I became familiar with Lewis' works at a fairly young age--in grade school. I did not become familiar with Eliot's work until I was somewhat older, probably a teenager. I remember attempting to read Eliot's infamously difficult poem The Wasteland while perusing an anthology of poetry I found on a bookshelf in our home. However, I did not really gain an appreciation of Eliot as a poet until my years teaching English in China. For some reason, I decided to assign Eliot's poem "The Journey of the Magi"--his imaginative re-telling of the story of the Magi and their visit to the Christ Child--as one of the readings in a writing course I was teaching. While struggling to understand the poem in order to be able to explain it to my students, I began to appreciate Eliot's gift as a poet.
Both Lewis and Eliot lived in England for much of their adulthoods and their lifetimes overlapped--Lewis died in 1963 and Eliot two years later. However, though both of them were intellectuals with a commitment to orthodox Christianity, they did not enjoy a close relationship for many years. It seems that Lewis was particularly antagonistic toward Eliot, in part because he did not agree with Eliot's literary criticism, nor could he accept Eliot's Modernist poetry. Perhaps Lewis was jealous of Eliot's success as a poet, a success Lewis failed to achieve.
However, ironically, despite this tense relationship, Lewis and Eliot shared a number of things in common. Both were, to some extent, outsiders in England--Lewis had been born and raised in Northern Ireland and Eliot was a transplanted American. Both were converts to the Christian faith--Lewis a convert from atheism and Eliot a convert from Unitarianism. Both men were, arguably, among the greatest Christian intellectuals of the 20th century.
Fortunately, in their later years, their antagonism was replaced with friendship. As Rowland Croucher in a February 21, 2006 posting at jmm.org.au tells us:
But it all turned out well in the end, though all disagreements continued to exist between them. In 1958, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, appointed both Eliot and Lewis to a commission charged with reviewing the Psalter. In the following years Eliot and Lewis met each other regularly during the meetings at Lambeth Palace which resulted in The Revised Psalter (1963). Now that they had gotten to know each other personally a friendship came into being. "You know I never liked Eliot's poetry, or even his prose. But when we met this time I loved him, "Lewis told his private secretary Walter Hooper in the last summer of his life. The greetings in his letters to Eliot changed from "Dear Sir" to "Dear Mr. Eliot" to "My dear Eliot." After a conference in Cambridge of the Psalter-commission, Lewis and Eliot even had lunch together with their wives...According to Hooper, Lewis could have been talking about Eliot and himself when he wrote [about friendship] in the fourth chapter of The Four Loves.
Perhaps this friendship that ultimately developed between Lewis and Eliot in their final years, despite their differences, can be cited as a striking example of how Christian love can overcome all.
Image of T. S. Eliot from wikipedia.org