Atkins - Strategy and Purpose in T.S. Eliots Major Poems: Language, Hermeneutics and Ancient Truth in New Verse

Strategy and Purpose in T.S. Eliots Major Poems

Also by G. Douglas Atkins

THE FAITH OF JOHN DRYDEN: Change and Continuity

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

T.S. ELIOT AND THE FULFILLMENT OF CHRISTIAN POETICS

T.S. ELIOTS CHRISTMAS POEMS: An Essay in Writing-as-Reading and Other Impossible Unions

Strategy and Purpose in T.S. Eliots Major Poems: Language, Hermeneutics, and Ancient Truth in New Verse

G. Douglas Atkins

Professor Emeritus of English, University of Kansas, USA

STRATEGY AND PURPOSE IN T.S. ELIOTS MAJOR POEMS
Copyright G. Douglas Atkins, 2016.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2016 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.

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.

Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

ISBN: 9781137581679 EPUB

ISBN: 9781137581617 PDF

ISBN: 9781137590572 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: 2016

www.palgrave.com/pivot

DOI: 10.1057/9781137581617

Contents

Preface

This little book is about Eliot and a way of seeing, which is (also) a way of reading that is inseparable from writing, understood as a putting-in-other-words. Thus it follows from, builds upon, and goes considerably beyond my recent T.S. Eliots Christmas Poems: An Essay in Writing-as-Reading and Other Impossible Unions: writing-as-reading is, fundamentally, putting-in-other-words. I offer this book deliberately as an essay, for it constitutes a trial, an attempt, at a way of reading that pertains and is applicable not just to the Modernist poet, essayist, and dramatist who gave rise to the idea in the first place.

The present book has been in a gestating state for some time, for as I have worked on Old Possum over the past several years, I have had the growing, strengthening sense that the thematic and rhetorical concerns and directions of Eliots poetry are mirrored in my own situation as reader and the demands those poems exact on me. I am not talking here just about the intersection of poem and reader, although that too matters fundamentally but also about both reader and poem confronting the same challenges, participating in a common condition of apprehension and expression.

Much more so than is generally recognized, Eliots works, from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock to Four Quartets, bridging two World Wars, and being present both pre- and post-conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, have to do with the possibility of understanding and particularly with philosophical and literary questions of putting-in-other-words; it is thus a matter of hermeneutics. New readings of the poems emerge from this recognition, along with new understanding of Eliots thought and art. His thematic and rhetorical treatments of this central, abiding matter lead to theoretical considerations concerning reading itself, as well as, ultimately, to a relation with the critical Christian dogma of the Incarnation. The ideas playing out here are indeed, then, big, necessitating, gentle reader, that any proposals forthcoming be modestly offered and essayistic in character. And as commentator, I act as steward, trying to put myself in Eliots place, but never being forgetful that I put in other words, which means an intersection of text and me, and which results in a tension, never entirely resolved between text and reader both positive and productive.

My focus is three enigmatic, plaguing questions that keep popping up in Eliots poetry: first, words and their slipperiness and vulnerability to manipulation, the writers intolerable wrestling with them and with meanings, and thus the quest, present from Prufrock on, both to understand and to be understood, and the effort, culminating in Little Gidding, to locate and define rightness in expression; second, the divided, tensional character of the self, apparent in Prufrock (Let us go then, you and I), dramatized in The Waste Land (When I count, there are only you and I together), and culminating in Little Gidding, in the encounter with the familiar compound ghost; and third, the rock on which these scaffoldings rest, the reiterated issue of the relation of dying and birth, located at and as the very heart of the new dispensation that is Christian, that is, Incarnational, understanding. It may be seen that I am thus following Eliots precepts, for I am amalgamating disparate experience (The Metaphysical Poets). A relation exists as well with the hope, expressed in Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems, of restoring/ With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Strange as it may sound, the idea of putting-in-other-words is the common thread linking these three themes; indeed, it may be seen as a rhyme being expressed in new verse. Putting-in-other-words is what we do in an effort to elucidate for readers, for example; it is what we do in order to understand, in the first place; and it is what we do when we read well, when the critical ego speaks out to that part of us that is always dying, when the material body dies so that the spiritual body may live: all involve the structure in which putting-in-other-words participates.

Indeed, putting-in-other-words is the fundamental act by means of which Eliot accomplishes restoring/ With a new verse the ancient rhyme. It is also the primary act for critical (self-)examination in writing and beyond, and both this restoration and this (self-)examination are positively related to, if not inseparable from, return of the dead, of which Eliot speaks so often, particularly after his formal conversion to the Church of England and Anglo-Catholicism. We thus begin in and with textual and linguistic facts, indeed with words, which are never left behind (in favor of ideas), and we proceed a posteriori, following what Eliot calls the movement of thought. He describes, in his essay on Blaise Pascals