Little Gidding : Coming This Way, Coming Closer: Commonality, Communication, Community, and Communion, or What’s Being Done in What’s Being Said
Abstract: A different sort of poem, “Little Gidding” completes, refines, and fulfills the previous three poems of Four Quartets—without transcending them. By means of a focus on the point of “intersection” of apparent opposites (time and timelessness, for example), the poem dramatizes Incarnational understanding. The other-dimensionality apparent from the beginning of this poem reaches its climax with the speaker’s encounter, on the bombed-out streets of London, with the “familiar compound ghost,” “himself” an “impossible union.” Here, “intersection,” signaling “necessarye coniunction,” constitutes a refinement of “still point” and of “pattern,” fulfilling “Incarnation.”
Atkins, G. Douglas. T.S. Eliot and the Fulfillment of Christian Poetics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137466259.0008.
God would not leave Mankind without a way.
—John Dryden, Religio Laici or A Layman’s Faith (1682)
God loves from Whole to Parts: but human
soul
Must rise from the Individual to the Whole.
Self-love but serves the virtuous mind to wake,
As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake;
The centre mov’d, a circle strait succeeds,
Another still, and still another spreads,
Friend, parent, neighbour, first it will embrace,
His country next, and next all human race,
Wide and more wide, th’o’erflowings of the mind
Take ev’ry creature in, of ev’ry kind;
Earth smiles around, with boundless bounty blest,
And Heav’n beholds Its image in his breast.
—Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (1734)
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
—T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
The thing is, despite all the denials, facile and otherwise, by commentators over the years, Thomas Stearns Eliot, poet, essayist, and Christian, does resemble his most famous character, the inimitable J. Alfred Prufrock. They share, if nothing more, the great desire to get it right. Prufrock gave in to his anxieties, dread, imaginings, and fears, while Old Possum kept on trying, just as he advised us to do in Four Quartets: “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”1 His greatest work may be read as an essai in essaying: an attempt whose very nature (thus) is conjoined with—or intersected by—its apparent opposite drive toward precision, accuracy, and Truth. Four Quartets is a series of attempts, of trials, edging ever closer to the “still point,” a quartile of verse writings at once ever widening in a spirit of union, community, and communion, while ever-narrowing in analytical concentration on the cause(s) of egotistical narrowing. “Little Gidding” is as close as Eliot ever got to that “point of intersection of the timeless / With time”—perhaps it is as close as anyone can get, short of being a saint, at least.
“Little Gidding” may or may not be orthodox. The question now strikes me as largely irrelevant—even though the great work of which it is (but) a part insists on trying to “get right,” that is, to say precisely, accurately, unequivocally, and definitively what is truth and what is falsehood. And at the same time, “Little Gidding,” more than its “semblables” “Burnt Norton,” “East Coker,” and “The Dry Salvages,” insists just as strongly on forgiving—perhaps especially forgiving those, like Milton evidently, who “got it wrong.” “Sin is Behovely,” but its inevitability must not keep us from “faring forward.” We must forgive while pressing on, committing again and again that for which we must, with humility and in penitence, pray for forgiveness. It may be a circle, but, if so, one less vicious than delicious.
We would not be far off the mark in observing that all of Eliot’s major poems have to do with movement: Prufrock’s fear of it, the wastelanders’ frenetic efforts to avoid facing Death, the abortive action of “the hollow men,” the journey of the Magi, the movement of perception in Triumphal March, the studied—and false—moves to avoid “turning” in Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems, and the annunciation cum representation of the “still point” actually intersecting in Four Quartets.
“Burnt Norton” says it clearly, if not definitively, wrestling with words and meanings, well on the way to clarification and elucidation: “Words move, music moves / Only in time.” And a bit later: “The detail of the pattern is movement.” And a few lines below that: “Desire itself is movement / Not in itself desirable; / Love is itself unmoving, / Only the cause and end of movement.” The philosopher Eliot here intersects with the poet Eliot. Love and desire, death and living, speech and writing—they are all in play here, moving, dancing.
