The man who disbelieves in any future life whatever is also a believer in Hell. For in this life one makes, now and then, important decisions; or at least allows circumstances to decide; and some of these decisions are such as have consequences for all the rest of our mortal life. Some people find themselves consequently in circumstances such that the whole of their mortal life must be a torment to them. And if there is no future life, then Hell is, for such people, here and now.
—T. S. Eliot, from a letter to Paul Elmer More, August 10, 1932

Guillaume: At our last meeting of the College Moot, after a rather lively discussion of Eliot’s “Sweeney Erect,” we decided to spend this evening looking at one of Eliot’s four French poems, “Lune de Miel.” Our purpose was to validate—or invalidate—Eliot’s account of the traditional poet as applied to his own poetry in the period 1915-22. If, we supposed, Eliot seriously practiced what he declared in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919); if it’s true that the poet gifted with “the historical sense” writes “with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer . . . has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order”; if the mind of Europe is truly “a mind which changes . . .  which abandons nothing en route”; if the traditional poet writes with the whole Western tradition flowing into his fingertips—theneverything he writes