Stephen Spender, the poet, critic and friend of T.S. Eliot wrote:
After his return from Paris in 1911, he [Eliot] joined C.R. Lanman's Indic philology course and studied Sanskrit and Indian Philosophy for two years. He became rather mystical, though distrusting this tendency in himself. But Buddhisim remained a lifelong influence in his work and at the time when he was writing The Waste Land, he almost became a Buddhist--or so I once heard him tell the Chilean poet Gabriele Mistral, who was herself a Buddhist. The Buddhist and Christian mysticisms in the Four Quartets seem very close.[1]
In 1927, the same year that Eliot became a British subject, he also underwent a religious conversion and became a devoted member of the Church of England. In the preface to his 1928 book of essays For Lancelot Andrewes Eliot prepared the reader for what was being presented by writing:
The general point of view may be described as classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion.[2]
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