4 - Eliot

Summary

‘Some sort of opium … the people … must have, until you can give them either religion, or to each man a job in which he can be passionately interested, or both. For the present, no doubt, commercial literature will continue to flourish and to pander, more and more severed from real literature. The latter will be produced by those who will not merely be content not to make a living by it, not merely content to have no career; but who will be resigned to a very small audience – for we all should like to think that our poetry might be read and declaimed in the public-house, the forecastle and the shipyard.’

T. S. Eliot The Criterion, July 1932 pp. 682–3.

‘I assume that we are all … aware that if Christendom were re-united tomorrow it would be far from co-extensive with even the European world. Against it would be not only that considerable body of influence which is positively anti-Christian, but all the forces which we denominate Liberal, embracing all people who believe that the public affairs of this world and those of the next have nothing to do with each other; who believe that in a perfect world those who like golf could play golf, and those who like religion could go to church.