T S Eliot And Indic Traditions

An exploration of Eliot's lifelong interest in Indic philosophy and religion.

The Hindu words "Shantih shantih shantih" provide the closing of The Waste Land, perhaps the most famous poem of the twentieth century. This is just one example among many of T. S. Eliot’s immersion in Sanskrit and Indian philosophy and of how this fascination strongly influenced his work. Centering on Eliot’s study of sources from ancient India, this new book offers a rereading of the poet’s work, analyzing his unpublished graduate school notebooks on Indian philosophy and exploring Eliot’s connection with Buddhist thought. Eliot was crucially influenced by his early engagement with Indian texts, and when analyzed through this lens, his poems reveal a criticism of the attachments of human desire and the suggestion that asceticism might hold out the possibility that desire can be cultivated toward a metaphysical absolute. Full of such insights, Upton’s book represents an important intervention in modernist studies.

From his early "e;Curtain Raiser"e; to the late Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot took an interest in all the arts, drawing on them for poetic inspiration and for analysis in his prose. T. S. Eliot and the Arts provides extensive, high quality research about his many-sided engagement with painting, sculpture, museum artefacts, architecture, music, drama, music hall, opera and dance, as well as the emerging media of recorded sound, film and radio. Building on the newly published editions of Eliot's prose and poetry, this contemporary research collection opens avenues for understanding Eliot both in his own right as a poet and critic and as a foremost exemplar of interarts modernism.

The central themes of this collection of essays are the mystery of time past, present and future, and the problems of redemption. They are concerned with modern literature, the threat of meaninglessness in the postmodern condition, and the possibility of salvation. In an age of deferral and difference, this book addresses itself to eschatology and apocalypse, and redemption in, through, but particularly of, time itself. Hell and madness are never far away, yet the reconfiguration of time and the breaking in of the transcendent continue to suggest theological possibilities beyond the wastelands of the twentieth century. To those possibilities we look in hope.

T. S. Eliot enjoyed a profound relationship with Earth. Criticism of his work does not suggest that this exists in his poetic oeuvre. Writing into this gap, Etienne Terblanche demonstrates that Eliot presents Earth as a process in which humans immerse themselves. The Waste Land and Four Quartets in particular re-locate the modern reader towards mindfulness of Earth’s continuation and one’s radical becoming within that process. But what are the potential implications for ecocriticism? Based on its careful reading of the poems from a new material perspective, this book shows how vital it has become for ecocriticism to be skeptical about the extent of its skepticism, to follow instead the twentieth century’s most important poet who, at the end of searing skepticism, finds affirmation of Earth, art, and real presence.

A concise and clear guide to the complexities of T.S.Eliot's poetry, with easy to follow structure and chapters on Eliot's major texts, all in chronological order.

"This book explores poetry of T. S. Eliot and three plays, Sweeney Agonistes, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party, in the light of his responses to his cultural tradition." "The concept of memory, as an acknowledgment both of a cultural heritage and of its availability for original works of mind and imagination, unifies this study by Grover Smith. Eliot was tradition-oriented, drawing upon various cultures - primitive, Indic, European, and American - for poetic inspiration and models. By education, he was multicultural in a thoroughly legitimate sense." "In separate chapters, Smith, though commenting on a few verbal sources of types familiar from Eliot's practice of stylistic borrowing, focuses on thematic concerns. Included are the psychological labyrinth of death-in-life of Poe's tales and poems; transfigurations of Hamlet from Shakespeare to Goethe, Coleridge, and Freud; popular stage entertainment in nineteenth-century America; poetic stimuli from James Barrie, Arnold Bennett, and Aldous Huxley; twentieth-century speculations on time and serialism; the world of occult phenomena in W. B. Yeats and, later, the novelist Charles Williams; and Eliot's obsessive critiques of primitive myth and ritual." "In various ways, all of these interests intersected. Smith shows in Eliot's dedication to diverse traditions a practical imperative, and to a great extent a moral one, for a poetic art grounded in traditional American reverence for inherited values."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Praise for the earlier edition: "Students of modern American literature have for some years turned to Fifteen Modern American Authors (1969) as an indispensable guide to significant scholarship and criticism about twentieth-century American writers. In its new form--Sixteenth Modern American Authors--it will continue to be indispensable. If it is not a desk-book for all Americanists, it is a book to be kept in the forefront of the bibliographical compartment of their brains."--American Studies