I’ve just received an e-mail from an acquaintance in Texas asking about C. S. Lewis’s attitude towards T. S. Eliot. Here’s the relevant part of the e-mail and my response:

A good colleague of mine and I have been reading your book on Lewis and the Catholic Church. While it has given rise to good conversation, we have a couple of questions we would like to ask, or a request for some further information if you are willing. We were curious about Lewis’ obvious dislike of T. S. Eliot. Was this simply a disagreement about literary style, or was there something more to it, something, perhaps, personal? Also, can you say more about Lewis’ politics particularly regarding Beveridge and Lewis’ resistance to the welfare state? I just read the chapter on Dante and purgatory and found this discussion most interesting and helpful as I have not read “The Great Divorce” – I look forward to this read.

Anyway, if you have the time, we would like to hear what you have to add.

My response:

I’m a little pressed for time at present so I hope you will forgive the brevity of my comments.

I believe that CSL’s dislike for TSE was a mixture of principled differences about the nature and practice of prosody and a degree of personal animosity based upon CSL’s perceptions of TSE and his influence. CSL disliked TSE’s stylistic modernism and believed that TSE’s work was not true poetry and that, indeed, TSE was a charlatan. CSL was intensely traditional in his literary likes and could not come to terms with the innovations in TSE’s poetry. He also disagreed with what he perceived to be TSE’s political and cultural elitism, and was not comfortable, at least in his early days as an Anglican Christian, with TSE’s anglo-catholicism. He would not have had much sympathy with TSE’s “Catholic” politics, the result of the enduring influence of Charles Maurras and Action Francaise on the young Eliot. I also believe that Lewis was frankly envious of Eliot’s success as a poet. Prior to his conversion, Lewis had hoped to make a name for himself as a poet and was clearly devastated by the failure of his poetry to make an impact. The lack of interest in his own verse heightened Lewis’s resentment of Eliot’s success.

As for Lewis’s politics, he was clearly very opposed to the impact of “progressive” modernity and scientism. With regard to his reference to the Beveridge Report, I believe that this indicates his essential sympathy with the distributism of Chesterton and Belloc, a sympathy that he expressed in a letter to his friend Arthur Greeves, if my memory serves me correctly.