T S Eliot Materialized Literal Meaning And Embodied Truth

By reading T.S. Eliot literally and laterally, and attending to his intra-textuality, G. Douglas Atkins challenges the familiar notion of Eliot as bent on escaping this world for the spiritual. This study culminates in the necessary, but seemingly impossible, union of reading and writing, literature and commentary.

Today, nearly 100 years after the publication of 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,' The Sacred Wood, and The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot still suffers from the perception of being difficult to read. In this lively and accessible book, G. Douglas Atkins moves beyond the familiar 'deep' readings and challenges the familiar notion of Eliot as bent on escaping this world for the spiritual world. In line with the poet's own comparative procedures, Atkins reads him literally and laterally, attending to his intra-textuality. By finding meaning in new places, Eliot's commitment to the physical, tangible, sensory world appears beside the spiritual. These original interpretations culminate in the necessary, but seemingly impossible, union of reading, writing, literature, and commentary.

This is the first full-scale analysis of T.S. Eliot's six "Ariel Poems" as Christmas poems. Through close readings, Atkins argues that these poems considered together emerge as clearly related representations of the "impossible union" that occurred in the Incarnation.

With special attention to the poems For Lancelot Andrewes, Journey of the Magi, and Ash-Wednesday , G. Douglas Atkins offers an exciting new analysis of T.S. Eliot's debt to the seventeenth-century churchman Lancelot Andrewes and his theories of reading and writing texts.

The culmination of a trilogy that began with T.S. Eliot, Lancelot Andrewes, and the Word, and continued with T.S. Eliot: The Poet as Christian, this gracefully executed new book brings to a triumphant conclusion the unique effort to pinpoint and identify the Christian characteristics of Eliot's poetic art. The book offers a close but companionable reading of each of the complex poems that make up Four Quartets, the essay-poem that is Eliot's masterwork. Focusing on the range of speaking voices dramatized, Atkins reveals for the first time the Incarnational form that governs the work's 'purposive movement' toward purification and fulfilment of points of view that were represented earlier in the poems.

By comparing and contrasting the pre-conversion and the post-conversion poetics and poetic practices of T.S. Eliot, this book elucidates the responsibilities and opportunities for a poet who is also Christian. This book is the second in a trilogy which includes T.S. Eliot, Lancelot Andrewes, and the Word.

Here, G. Douglas Atkins offers a fresh new reading of the past century's most famous poem in English, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922). Using a comparatist approach that is both intra-textual and inter-textual, this book is a bold analysis of satire of modern forms of misunderstanding.

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.