T.S. Eliot and the Fulfillment of Christian Poetics
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 Pope’s 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
SWIFT’S SATIRES ON MODERNISM: Battlegrounds of Reading and Writing
ALEXANDER POPE’S 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. ELIOT AND THE FULFILLMENT OF CHRISTIAN POETICS
Copyright © G. Douglas Atkins, 2014.
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First published in 2014 by
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ISBN: 978–1–137–46625–9 EPUB
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First edition: 2014
DOI: 10.1057/9781137466259
1 Four Quartets : Simulacrum of Being
2 Burnt Norton : “The ancient rhyme in a new verse”: “Only through time time is conquered”
4 The Dry Salvages : Many Voices, Many Gods
5 The Dry Salvages (Continued): Four Quartets and the Work in the Word: What the Word Does
7 Little Gidding (Continued): The Pattern in the Movement, the Doing in the Speaking
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 poet’s embrace of Anglo-Catholicism. Eliot derived from Andrewes’s 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: Eliot’s 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 Eliot’s 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 fulfillment—of purpose. It is only by writing that I can hope to approach Eliot’s 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 time—and Eliot teaches us to (try to) go beyond the desire to want to do so.
The result is commentary—the 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 text’s destruction nor as a transcendence of it, but as its fulfillment. Here, too, there is a forward—rather than Prufrockian and crab-like—movement, 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 text’s intersection with him or her.
Commentary is, in the final analysis, about the text’s ultimate effects on the receiver and respondent (in line with the speaker’s 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 reader’s response to the text, and that response necessarily involves submission to the text, which (paradoxically) yields the reader’s 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 Eliot’s 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 Four Quartets. I hope that you too enjoy this magnificent work of art with its dramatization of the most essential and enduring insight. Your pleasure will derive, in no small measure, from recognizing how the poem works, intersecting with you. You can participate in the mirrored pattern that governs the writing of the work, the timeless, universal work of Incarnation—just as my own efforts, my essaying, mirrors at many points and in so many ways Eliot’s own.
I cannot deny that commentary on the great work is itself, in ways, difficult. I have sought to make that commentary (not the poem) as accessible as possible by writing without jargon and with few notes, this without, I hope, diluting or reducing or falsifying the text on which I offer these comments. I recommend that commentary and poem be read together. My hope is that my essay “supports” Four Quartets (even if the latter does not need it).
The idea of commentary as “companion”—one who goes along with—should, in my view, be revived (or is it “resurrected”?), for it means the accompaniment that I have just mentioned, as well as a coming-together such as befits accounts of Four Quartets. The etymology, traceable at least to the medieval, appeals to me more than the pedestrian idea of a handbook or guide, which this volume does not pretend to be: by “companion,” I mean, bowing to etymology, the idea of food and a meal, and I like that a lot. The Doyenne of Eliot studies, Jewel Spears Brooker, described me in a review of an earlier book of mine on Eliot as “good company,” and I hope my manner here, despite the admitted and, I contend, ineluctable difficulty of subject matter and approach, reflects a person engaged in, and surrendered to, his material, confessing responsibility and accepting the burden, and in love with his work, a genuine ama-teur, in other words. I like to think, then, that “companion” may suggest that my commentary has something in it of that “Gen’rous Converse” that Alexander Pope identifies as crucial in the person who would be a “critic” (An Essay on Criticism [1711]). Consider, if you will, my voice as an-other voice, accompanying you on your journey toward understanding—you, after all, I have thought of as accompanying me on mine to this time and place.
I am happy, once more, to acknowledge my debts to my wife Rebecca, our children Leslie and Christopher, their spouses Craig and Sharon, and our grandchildren Kate and Oliver; our Cavvy Bofort Dancing Diva, who came to us from Cambridge by way of Virginia, and who appears to be a Royalist like our late and much-missed Millie; my Wofford College teachers Vincent Miller and Raymond Bourne; my University of Virginia teachers Irvin Ehrenpreis, Francis Russell Hart, and E.D. Hirsch, Jr.; my later “mentors” Aubrey Williams and Geoffrey Hartman; my students over 44 years of teaching at the University of Kansas; the generous support offered by department chairpersons Gerhard Zuther, Michael L. Johnson, and Maria Caminero-Santangelo; the continuing, post-retirement assistance and grace of Pam LeRow and Lori Whitten; and the good folks at Palgrave Macmillan, including Brigitte Shull, than whom no more responsive or supportive editor exists, Ryan Jenkins (who not only puts up with me, but encourages me), and, last but not least, Erin Ivy, who introduced me to Palgrave Macmillan and to whom I shall forever be grateful.
And with (all) that said, “Let us go then, you and I.” We fare forward—to an introduction.
