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Here, G. Douglas Atkins offers a fresh new reading of the past century's most famous poem in English, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922). Using a comparatist approach that is both intra-textual and inter-textual, this book is a bold analysis of satire of modern forms of misunderstanding.
What principles connect—and what distinctions separate—“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” The Waste Land, and Four Quartets? The thought-tormented characters in T. S. Eliot’s early poetry are paralyzed by the gap between mind and body, thought and action. The need to address this impasse is part of what drew Eliot to philosophy, and the failure of philosophy to appease his disquiet is the reason he gave for abandoning it. In T. S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination, Jewel Spears Brooker argues that two of the principles that Eliot absorbed as a PhD student at Harvard and Oxford were to become permanent features of his mind, grounding his lifelong quest for wholeness and underpinning most of his subsequent poetry. The first principle is that contradictions are best understood dialectically, by moving to perspectives that both include and transcend them. The second is that all truths exist in relation to other truths. Together or in tandem, these two principles—dialectic and relativism—constitute the basis of a continual reshaping of Eliot’s imagination. The dialectic serves as a kinetic principle, undergirding his impulse to move forward by looping back, and the relativism supports his ingrained ambivalence. Brooker considers Eliot’s poetry in three blocks, each represented by a signature masterpiece: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” The Waste Land, and Four Quartets. She correlates these works with stages in the poet’s intellectual and spiritual life: disjunction, ambivalence, and transcendence. Using a methodology that is both inductive—moving from texts to theories—and comparative—juxtaposing the evolution of Eliot’s mind as reflected in his philosophical prose and the evolution of style as seen in his poetry—Brooker integrates cultural and biographical contexts. The first book to read Eliot’s poems alongside all of his prose and letters, T. S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination will revise received readings of his mind and art, as well as of literary modernism.
The Waste Land (1922) is a poem by T.S. Eliot. After suffering a nervous breakdown, Eliot took a leave of absence from his job at a London bank to stay with his wife Vivienne at the coastal town of Margate. He worked on the poem during these months before showing an early draft to Ezra Pound, who helped edit the poem toward publication. The Waste Land, dedicated to Pound, includes hundreds of quotations of and allusions to such figures as Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Saint Augustine, Chaucer, Baudelaire, and Whitman, to name only a few. Divided into five sections—“The Burial of the Dead;” “A Game of Chess;” “The Fire Sermon;” “Death by Water;” and “What the Thunder Said”—The Waste Land is a complex poem that translates Eliot’s fragile emotional state and increasing dissatisfaction with married life into an apocalyptic vision of postwar England. The poem begins with a meditation on despair before moving to a polyphonic narration by figures on the theme. The third section focuses on death and denial through the lens of eastern and western religions, using Saint Augustine as a prominent figure. Eliot then moves from a brief lyric poem to an apocalyptic conclusion, declaring: “He who was living is now dead / We who were living are now dying / With a little patience.” Both personal and universal, global in scope and intensely insular, The Waste Land changed the course of literary history, inspiring countless poets and establishing Eliot’s reputation as one of the foremost artists of his generation. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is a classic of English literature reimagined for modern readers.
The inspiration for the iconic musical Cats, T. S. Eliot's classic and delightful collection of poetry about cats. These lovable cat poems were written by T. S. Eliot for his godchildren and continue to delight children and adults alike. This collection is a curious and artful homage to felines young and old, merry and fierce, small and unmistakably round. This is the ultimate gift for cat and poetry lovers.
The last major verse written by Nobel laureate T. S. Eliot, considered by Eliot himself to be his finest work Four Quartets is a rich composition that expands the spiritual vision introduced in “The Waste Land.” Here, in four linked poems (“Burnt Norton,” “East Coker,” “The Dry Salvages,” and “Little Gidding”), spiritual, philosophical, and personal themes emerge through symbolic allusions and literary and religious references from both Eastern and Western thought. It is the culminating achievement by a man considered the greatest poet of the twentieth century and one of the seminal figures in the evolution of modernism.
In T. S. Eliot’s Ascetic Ideal, Joshua Richards charts an intellectual history of T. S. Eliot’s interaction with asceticism. This history is drawn from Eliot’s own education in the topic with the texts he read integrated into detailed textual analysis. Eliot’s early encounters with the ascetic ideal began a lifetime of interplay and reflection upon self-denial, purgation, and self-surrender. In 1909, he began a study of mysticism, likely, in George Santayana’s seminar, and thereafter showed the influence of this education. Yet, his interaction with the ascetic ideal and his background in mysticism was not a simple thing; still, his early cynicism was slowly transformed to an embrace.
This is the first full-scale analysis of T.S. Eliot's six "Ariel Poems" as Christmas poems. Through close readings, Atkins argues that these poems considered together emerge as clearly related representations of the "impossible union" that occurred in the Incarnation.
Two long essays: "The Idea of a Christian Society" on the direction of religious thought toward criticism of political and economic systems; and "Notes towards the Definition of Culture" on culture, its meaning, and the dangers threatening the legacy of the Western world.
Julius's critically acclaimed study (looking both at the detail of Eliot's deployment of anti-Semitic discourse and at the role it played in his greater literary undertaking) has provoked a reassessment of Eliot's work among poets, scholars, critics and readers, which will invigorate debate for some time to come.
