The Great War, which shattered the lives of men like Robert Graves and drove others like George Mallory to seek some form of redemption in the unsullied purity of high places, was succeeded in Europe by two distracted and febrile decades. In Britain, thousands of returning soldiers encountered a land less fit for heroes than they had anticipated, its towns and cities smoky and polluted and its productive farming landscape largely abandoned to the uncontrolled forces of free trade. If agricultural research advanced on a broad front in the 1920s and 1930s, most sectors of farming remained in the economic doldrums as imported foodstuffs arrived at British ports at prices below the costs of home production. The land, the nation’s only real capital, was being sacrificed on the altar of economic expediency. In the longer term, many believed, this neglect would usher in a decline in soil fertility and, as people left the land, a soulless, desolate and dispirited countryside would remain.

To the small but influential group of ruralist landowners, writers and scientists who formed the nucleus of the early organic movement, this situation was intolerable; the land had to be revived, its ‘spiritual values’ reinforced and vibrant rural communities with their daily lives in contact with seasonal natural rhythms established. Meanwhile, the true agrarian community would only flourish with Christianity as its keystone. Destruction and decay would inevitably follow the abandonment of this principle. If a hard-bitten farming world viewed this notion with ill-concealed scepticism, the organicists looked upon harmony with nature as consonant with the Christian ethic and the restoration of a direct relationship between society and the land as a prerequisite for religious revival. Yet, one cannot help thinking that the rural labourer, back hunched against the freezing east wind as s/he picked Brussels sprouts in some bleak Bedfordshire field, might well have offered a different perspective on the much-vaunted ‘spiritual values’ engendered by work on the land!

In his thoughtful and occasionally provocative discussion of T. S. Eliot’s poetry, journalism and cultural criticism, Jeremy Diaper explores the poet’s deep engagement with organicist and rural revivalist movements. The city-dwelling Eliot readily admitted his ignorance of the minutiae of farming and harboured few illusions about the impracticability of a return to some sort of utopian rural past. Nevertheless, several of his essays reveal considerable sympathy with the idea of a rural community with God and the Church at its heart and suggest that such communities would somehow serve as a counteractive to the spiritual vacuity of city life. As a member of the Editorial Board of Faber (which published a number of seminal organicist texts), and friend of Philip Mairet, editor of The New English Weekly, Eliot was in frequent contact with several of the foremost proponents of the organicist vision. Mairet’s journal and Eliot’s own Criterion were to offer a platform for a whole raft of organicist writings with their emphasis on ‘wholeness’, the over-exploitation of the earth’s resources and man’s misuse and misapplication of science.

Eliot’s major poetical works are, of course, subject to a wide range of interpretations. However, as Diaper argues, his agrarian sensibilities pervade the poetry from the 1920s onwards. In The Waste Land drought and infertility reign; the land is desolate and exhausted and the spirit vitiated. Meanwhile, the organicist’s horror at over-exploitation of the soil finds expression in the striking image of dust storms in Little Gidding and the notion of the river as a potentially destructive force in The Dry Salvages. Even so, there seems to be little in Eliot’s work suggestive of any sort of romantic yearning for a mythical rural past. Indeed, observes Diaper, the dance in East Coker might be read as an attempt by the poet to debunk the rural idyll as adumbrated by Rolf Gardiner in his volkisch festivities at Springhead.

T. S. Eliot deplored the ‘domination of finance’ as an overriding feature of modern life. Yet the essence of the ‘domination of finance’ and its inevitable racial connotations were central to the thinking of Lord Lymington, Jorian Jenks, Anthony Ludovici and other far-right nostalgists with whom the poet was either directly or indirectly in contact. Diaper, however, exonerates Eliot from guilt by association although the eventual availability of further archival material may (or may not) give reason to modify this judgement. For the moment, Jeremy Diaper’s lucid and detailed study locates Eliot at the heart of the early organic movement. Some readers may question the author’s interpretation of some of the verse, but few will gainsay his central argument. In any event, this book will prove essential reading not only for students of organicism, but for all those with a general interest in the culture of mid-twentieth-century England as reflected in the work of its greatest modernist poet.