Atkins George Douglas - T.S. Eliot: The Poet as Christian

T.S. Eliot

Also by G. Douglas Atkins

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READING DECONSTRUCTION/DECONSTRUCTIVE READING

WRITING AND READING DIFFERENTLY: Deconstruction and the Teaching of Composition and Literature (co-edited with Michael L. Johnson)

QUESTS OF DIFFERENCE: Reading Popes Poems

SHAKESPEARE AND DECONSTRUCTION (co-edited with David M. Bergeron)

CONTEMPORARY LITERARY THEORY (co-edited with Laura Morrow)

GEOFFREY HARTMAN: Criticism as Answerable Style

ESTRANGING THE FAMILIAR: Toward a Revitalized Critical Writing

TRACING THE ESSAY: Through Experience to Truth

READING ESSAYS: An Invitation

ON THE FAMILIAR ESSAY: Challenging Academic Orthodoxies

LITERARY PATHS TO RELIGIOUS UNDERSTANDING: Essays on Dryden, Pope, Keats, George Eliot, Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and E.B. White

T.S. ELIOT AND THE ESSAY: From The Sacred Wood to Four Quartets

READING T.S. ELIOT: Four Quartets and the Journey toward Understanding

E.B. WHITE: The Essayist as First-Class Writer

T.S. ELIOT MATERIALIZED: Literal Meaning and Embodied Truth

SWIFTS SATIRES ON MODERNISM: Battlegrounds of Reading and Writing

ALEXANDER POPES CATHOLIC VISION: Slave to no sect

T.S. ELIOT AND THE FAILURE TO CONNECT: Satire and Modern Misunderstandings

T.S. ELIOT, LANCELOT ANDREWES, AND THE WORD: Intersections of Literature and Christianity

SWIFT, JOYCE, AND THE FLIGHT FROM HOME: Quests of Transcendence and the Sin of Separation

T.S. Eliot: The Poet as Christian

G. Douglas Atkins

T.S. ELIOT

Copyright G. Douglas Atkins, 2014.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2014 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
in the United Statesa division of St. Martins Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

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ISBN: 9781137444486 EPUB

ISBN: 9781137444462 PDF

ISBN: 9781137446886 Hardback

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

First edition: 2014

www.palgrave.com/pivot

DOI: 10.1057/9781137444462

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

I have written a good deal about Old Possum recently, revealing at least two faults: a near-obsession with the poet, the essayist, and the dramatist, and a stubborn, relentless ongoing essai to get him right. The present book follows from, without repeating or replacing, the most recent, a study of Eliot and his relation to the particular ways of both writing and reading embodied in the sermons of the seventeenth-century Anglican Divine Lancelot Andrewes.

Bishop Andrewess way of writing and reading has been succinctly described by (my fellow-eighteenth-century scholars) John Butt and Geoffrey Tillotson, introducing the Cambridge University Plain Texts edition of Andrewess sermons on the Resurrection:

Andrewes business here is exegesis. His interest lies only in the text and he does not consider his work finished until every word has directed a separate pencil of light into the heart of his subject.... It is his theme which masters Andrewes.... His style progresses with the imperturbable tattoo of a Morse signal. He escapes the muddiness of many of Donnes sermons and has no use for his ecstasies. Where everything is equally important there is no need for rhetoric.

In his brilliant commentary in the 1928 book that he prefaced with the famous announcement that he was classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion, Eliot himself opens the way for Professors Butt and Tillotson by demonstrating in theory and practice Bishop Andrewess squeezing and squeezing of a word until it yields a full juice of meaning which we should never have supposed any word to possess. Although the procedure is obviously susceptible to abuse, it constitutes the focal point of my reading of Eliots poems. Lancelot Andrewess writing is also the basis of Eliots understanding of the Incarnation and of a complementary and entailed way of writing (and reading): philological, comparative, and meditative. What we might call Eliots theology of the word becomes a theology of the Word (and perhaps vice versa).

I take from Bishop Andrewes that intensely verbal concentration; from Eliot, I take the complementary comparative, or intra-textual, manner. Inter-textuality enhances the play of intra-textuality, with the result that I am constantly following Eliots further advice and weighing one thing by another, often its apparent opposite. From Andrewes and Eliot together, then (but not necessarily in the order of my listing of debts), I take an (Incarnational) understanding, based in paradox and impossible union (Four Quartets), with which I approach the writing and the reading of poetry. Incarnation forms the thematic heart and soul as well as the structural pattern represented and dramatized in Eliots post-conversion poems.

Comparing Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems with the Ariel poems, the works in verse closest in time to Andrewess most profound and revealing effects on Eliots understanding and his writing opens up fresh new perspectives on the situation, burden, responsibilities, and opportunities faced by the poet who is (also) a Christian. In order to delineate and define the way of the poet writing as a Christian, I compare the new writing, post-conversion, with that done under the old dispensation, in the process discovering differences and similarities heretofore scanted in previous commentary. The complex, both/and nature of Christianity poses particular problems and difficulties for the poet at once true to his or her understanding and responsible and scrupulous as a poet and thus a steward of words.

This book is, then, fundamentally about T.S. Eliots perhaps most under-read, misread, and most challenging and demanding works, the so-called conversion poem and five Ariel Poems (counting the oft-dismissed The Cultivation of Christmas Trees, included among Faber and Fabers new Ariel poems in 1954, a sort of second-coming that book-ends with the story of the first coming, and the coming to it, Journey of the Magi). The present volume also engages in de-confining critical procedures by (paradoxically) returning attention to the primary units of attention, those things composed of mere letters, the literal facticity of words themselves. I subscribe completely to Old Possums little-noticed declaration that the letter giveth life.

I gratefully acknowledge my debts once more to Brigitte Shull at Palgrave Macmillan, who supports, encourages, facilitates, and opens a way; Erin Ivy, who introduced me to Palgrave Macmillan; Pam LeRow and Lori Whitten, who make my work easier; Leslie, Christopher, Kate, Oliver, Craig, and Sharon, who make me proud; and my wife Rebecca, who not only makes me proud but also makes both my work and my life easier and happier.