Each of the last three poems of Four Quartets may be read as one part of a series of elaborations, clarifications, and refinements of the understanding focused in the preceding poem(s). The first of the four poems, “Burnt Norton,” does not stand alone, of course, though it has no preceding understanding to refine. It has always felt to me, though, that it could stand alone. One reason—of several—why it cannot is that it moves away from “the still point” toward the (ultimate) embrace of “pattern.” In fact, the lyrical fourth section of “Burnt Norton” ends with the definitive-sounding words “the light is still / At the still point of the turning world.” This is not a falsehood, although Eliot appears to question whether the notion is somehow ineffective, or incomplete.
In all four of the poems, as I have argued above, the fourth section is suspect, representing a lyrical response emotional, personal, and smacking of egotism. Immediately in “Burnt Norton” following the reference to “the still point,” the fifth poem opens with a studied response that turns in a somewhat different direction: “Words move, music moves / Only in time”—not outside time, at some “still point.” We need, in other words, to stay with and within time, and seek an idea other than “the still point.” Here, the alternative emerges of pattern: “Only by the form, the pattern, / Can words or music reach the stillness.” Pattern thus represents the path in time, although you may proceed through time by means of pattern to “the stillness.”
The way is being paved for the rather different “Little Gidding,” and its focus on such action (in the world) as exemplified in the work of the Holy Ghost. The idea of “Incarnation” is, in other words, both refined (via “intersection”) and gone beyond (via “right action,” which anticipates the “right”-ness of phrases and sentences detailed in the fifth section of the final poem of Four Quartets).
In “Little Gidding,” “intersection” takes center-stage: from the beginning description of “midwinter spring” to the intersection—or “attend-ance,” another new, parallel term—of both the Birth in Bethlehem and King Charles’s visit to the thriving chapel with the ruins that now comprise Little Gidding itself, to the direct mention that “the intersection of the timeless moment / Is England,” here and now, “and nowhere. / Never and always.” The Mystery has entered our world and continues, and Eliot works hard to make sure his reader understands that he is talking precisely about intersection.
The same occurs in the critical scene featuring the “familiar compound ghost” in the next section. In fact, Eliot describes the poet’s encounter as resulting “In concord at this intersection time / Of meeting nowhere, no before and after.” As we saw, he had earlier written of “the intense moment, / Isolated, with no before and after.” Now, the same phrasing occurs in the contrasting account of a scene precisely not isolated, but attended and intersected by that which makes for “another dimension.” For most of us, ordinary laypersons and hardly saints, there is but the “unattended moment,” which is “isolated,” and separated from time. The idea—the desire, really—to transcend time, here represented, should alert us to the unreliability and problematic nature displayed. Eliot rejects the notion of timelessness alone being possible for us fallen creatures. The crucial fact appears as the “familiar compound ghost”—he from “another dimension” and representing a greater “intensity”—literally intersects with the speaker.
“Little Gidding” focuses on the results and the effects of the understanding represented in approaching and at least glimpsing Incarnational understanding. In this regard, it differs—and feels different—from “Burnt Norton,” “East Coker,” and “The Dry Salvages.” Its presiding Trinitarian figure is the Holy Ghost, attention directed to the Word’s being “within / the world and for the world.”2 Acting does not trump thinking, but is presented as going beyond thinking—necessarily: in other words, incarnating (Incarnational) understanding.
“Little Gidding” thus illustrates that reaching correct understanding, after one falsehood after another has been revealed as variously lacking, incomplete, and unsatisfactory, is hardly the end of the story, the journey, the quest (shared by poet, speaker, and reader). There is more to be done, much more.
The final poem of Four Quartets, thought by most readers (evidently) to be best of the four, is, appropriately, the only one to incorporate—embodying, incarnating—its titular “place” into the dramatic action and thematic direction. Burnt Norton essentially does not figure in the poem of that title; East Coker appears only indirectly, in fact only inferentially, as apparent location of the Elizabethan rustics dancing; and “the dry salvages,” that “small group of rocks, with a beacon, off the N.E. coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts,” according to Eliot’s headnote to the poem, do not appear as such, where the dominant “element” is water and the sea beckons in its manifold dangers.
