Disambivalent Quatrains

Eliot’s career is often assumed to fall into two phases. The break between these is said, for convenience, to occur with Eliot’s announcement that he was “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion” (FLA vii), though it is understood that the transition – his conversion from one sort of Eliot to another – could not have been so abrupt. While sensitive to the dissonance in Eliot’s writing, we tend to assume that his discordant tones are sounded not simultaneously but in succession.
His career, however, does not divide comfortably into phases – and certainly, an agnostic, materialist, avant -garde phase was not followed by its inverse. His conversion was an expression, one among many, of unresolved ambivalence. At different times he responded in different ways, but his ambivalence was constant and consistent.