Ever since The Waste Land appeared in 1922, T. S. Eliot has been hailed as the voice of the Lost Generation: the cohort who came of age amidst the horrors of World War I. And, in a way, that makes sense. The disillusionment and desperation in Eliot’s poem couldn’t help but resonate with the first men and women to witness industrial warfare.
Yet it’s worth pointing out that over 10 million members of that generation were lost in the fighting. Who speaks for the dead?
Wilfred Owen seems a good contender. The doomed youth was KIA in November of 1918, just one week before the Armistice was signed. I’m sure you read his most famous poem, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” in high school. Here’s how it ends:
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
It’s also the reason that line from Horace—“It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country”—will always have the ring of bitter irony.
Still, it wasn’t the dead who elected Owen their spokesman. They didn’t make him a staple of freshman English classes. That was the literati’s doing. Many of them, like Eliot, managed to avoid the trenches. They elevated Owen above more gifted poets who died in the fighting: Edward Thomas, Joyce Kilmer, and Rupert Brooke, to name just three.
Now, why is that?
Maybe it’s because Thomas and Kilmer and Brooke believed the old Lie. Whatever they thought of the Great War, they believed that it was indeed sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. So, maybe Owen’s reputation has nothing to do with his talents as a poet. Maybe it’s more to do with his message: patriotism is a scam, and countries are nothing to die for.
In fairness, Brooke’s “The Soldier” (which I’m sure you also read in English class) isn’t much more nuanced. But then we have a poem like Thomas’s “The Owl.”
On a cold, windy night, the poet arrives at a cozy inn and sits down to a hot meal. “Rest had seemed the sweetest thing under a roof,” he reflects, until he hears “An owl’s cry, a most melancholy cry.” Suddenly, the world seems a different sort of place:
And salted was my food, and my repose,
Salted and sobered, too, by the bird’s voice
Speaking for all who lay under the stars,
Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.
As Someone once said, “The poor you will always have with you.” Thomas seems to feel the same way about soldiers. He wrote “The Owl” in 1915, the same year he enlisted in the Royal Garrison Artillery. He died two years later at the Battle of Arras.
This mixture of sympathy and stoicism is very English. It’s also hard to come by. You have to spend your whole life thinking about the less fortunate, even when you yourself are half-dead from cold and hunger. And for what? In the end, you still get shot through the chest in the Hauts-de-France.
Little wonder the literati prefer Wilfred Owen.
I’ve been turning all this over in my head after talking with a friend of mine, a staunch Eliotian. As I said, I understand the appeal of Eliot’s earlier works to those who are disillusioned with modernity. I do. But I think we also have to ask ourselves, Are these modern horrors new, or just worse? I’m not sure, though sometimes I think we hew to writers like Eliot and Owen because they give us an excuse. An excuse to cower. An excuse to despair.
Did the Great War really discredit patriotism? Did it absolve men from the bonds of duty and honor? Dying for one’s country may be less sweet, but is it less fitting?
And, yes, the modern world is uniquely odious in many ways. (Actually, I wrote a book about it.) The question is, what are we going to do about it? Should we mope like the Modernists? Should we lash out against the world, like the fascists and the socialists? Or should we try to suffer with grace, find beauty in the ruins, and make life a little better for the people we love?
I really don’t want to keep bagging on Eliot, whose later poems are some of the finest ever written, and who’s unsurpassed as a literary and social critic. Deep down, I’m an Eliotian, too. But I can’t stand those dismal lines at the end of his poem “The Hollow Men”:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Much better is G. K. Chesterton’s famous retort:
Some sneer; some snigger; some simper;
In the youth where we laughed, and sang.
And they may end with a whimper
But we will end with a bang.
Even during his lifetime, Chesterton’s stoicism (more hopeful than Thomas’s) felt somewhat dated. Yet Chesterton and Eliot were only born fourteen years apart. They both lived through World War I. Chesterton actually lost his brother to “the Prussian power.” The difference is that GKC came of age well before the Great War; TSE was in his mid-twenties when the fighting started.
What’s odd is that critics tend not to fault Eliot for his lack of perspective. Instead, they blame Chesterton for taking too broad a view of things. He failed to see that the war “changed everything.” But that was precisely Chesterton’s point. It didn’t. “Sometimes life doesn’t go the way you wanted. That’s part of the deal,” he’s saying. “We learned to deal with it. You can, too.”
We don’t like people who talk like Chesterton. We don’t want to be told that our problems are commonplace. We don’t want to hear that the solutions to those problems are easy to grasp, though difficult to practice. We want poets like the young Eliot, who quote William Blake and the Bhagavad Gita to prove that we have it so much worse than those who came before.
Chesterton holds us to a higher standard. Eliot gives us an out. And while TSE might be haute couture, I’m with GKC on this one. It’s harsh, yes. But I do think it comes from a place of love. Chesterton wanted to share his perspective with the Lost Generation, to help lift them out of the mire they’d settled themselves into.
To his credit, TSE came around to GKC’s view in the end. By his own winding ways, he evolved a sort of Christian stoicism all his own. As he wrote in The Four Quartets:
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
If there’s any value in the word conservatism, surely this must be it. “There is no new thing under the sun.” If our problems seem different, it’s a difference of degree, not of kind. And the solution to our problems isn’t structural or “systemic.” It’s not a matter for politicians or economists or ideologues.
No: the only way things get better is if ordinary men and women choose virtue over vice, sacrifice over selfishness, hope over despair. Every single one of us has to renew that choice a thousand times a day, from the moment we become rational to the hour of our death. There are no shortcuts. We can’t choose for other people, though we can help each other along the way.
This battle will go on, day after day, generation after generation, until He comes again.
P.S. Friends, please forgive my absence last week. The Davises finally caught COVID. We all had very mild cases, thank God—much lighter than our friends who were fully vaccinated. Before you go, I’d like to share two pieces of professional news.
First, I’ve been made a contributing writer at the World edition of The Spectator. I’ll be covering the intersection of religion, politics, and culture. Many thanks to the Speccie’s editors for this honor.
Second, I’ve signed a contract with Sophia Institute Press for my next book, The Times Are Wretched. I’m also grateful to my colleagues at Sophia for this chance to continue refining a strategy for Christians living in this new Dark Age.
As always, if you’ve enjoyed this (free!) newsletter, please consider buying a copy of my first book The Reactionary Mind.
Peace and the Good!