Directly, though, Little Gidding—the tiny village in Northamptonshire where Nicholas Ferrar established a thriving Anglican community in the early seventeenth century—matters thematically, rhetorically, emotionally, and spiritually: it received King Charles I in 1642 after his defeat at Naseby, and it subsequently suffered desecration by Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan extremists. Little Gidding thus stands as a ruin for which “before and after” figure significantly. It also stands as the ruin that may occasion the speaker’s own ability, later on in the poem, to offer forgiveness. Finally perhaps, Little Gidding stands as so important because it rhymes with, representing intersection by, the humble scene in the manger in Bethlehem that saw the Birth of Jesus the Christ.
“Little Gidding” places us in time as well as in space. It is both historical—unlike the other poems of Four Quartets—and other-dimensional, a fact apparent from the first, where “May time” is juxtaposed with “maytime.” The chapel itself, at Little Gidding, historicizes, of course, but the strongest temporal setting is felt in the encounter with the “familiar compound ghost”: war-torn England and specifically the streets of London, in the early morning, following another night of Nazi bombs raining down upon the innocent. The scene is the thematic and rhetorical center of “Little Gidding,” perhaps appropriately off-center—and thus not to be confused with a “still point”—coming as it does in the second of the five sections. Eliot leaves little doubt as to the significance of the meeting, the place, and the time: “In concord at this intersection time.” The “meeting” does, of course, occur here, now, but because it is precisely an intersection of the timeless with time, of this world and “another dimension,” you cannot say it occurs anywhere in particular—another dramatization, then. No wonder that the speaker reports feeling “wonder.”
Paradox does, indeed, abound here, pattern certainly apparent. It is clear, though, that by “intersection” Eliot means the emergence of “another dimension” within our world, within our time. The subject is by no means confined to the intellectual or the ideational, not even the philosophical or the theological. It is moral, ethical, and personal, and we shall see dramatized the effects of it all upon the speaker, who, following the wondrous encounter, shows himself to be different, to be forgiving, for one thing, even of those, like the Cromwellian hordes and perhaps even the unspeakable Nazis, who have committed and are committing such heinous crimes and atrocities that strain the capacity to forgive. And yet he does forgive, the speaking voice now incarnating the heart and soul of Christian understanding.
“Little Gidding” is, indeed, a step (or two or three) beyond the other poems of Four Quartets. It is not, however, a transcendence of those poems or of their affirmations.
We now find ourselves in a position to understand better not just some key and troubling points in Four Quartets but also to get a grip on some of the most plaguing questions that we have concerning other poems as well made by Old Possum.
For one, “intersection” represents a refinement of the understanding that we have been tracing in this book from “still point” to “pattern” and on to “Incarnation,” which is, itself, as distinguished from the Incarnation, limited and ultimately in need of the event in time and place that, as with the relation of the New Testament to the Old, fulfills the promise of the idea, indeed embodying precisely that. And as a result, we gain a new and needed perspective on “and,” that “necessarye coniunction” we find of such evolving importance in Eliot’s poems. “And,” we now can understand, matters so much because it signals intersecting. Such enigmatic statements as are used to characterize the “Lady of silences”—that is, the Blessed Virgin—in Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems, for example “Torn and most whole,” which we have been trying hard to grasp and understand, finally make sense to us: She may be “torn” in time, but in “another dimension” She is indeed whole.
In the same manner, that stubborn wording in Ash-Wednesday, with which I wrestled so in my previous book T.S. Eliot: The Poet as Christian, now proves susceptible to our comprehension:3 “Teach us to care and not to care.” Caring is that from and with which we start our journey, our quest, in time, but what seems so desirable, so worthy, here and now, becomes, in “another dimension,” less so; it is then, and there, that we may come not to care. The same pattern of understanding appears, finally, in that troublesome wording in “Little Gidding” that seems to bear so very much importance: “This is the use of memory: / For liberation—not less of love but expanding / Of love beyond desire, and so liberation / From the future as well as the past.” Clearly, Eliot does not embrace some sort of asceticism, no more than he does idealism. “Love beyond desire” is not “less of love” but its refinement figured as other-dimensional.
Mystery too abides and abounds, despite our “progress” toward rational comprehension, just as Old Possum said it would when pointing to the requirement of “something given / And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love, / Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender,” for which we may strive, amidst hints received and guesses taken, in “prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action” (italics added).
