T. S. Eliot and Football Supporters

Dublin October 2012

A trip via North Wales to Dublin with friends from Swansea University days, included an extended visit to Ireland's National Gallery.  This gallery is intuitively laid out to take the visitor though the various eras of art history, all helpful.

Back this enjoyable weekend we were travelling on a train back from Bangor to Euston. At Milton Keynes, the carriages were suddenly invaded by crowds of football supporters heading for some London-based fixture. They were a boisterous, good-humoured lot, but the contrast between the peace of the earlier part of the trip, and the chaos we were now subjected to, was palpable.

Here is the set of words (somewhat more judgmental)  from TSEliot about the “Inner Voice”  They are from an Essay called “The Function of Criticism” and actually addresses the relative merits of an understanding of “Classical”  and “Romantic” in art and literature.  In this section, he focuses on the importance of “Tradition” to advance a civilisation via its literature  – the Classical mode,  as preferable to the Romantic mode which relies on reference to the self, the “inner voice”.

North Wales October 2012

“My belief is that those who possess this inner voice are ready enough to hearken to it, and will hear no other. The inner voice, in fact, sounds remarkably like an old principle which has been formalised by an elder critic in the now familiar phrase of “doing as one likes”. The possessors of the inner voice ride ten to a compartment to a football match at Swansea, listening to the inner voice which breathes the eternal message of vanity, fear and lust.”

Thus the themes of our trip were joined, fragmentally, with Swansea and football hooligans!