Orwell and Eliot: Politics, Poetry, Prose

Abstract

At first sight, Orwell and Eliot would appear to have little to connect them, in background or outlook or anything else.¹ Eliot was an established poet, critic and publisher by the time Orwell knew him, and a declared conservative and Anglo-Catholic. Orwell was still a struggling novelist and journalist, and a committed social democrat. Nevertheless, there is an intriguing personal connection, mainly during the early 1940s, and also a literary and intellectual one. All of this was more important for Orwell than for Eliot, who was a figure of great symbolic significance for the younger writer though in complex and often contradictory ways. Orwell often focused on the same issues as Eliot, opposing, but also incorporating Eliot’s ideas into his own thinking. After describing the circumstances of their friendship, this paper will compare their views on certain historical, cultural and literary matters (class vs. élite, poetry vs. prose, community vs. individual), ending with the implication of these ideas in their culminating imaginative visions, Four Quartets (1944) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).