ELIOT AS INTERNATIONAL HERO
205
each of these authors the subject is transformed into a timeless essence.
The heritage of Western culture is available to these authors and they
use it many beautiful ways; but the fate of Western culture and the
historical sense as such does not become an important part of their
poetry. And then if we compare Eliot with Auden and with Pound,
a further definition becomes clear. In his early work, Auden is inspired
by an international crisis in a social and political sense; in his new
work, he writes as a teacher and preacher and secular theologian. In
neither period is all history and all culture a necessary part of the
subject or the sensibility which is dealing with the subject. With
Pound, we come closer to Eliot and the closeness sharpens the differ–
ence. Pound is an American in Europe too, and Pound, not Eliot,
was the first to grasp the historical and international dimension of
experience, as we can see in an early effort of his to explain the
method of the
Cantos
and the internal structure of each
Canto :
"All times are contemporaneous," he wrote, and in the
Cantos,
he
attempts to deal with all history as if it were part of the present.
But he fails; he. remains for lhe most part an American in Europe,
and the
Cantos
are never more than a book of souvenirs of a tour
of the world and a tour of culture.
To be international is to be a citizen of the world and thus a
citizen of no particular city. The world as such is not a community
and it has no constitution or government: it is the turning world in
which the human being, surrounded by the consequences of all times
and all places, must live
his
life as a human being and not as the
citizen of any nation. Hence, to be the heir of all the ages is to inherit
nothing but a consciousness of how all heirlooms are rooted in the
past. Dominated by the historical consciousness, the international hero
finds that all beliefs affect the holding of any belief (he cannot think
of Christianity without remembering Adonis) ; he
finds
that many
languages affect each use of speech
(The Waste Land
concludes with
a passage in four languages).
When nationalism attempts to renew itself, it can do so only
through the throes of war. And when nationalism in America attempts
to become articulate, when a poet like Carl Sandburg writes that
"The past is a bucket of ashes," or when Henry Ford makes the
purely American remark that "History is the bunk," we have only to
remember such a pilgrimage as that of Ford in the Peace Ship in
which he attempted to bring the First World War to an end in order
to see that anyone can say whatever he likes: no matter what anyone
says, existence has become international for everyone.
Eliot's political and religious affirmations are at another extreme,
