The Language of Patriotism: Rudyard Kipling and Rupert Brooke

Abstract

The phrase ‘spiritual patriots’, originally coined by Evelyn Underhill in her 1912 Introduction to The Cloud of Unknowing,¹ is perhaps, the most helpful phrase to use when describing the patriotism of someone like T. S. Eliot. But it can also be misleading. Eliot’s ‘spiritual’ patriotism did not prevent him, for example, from an immediate and active involvement in the war effort. And, after 1938, he became, if anything, more concerned than ever with social and political issues. But the full integrity of a civilised life in England (or, perhaps, one should say rather, the possibility of such integrity) Eliot saw as being threatened by the general collapse of religious and spiritual values throughout Europe. The war, in his view, with all its attendant horror, was but the merest symptom of this collapse. Eliot’s immediate aim was ‘to find new spiritual energies to regenerate and vitalize our sick society’.² This search led him back to the sources of European wisdom and most notably, at one period, to the English medieval tradition of mysticism.³Evelyn Underhill wrote in 1912:

The little family of mystical treatises which is known to stu- dents as ‘the Cloud of Unknowing group’, deserves more attention than it has hitherto received from English lovers of mysticism; for it represents the first expression in our tongue of that great mystic tradition of the Christian Neoplatonists which gathered up, remade, and ‘salted with Christ’s salt’ all that was best in the spiritual wisdom of the ancient world.⁴

Let us take one of the commonest manifestations of natural mysticism, patriotism…

(Henri Bremond, Prayer and Poetry, 1924)

All the last three Quartets are in a sense war poems…

(T. S. Eliot, ‘T. S. Eliot Talks about his Poetry’, 1958)