From the beginning of his poetic career, starting with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in 1915, as we have seen in this book and the previous two in this series, T.S. Eliot has been centrally concerned with both understanding and communicating that understanding. Prufrock struggles with the possibility—with memory and desire, with the past and the future—of communicating to others what he has observed. For him, that is hardly “another dimension,” but instead “only” another world, in the same dimension of time and space as his own (and ours). If, as is surely the case, Four Quartets represents a refinement and an expansion of the understanding reached in Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems—much of that, I am convinced, resulting from the act of writing itself—within his last, great essay-poem, there is a development, refinement, and expansion as we journey through “Burnt Norton,” “East Coker,” “The Dry Salvages,” and “Little Gidding,” never leaping out of time but submitting to it (as my teacher Vincent Miller aptly put it in his Sewanee Review essay) while recognizing that “another dimension” intersects with it.4
Everything changes with the Incarnation. Incarnation was there before; indeed, it has always and everywhere been present and operative, apparent to those with eyes and mind attuned. The Incarnation gave flesh to that idea, that decisive, determining pattern. Every moment now matters, burning with meaning, because the Divine has entered time, at a particular time and in a particular place. The gift is without price, even if/though we merely guess at its value.
In a sense, then, “Little Gidding” is about faring forward. To do so is extraordinarily difficult, although you perhaps would not think so. Experience confirms my claim, and Four Quartets does or says nothing to contradict it.
I will go further and say that, from the beginning, Eliot’s verse treats issues circling about this issue. As I have argued in T.S. Eliot: The Poet as Christian, J. Alfred Prufrock’s particular liability is his inability to “fare forward,” stuck in a netherworld of memory and desire, on the horns between two worlds, afraid of one, in sad dis-ease about the other. “I should have been a pair of ragged claws,” he says in a perceptive moment that he cannot internalize, the conditional verb revealing to us what he does not see, “Scuttling across the silent seas.”5 For him, movement is always only lateral.
The wastelanders react in somewhat similar fashion, unable to face the nothingness of their existence or to proceed in, through, and by means of their egotistical imprisonment, their waste land, to its end. In one form or another, abortion marks their efforts. For “the hollow men,” the same abortiveness characterizes their actions: “the Shadow” always already “falls between,” modern men resembling the fumbling, bungling Guy Fawkes.6 Capping off such incapacity is the ascetically minded speaker early in Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems, who rejoices that he will, or so he supposes, no longer turn, free, then, from the future and its uncertainties, if still locked in memories of past moments with their inevitable failures.
Eliot might say that it takes a Christian to “fare forward.” The Incarnation shows why and how. The hope is always tempered, because “another dimension” only intersects with our world—not because it has been, and will always be, fallen and unsatisfying but because we do not grasp that it is now “attended,” the timeless having come within it. The problem is ours, in other words, not the world’s. “Little Gidding” says it, and says it well, reminding us of just that gift that the Incarnation gives us, God having once entered our world: “And all shall be well and / All manner of thing shall be well / In the purification of the motive / In the ground of our beseeching.”
And, regarding words: we return one more time—probably not the last time—to Eliot’s return to the word in the fifth section of “Little Gidding.” I once and for long while supposed that his words rhyme perfectly with those at the end of “Burnt Norton,” where the stress falls on movement and pattern. I have above, though, raised questions concerning the trustworthiness of some of the comments in the later passage.
Here, I suggest, regarding verses that are, after all, Eliot’s last on the subject, that at the end of Four Quartets he offers a(nother) refinement of matters broached earlier. A certain clumsiness appears at this point in “Little Gidding,” it is true, most notably with the long parenthesis, but the verses feel conclusive, if not exactly triumphant. A modesty inheres, which is thematically appropriate (whether or not rhetorically effective). And an implicit alternative to and criticism of the immanentism that marks the earlier verses claiming that pattern gives meaning to the movement of words. Differently, the fifth section of “Little Gidding” begins, not directly (versus, that is, “Words move, music moves / Only in time ...”): “What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning.” Then follow the key words “The end is where we start from.” “End” is not “pattern,” and “pattern” is not “end” but more like a medium.
