T. S. Eliot’s Immeasurable Happiness

Abstract

This chapter shows how Eliot struggled with happiness, and how his work illuminates the unsettling far reaches of the concept. T. S. Eliot struggles between a sense of happiness as residing in creaturely comforts (often food-related) and a concern for the otherworldly. The chapter begins with a consideration of how The Waste Land is punctuated with moments of consolation amidst devastation, and how this echoes Eliot’s sense of the happiness to be found in wartime. I examine such happiness in relation to ideas of post-war reconstruction, health, leisure, and ‘standard of living’. I argue that in ‘Marina’ and Four Quartets Eliot thinks about happiness in relation to both religious grace and fiction. The section on Four Quartets explores hypothetical, fictional, wished-for happiness, as well as Eliot’s balance between loving ‘very good dinners’ and seeing happiness even amidst darkness and deprivation. I conclude by examining undeserved happiness in The Elder Statesman.