfs.’[12] To make new, then, is also a goal of theopoetics. I argue it is this shared intent that makes theopoetics relevant to modernism and particularly to Eliot. For Eliot, bridging the gulf between culture and history through theopoetic drama is a step towards creating a Christian community that is accessible, intelligible, and in so being, would provide the first practical results of his Christian political vision.
Sources
Feature Image Credit: Keystone Pictures USA / Alamy Stock Photo
[1] L. B. C. Keefe-Perry, ‘Theopoetics: Process and Perspective’ in Christianity and Literature, Vol. 58, No. 4 (Summer 2009), pp. 579-601, p. 579.
[2] Keefe-Perry, ‘Theopoetics, Process and Perspective’, p. 583
[3] Heather Walton, ‘A Theopoetics of Ruins’ in Toronto Journal of Theology, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Fall 2020), pp. 159-169, p. 161.
[4] E. Martin Browne, The Making of T. S. Eliot’s Plays, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 6.
[5] T. S. Eliot, ‘Lecture VIII: Conclusion’ in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, Volume 4: English Lion, 1930-1933 ed. Jason Harding and Ronald Schuchard (The Johns Hopkins University Press and Faber and Faber, 2015), pp. 685 – 694, p. 691.
[6] T. S. Eliot, The Rock (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), p. 7.
[7] Amos Niven Wilder, Theopoetics (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976), p. 1.
[8] Randy Malamud, Where Words Are Valid (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1994), p. 36.
[9] The Rock, p. 25.
[10] Keefe-Perry, ‘Theopoetics: Process and Perspective’, p. 583.
[11] Letter to Harriet Monroe, September 30, 1914, in Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (London: Faber & Faber, 1951), p. 80.
[12] Wilder, Theopoetics, p. 1.
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