Atkins G. Douglas - T.S. Eliot and the Fulfillment of Christian Poetics

T.S. Eliot and the Fulfillment of Christian Poetics

Also by G. Douglas Atkins

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T.S. ELIOT: The Poet as Christian

T.S. Eliot and the Fulfillment of Christian Poetics

G. Douglas Atkins

T.S. ELIOT AND THE FULFILLMENT OF CHRISTIAN POETICS

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,

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ISBN: 9781137466204 EPUB

ISBN: 9781137466259 PDF

ISBN: 9781137470836 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: 10.1057/9781137466259

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

T.S. Eliot and the Fulfillment of Christian Poetics is the third work in a trilogy that began with a study of Eliot and Lancelot Andrewes, the great seventeenth-century Anglican divine whom he rescued from relative oblivion and who was instrumental in the poets embrace of Anglo-Catholicism. Eliot derived from Andrewess sermons a poetics that, I have argued, marks the way of writing that appears in the post-conversion poems (the Ariel poems and Ash-Wednesday) and that differs from the less verbal, less comparative, and less meditative character of the verses written before 1927, the year of his baptism into the Church of England. Another way of putting it: Eliots pre-1927 poems play the Old Testament to the New that appears in the poems written after his conversion, which fulfill the law present in the earlier. For many reasons, Four Quartets deserves extended treatment; and commentary on it here completes my account of T.S. Eliot: The Poet as Christian.

I feel the need to acknowledge that I am here returning to a work on which I have already written quite a lot, covering again ground that I have explored before. The simple fact is, I keep on essaying, that is, trying: considering this inexhaustible work from different and fresh perspectives, seeking to understand Eliots words. I want to assure you, gentle reader, that what you have in your hands represents a refining of approach that yields something quite different from rehashed material: the ancient rhyme in new perspective, to modify Eliot himself in Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems. My focus is how each poem of Four Quartets works, what it means, that and how it matters (so much), and how each of these parts supports the others, right in participating in the creation of a structure whose details we fully appreciate only at the end, the place from which we begin in order to appreciate fully those magnificent details. The issue is fulfillmentof purpose. It is only by writing that I can hope to approach Eliots meaning and his own understanding.

I admit that as I have proceeded in this effort over the years, I have been wrong, more than once or twice, alas, and so I attempt, unabashedly, to issue corrections. My understanding of the still is unstill, ever moving. To reach a perfect understanding of a text, especially one as complex and explicitly challenging as Four Quartets, would be to transcend time, for the poem, like everything else made of words, consists of that which constitutes the details of the pattern whose still point is available only to God Who stands outside time and can apprehend the pattern that those un-still words make. I can but fare forward, perhaps apprehending (anew) how this detail and that detail work together, how they help to constitute the pattern, the idea of which I have perhaps caught. But I cannot stop timeand Eliot teaches us to (try to) go beyond the desire to want to do so.

The result is commentarythe product of close textual analysis, comparison, and meditation. Commentary is neither identical to the text nor separate from it. To be sure, the text can stand alone, but commentary may be read, not as the primary texts destruction nor as a transcendence of it, but as its fulfillment. Here, too, there is a forwardrather than Prufrockian and crab-likemovement, the ancient rhyme (to adapt Ash-Wednesday) faithfully adhered to and/but represented in new manner. In commentary, the reader (thus) figures prominently, for it is the record of the texts intersection with him or her.

Commentary is, in the final analysis, about the texts ultimate effects on the receiver and respondent (in line with the speakers change dramatized in Journey of the Magi). Commentary thus represents both affect and effect. It rests upon a foundation of humility, constituting the record of the readers response to the text, and that response necessarily involves submission to the text, which (paradoxically) yields the readers freedom (to respond). The text is, we may say, thus embodied in the commentary as well as fulfilled there.

Amidst all this close attention to words (qua words), all this theological and philosophical talk, all this surmise about the Ultimate, I write in hopes of enhancing your pleasure, dear reader, in reading Eliots great essay-poem, its often prose-like verses. I seek to share with you the great pleasure (never separable from understanding) that I take in reading, re-reading, and meditating upon the words burning with meaning in