Accordingly, “Little Gidding” goes on to emphasize the “rightness” of every word and phrase: “where every word is at home, / Taking its place to support the others.” You may say that this is (merely) another way of referring to pattern, but if so, by emphasizing “home” and “support,” Eliot humanizes the effort. In fact, I am inclined to think that here, but not in “Burnt Norton,” Eliot’s verses imply that an author is always at work with words, transcendence intersecting with immanence. Whereas pattern derives from the figure(s) made by the movement of words, a purely lateral affair, a whole depends upon, while deriving from, a (transcendent, or vertical) purposiveness. We start from the “end,” which we cannot know until the whole swims into consciousness, being revealed. That the passage in “Little Gidding” proceeds to describe the kind of words “necessarye” for the whole to be made—“neither diffident nor ostentatious,” both old and new, forming “easy commerce,” the words “exact without vulgarity, / The formal word precise but not pedantic”—reflects authorial presence, judgment, and direction. (Here, key differences in Eliot from Derridean deconstruction appear prominently.) Determinacy thus shifts from linguistic management of self-induced pattern to authorial intersection with slippery, sliding, imprecise words. Someone is always in the act of wrestling with words, a condition and a situation intolerable and “necessarye.” One keeps on essaying.
“For us, there is only the trying,” faring forward. “The rest is not our business.”
One of the most troubling points that “Little Gidding” elucidates is that in “East Coker”: “and let the dark come upon you / Which shall be the darkness of God.” The stakes are high. Our way is indirect.
In “The Hollow Men,” first published as a whole in 1925, two years before his formal embrace of Anglo-Catholic Christianity, Eliot used as an epigraph words from Joseph Conrad’s novella The Heart of Darkness. The poem proceeds to develop this “hint,” the speaking voice allowing that we “hollow men” are “Sightless, unless” mediating eyes come to our aid. Critical eyes able to penetrate each person’s “heart of darkness” are central to the poem’s movement and meaning. Our (fallen) condition shows us burdened by “the Shadow” that “falls between” “the idea” and “the reality,” “the motion” and “the act,” “the conception” and “the creation,” “the emotion” and “the response,” “the desire” and “the spasm,” “the potency” and “the existence,” and “the essence” and “the descent.”
Three years before “The Hollow Men,” Eliot represented the wastelanders as awash in misunderstanding and, indeed, as “East Coker” puts it, hoping “for the wrong thing” (immediately following come these words: “So the darkness shall be the light”). Just as they look toward water as the opposite of the refining, purifying fire that they actually need, the “I” says early on, returning from the thematically charged “hyacinth garden”: “I could not / Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, / Looking into the heart of light, the silence.”7 The mistake lies in supposing—expecting—that the way to light is direct. Our business lies, rather, in seeking out the darkness, especially our own. We should note, as well, the apparent identification of “the heart of light” with “the silence”: silence is the speech of the Word Whose speech is act.
In “Burnt Norton,” recall, light creates water in “the garden” filling the “empty pond,” in which we are momentarily “reflected”: “the surface glittered out of heart of light.” Then, “a cloud passed, and the pond was empty.” Whatever darkness there was eliminated the possibility of “our” seeing ourselves fully and satisfactorily reflected in the pond. In the next poem, “East Coker,” the speaker says to his soul, “be still, and let the dark come upon you / Which shall be the darkness of God” and eventually concludes, “So the darkness shall be the light.” The assumption is that you can will yourself into allowing the darkness inside you. Does “the darkness of God” refer to God’s being dark Himself or, quite differently, to darkness understood as the possession of God? In any case, in the final words of “East Coker,” a more likely point of view emerges, that of “a deeper communion / Through the dark cold,” etc., darkness now become a means, a necessary medium.
And so we come to “Little Gidding.” More specifically, to the all-important encounter with the “familiar compound ghost,” an intersection of timelessness with time, of the Dead with the living, and of the self with necessary critical spirit (here, the barely disguised Holy Ghost, at work in the world). The meeting occurs at an appropriately in-between time, in the dark, in fact: “before the morning / Near the end of interminable night,” thus just before light dawns. The place is war-torn London, nightly ravaged by Nazi bombers, taking advantage of the darkness that they also represent. The speaker—whom we likely think of as Eliot himself—meets up with a figure wearing the “look of some dead master,” both “intimate and unidentifiable,” thus a both/and creature reminiscent of the Blessed Virgin, the “Lady of silences,” in Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems. As their initial exchange makes clear, the speaker “was still the same, / Knowing myself yet being someone other.” Everything, here, is intersected—and “in concord at this intersection time.” The speaker knows himself as “someone other,” that “other” lending necessary critical distance (and measurement). After a pointed lecture on forgiving, and letting the past be, the ghost directs himself to the speaker, disclosing, in his trenchant, and burning, words “the gifts reserved for age, / To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort.” It is all humbling, putting the speaker in his rightful place. Soon afterwards, we see the salutary effects. Then “the day was breaking,” issuing light beginning to chase away the darkness: “He left me, with a kind of valediction, / And faded on the blowing of the horn” (italics added), signifying all-clear.
