In my end is my beginning T.S. Elliot

In my end is my beginning
T S Elliot

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present to time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all Time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.

These are the opening words of Burnt Norton from the Four Quartets by T S Elliot published by Faber and Faber which I bought for three shillings and as an original paper back edition in the early 1960’s

On Saturday night there was an excellent programme on the life of T S Elliot, regarded by many as one of the great poets of twentieth century, born and raised in the USA but became a British citizen after coming to England and marrying. The programme explained his marital unhappiness because of the instability of his wife and her eventual admission to hospital for nearly a decade until her death. After her death he married his secretary and she devoted herself to caring for him, and then after his death to his work which included to the Anew Lloyd Webber musical production Cats based on his book for children, Old Possum’s book of Practical Cats. The programme related the circumstances of his life including the two World Wars to the subjects of his writings and to the impact of moving from a Unitarian Church background to becoming an Anglo Catholic. For me there are three works which had significant influence on my life, The Four Quartets, The Play- The Cocktail Party, and the long works, Ash Wednesday and the Waste Land.

I cannot remember when or who introduced me to his writings for certain, One of my earliest purchases on laving school was to buy at copy of the Penguin Book of English Verse published in 1946 for four shillings and six pence. It has lost its spine covering and the front and back covers are loose and dog-eared such has been its use over those early years. His poems Gerontion, Ash Wednesday vi and Rannoch by Glencoe, and the fourth of the Quartets-Little Gidding. Although I had successfully studied and passed English Literature along with English Language at Ordinary Level of the General Certificate of Education, and had been reading adult literature from an early age having graduated myself from the Children’s into the adult fiction room while still a school boy and read books with an innocence and naivety which makes me now cringe. I struggled then, as now, with grasping the literary, philosophical, religious and historical references of individual poems and with their intellectual meaning and significance. I loved the music of the words and their emotional resonance with how I felt about myself and life as a late developing adolescent and a young man determined to translate feelings into positive action.

The Penguin Book covered work from the sixteenth century with the work of Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Bryon, Shelley and Keats, Tennyson and Longfellow being poets I tried to hear, Then there was Walt Whitman before coming to the Beat Poets and William Morris. I still like Kipling and Robert Frost and then in period of What a lovely War, Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen before TS Elliot who can be said with Ezra Pound who befriended him and edited some of his writing before it was published, to have started what is now regarded as “modern“ or the “contemporary” style of writing. Penguin has first published a book of Contemporary verse in 1951 which I did not acquire until 1960, with entries by D H Lawrence, Siegfried Sassoon before T S Elliot’s Sweeney Erect , excepts from The Waste Land and Ash Wednesday and two of his Plays, Murder in the Cathedral and the Family Reunion. There was then Hebert read, Aldous Huxley and Robert Graves; William Plomer’s poem Father and Son and another love John Betjeman- Miss Joan Hunter Dunne.. I paid attention to Lawrence Durrell after an important young female influence in my life had given me a copy of one of his Alexandrian Quartet Novels from which I retain many images especially his eating at a whole tin of olives at one sitting. Whereas it was Elliot who appeared to combine works on spirituality and psychology which fitted like a glove over my dilemmas and growing understanding at that time, it was Dylan Thomas that expressed something of the need to break out, to enjoy waywardness and excess and to express anger at what one could not control, Rage Rage against the dying the light. A third volume bought at the same time was on Modern American verse which includes an article on TS Elliot as well as his work Dry Salvages to illustrate how American his work sounded.

It was not until the 1980’s that I bought The Oxford Book of Twentieth century English version chosen by Philip Larkin. This contains the poem which first brought him to public attention, The Love Song of J Alfred Prufuck and the full The Waste Land. There is a similar selection the three volume edition of the Oxford Library of English Poetry, this time chosen by the novelist John Wain. I will watch the programme again on i Player but my work and other interests and activities will mean that will not for the foreseeable future take time to hear again the voice of Elliot in the way that he merits, I hope however his words will sing in the ears of many generations to come.