Hulme of Original Sin

Abstract Some of us who include Eliot in our own syllabuses have to contend with a number of entrenched attitudes toward his life and work, especially the alleged discontinuity of the poetry and criticism written before his religious conversion with that written after. Since the 1920s the cumulative criticism of Eliot’s development as a poet, critic, and Anglo-Catholic has persuaded most classroom teachers to accept the following assumptions and chronology: that the poems written from “Prufrock” to “The Hollow Men” are those of a despairing, sceptical poet probing spiritual bankruptcy in the modern world; that from “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) to his formal conversion in 1927 Eliot’s theory of tradition and criticism spring from literary rather than moral concerns; that in 1928, when in the preface to For Lancelot Andrewes Eliot announces that his attitude is “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglcatholic in religion,” there is a rather sudden turn from an aesthetic and literary theory of tradition to a moral and religious doctrine of orthodoxy; that in After Strange Gods (1934) and later Eliot not only sins against literature by employing his dogmatic religious beliefs as the narrow touchstone of his criticism but yearns nostalgically for the unified sensibility and moral security of a lost medieval world. Few would accept the assertion that by 19r6 Eliot’s classical, royalist, and religious point of view was already formulated. A first step toward establishing this assertion is to examine evidence of Eliot’s critical and religious position in 1915-16, and especially the role of T. E. Hulme in defining that position.