The ghost thus spoke in the dark, his words clear and sharp. He acts as the critical eyes—an outside force that comes within, a capacity necessary to reveal ourselves to ourselves. The dark cloud having emptied the pond of light with which we had seen ourselves briefly reflected, we need the darkness now for the light to speak and to become “all-clear.” This does not mean, Satanically, that God’s “being” is darkness.
Journey of the Magi (1927) represents Jesus’s birth, in “ ‘the worst time of the year,’ ” in the most humble of circumstances, as the “new dispensation,” in which birth and death no longer appear as different:8 “this Birth was / Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death” (italics added). The “good news” is, then, inseparable from (what we perceive as) bad. If, as the speaker says in “East Coker,” God is He Who “prevents us everywhere,” it is always the case that in His “absolute paternal care / [He] will never leave us.” No kindly figure in the sky so familiar in our sanguine imaginings.
Eliot’s, it is clear, is no “easie God,” such as John Dryden rejected and repudiated in the Latitudinarians of the later seventeenth century. Eliot’s God, instead, requires much of us, making our way difficult, for perfectly understandable psychological reasons. Journey of the Magi again: “A hard time we had of it.”
The speech we may come to hear within the darkness is not to be confused with the so-called inner voice, the work of “the private spirit” that the English Augustans summarily reprobated and that Eliot saw as the most offensive and dangerous thing imaginable. The true spirit is (self-)critical, whereas the other is self-generated and aggrandizing, optimistic and consoling.
It is but another falsehood that God is present in His absence (a familiar last-resort). He is, simply stated, not absent, but silent, as Ash-Wednesday repeatedly and emphatically says, working in mysterious ways, even when words are unheard, the Word at work, doing the Father’s work, in, through, and by means of the Holy Ghost. He is that other, “walking beside [us]” (The Waste Land), with eyes that allow us to see ourselves honestly, our eyes become those eyes, participating.
And so that “dark dove” (“Little Gidding”), visiting terror, destruction, and death upon the innocent? I will say much more in the following essay, but for now, this:
Our own darkness must encounter that darkness. There must be a meeting, an intersecting with it, just as we see in the speaker’s with the “familiar compound ghost,” in the dark, on the bombed-out streets of London in the early 1940s. You must receive and accept the dark, “the darkness of God”—God’s possession.
You do not simply let it come upon you, passively; instead, you must pray for it: “Let thy will be done.” Thereby, you are actively involved, doing your part, which is precisely a part, not apart.
The “darkness of God” meets, intersecting with, the darkness within us, which we do not easily recognize nor readily acknowledge. This condition necessitates prayer, understood not, as commonly supposed, as request for special favor. Since “the light shines in darkness,” the “darkness of God” is more than self-awareness and self-criticism, a rebuke to and critique of self-satisfaction, “prevent[ing] us everywhere”; it is also the unvarying, never wavering, way of and to Light and Love.
“And the fire and the rose are one“: this last verse of “Little Gidding” and so of the essay-poem Four Quartets both says and does, declaring and embodying “impossible union.” It begins with the “necessarye coniunction,” and ends in and with “one.”
1 T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943).
2 T.S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1930).
3 See my T.S. Eliot: The Poet as Christian (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
4 Vincent Miller, “Eliot’s Submission to Time,” rpt. A Packet for Vincent Miller, ed. Donald Greiner and John Lane (Spartanburg, SC: Holocene, 2002), 10–25.
5 T.S. Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations (London: Egoist Press, 1917).
6 T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men,” Poems 1909–1925 (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1925).
7 T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922).
8 T.S. Eliot, Journey of the Magi (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1927).