Prelude: The Dark Angel

Abstract T.S. Eliot inherited the dark angel that tormented Lionel Johnson’s spiritual life. Its visitations began early in Eliot’s manhood, and it stayed long to terrorize a creative sensibility rich in sensual and spiritual antinornies. The outwardly happy Harvard undergraduate, who loved philosophy and art, poetry and drama, minstrel shows and melodramas, college songs and bawdy ballads, gradually gained a malicious companion. Hovering and whispering, Eliot’s dark angel descended as an agent of temptation and messenger of damnation. Under the shadow of its wings, the poet’s spiritual impulses were desecrated by sexual fantasies, while his sexual desires were short-circuited by the chatter of madness or chuckle of death. Turning desire itself into a psychological mechanism of spiritual terror and bodily disgust, the dark angel dislocated the poet’s consciousness from ordinary reality, took him to the edge of the abyss, and led him to phantasmal planes. Under its louring presence, the suffering poet conceived of himself as Arnaut, his lustful soul wrapped in purgatorial flames; as Sebastian, his spiritual love wracked by bodily arrows; as Hamlet, his rational will locked in spiritual paralysis; as Faust, his self-inverted rnind on the brink of dissolution. The dark angel would appear again in the consciousness of the London bridegroom and banker who loved teaching and reviewing, music halls and the Russian ballet, ragtime and jazz, the Chicken Strut and the Grizzly Bear. Eliot’s dark angel was at once his fury and his muse, causing and conducting the internal drama of shadows and voices that inhabit his acutely personal poems and plays.