Books: Royalist, Classicist, Anglo-Catholic

COLLECTED POEMS OF T. S. ELIOT—Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

Thomas Stearns Eliot is a St. Louis boy who went to Harvard, and beyond. Not a particularly shining light in an undergraduate world that included such firebrands and footlights as the late John Reed and Walter Lippmann, he polished his post-graduate lamp to such purpose that he became Poet Laureate of the Lost Generation. His famed Waste Land has stood like a lighthouse against which whole flocks of sophisticated blues-writers have dashed themselves in vain emulation. When Poet Eliot expatriated himself to England, there were few disapproving murmurs from his followers. But when he publicly renounced agnosticism, announced himself a "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion," he started an indignant fluttering in literary incubators that has not yet died down. Poet Eliot, now a naturalized British subject, a scholarly editor (The Criterion), even more highly regarded in his foster-country than in the U. S., a devout member of the Church of England, is a puzzling phenomenon. Last week, when he published his Collected Poems, readers were curious to see what he had left out.

Some of T. S. Eliot's most famed verses were obviously written before he attained a state of grace, were not likely to inculcate any comfortable doctrine into Anglo-Catholic minds. But after looking through this collection readers could see that Poet Eliot had let himself be guided by his artistic conscience: the book contained many a passage that the Archbishop of Canterbury would not read from the pulpit. Sample: The Hippopotamus, generally taken as a satire on the Church.

The hippopotamus's day Is passed in sleep, at night he hunts; God works in a mysterious way— The Church can sleep and feed at once. . . .

(The hippo is envisaged as being translated into heaven):

He shall be washed as white as snow, By all the martyr'd virgins kist, While the True Church remains below Wrapt in the old miasmal mist.

Only experts can fathom all of Eliot's literary allusions, with which his verse is packed, but even cursory readers will recognize some of his allusive tricks:

When lovely woman stoops to folly and Paces about her room again, alone, She smoothes her hair with automatic hand, And puts a record on the gramophone.

Critics and admirers may respect Eliot's later, purportedly religious poems, such as Ash Wednesday, but what will stick with them will be gobbets of his earlier verse, such as the closing lines of The Hollow Men:

This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a 'whimper.