G. Atkins - T.S. Eliots Christmas Poems

T.S. Eliots Christmas Poems

Also by G. Douglas Atkins

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T.S. Eliots Christmas Poems: An Essay in Writing-as-Reading and Other Impossible Unions

G. Douglas Atkins

Professor Emeritus of English, University of Kansas, USA

T.S. ELIOTS CHRISTMAS POEMS

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: 9781137479129 EPUB

ISBN: 9781137479129 PDF

ISBN: 9781137485700 Hardback

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Atkins, G. Douglas (George Douglas), 1943 author.

T. S. Eliots Christmas poems: an essay in writing-as-reading and other impossible unions / G. Douglas Atkins, Professor Emeritus of English, University of Kansas, USA.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 9781137485700 (hardback)

1. Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 18881965Criticism and interpretation. 2. Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 18881965. Ariel poems. 3. Christmas in literature. I. Title.

PS3509.L43Z5997 2014

821.912dc23 2014030394

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

First edition: 2014

www.palgrave.com/pivot

DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129

Contents

Preface

You do not usually associate Thomas Stearns Eliot with the Christmas spirit. Even though he did write the joyous Old Possums Book of Practical Cats, from which came the phenomenally successful and popular London and Broadway musical, a book of verse that was made for his friend Geoffrey Fabers kids. You may know that Old Possum liked Groucho Marx and admired the music hall, but you are still likely to think of him, as his friend Virginia Woolf did: dressed in a four-piece suit, stiffening him more than the collar of his morning coat did J. Alfred Prufrock, often thought to be Eliots alter ego. But as the author of The Cultivation of Christmas Trees, with its embrace of the angel atop? The child wonders at the Christmas Tree, writes the author of The Waste Land and The Hollow Men, Let him continue in the wonder, never losing delight in the surprises, the new possessions, as well as The expectation of the goose or the turkey / And the expected awe on its appearance. For many readers, adult in their childishness, this poem is a sorry come-down from the poetic heights (supposedly reached before baptism into the Church of England, twenty-seven years earlier). Even more sympathetic readers, some of them offended, charge the Master with somehow equating the expectation of the Messiah with that of a seasonal turkey! What audacity, some shout! What pusillanimous discharge of misguided thinking and feeling, others proclaim!

A problemarguably, the problemlies in our perceiving. It is my argument in this booktotally new, despite my having written about these Ariel Poems before, this one unique in being made of complete and pure readingsthat Old Possum here explores with feeling, insight, and impressive poetic skill the meaning of Christmas, its demands and its joys, and our problems in coming to terms with it and the new dispensation that it signals and inaugurates: the great joy is inseparable from the great fear, and accordingly so much is exacted of us in the way of understanding. In these six poems, Eliot ranges widely, offering works linked in ways that have not before now been adequately explored, nor specifically related to Christmas. Read closely, and carefully, with due attention to their words and their rhymes with each other and with other Eliot poems (and prose), these Ariel Poems emerge. The poems need, deserve, and repay responsible reading. In them, T.S. Eliot defines, de-mythologizes, and defends child-like wonder, the glittering rapture, the amazement / Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree and, at the same time, the Birth with which Christmas began, in the Maguss words, as Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death. The issue remains what it has been for Eliot since The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: what you see, how you see.

In exploring what Christmas means, in, through, and by means of Eliots Ariel Poems, I am concerned, of course, with his definition of Christmas, that is, with his (Anglo-Catholic) understanding of the Incarnation: as impossible union (Four Quartets). My interests are also wide. Just as the Incarnation is more than an idea, or dogma, Christmas, in Eliots terms, also has to do, perhaps principally, with its demandsthat Hard and bitter agony and the relationship of Birth and Deathand so with its effects on the person who comes in serious contact with it. It is, in other words, a matter of practice as well as theory.

The Christmas poems, diverse, demanding, and never simple or simplistic, are a remarkable achievement. I wish you a happy embrace of them. Along with the demands and difficulties of both the poems and their subject(s), there is joy in the child-like recognition that atop the Christmas tree stands both a decoration and an angel.

Typically, as I have said, the works that make up Eliots Christmas poems go unrelated to one another (although one recent critic, at least, has admirably advanced the effort to address this part-iality [John H. Timmerman,