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The culmination of a trilogy that began with T.S. Eliot, Lancelot Andrewes, and the Word, and continued with T.S. Eliot: The Poet as Christian, this gracefully executed new book brings to a triumphant conclusion the unique effort to pinpoint and identify the Christian characteristics of Eliot's poetic art. The book offers a close but companionable reading of each of the complex poems that make up Four Quartets, the essay-poem that is Eliot's masterwork. Focusing on the range of speaking voices dramatized, Atkins reveals for the first time the Incarnational form that governs the work's 'purposive movement' toward purification and fulfilment of points of view that were represented earlier in the poems.
List of contents
1. Four Quartets: Simulacrum of Being 2. Burnt Norton: "The ancient rhyme in a new verse": "Only through time time is conquered" 3. East Coker: "Mixing Memory and Desire": Lyrical Response and the Fear "Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God" 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 6. Little Gidding: Coming This Way, Coming Closer: Commonality, Communication, Community, and Communion, or What's Being Done in What's Being Said 7. Little Gidding (Continued): The Pattern in the Movement, the Doing in the Speaking
About the author
G. Douglas Atkins is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Kansas, USA, where he taught for 44 years. He is the author of 20 books and the co-editor of 3, covering wide range of topics, including literature and religion, literary theory, eighteenth-century studies, pedagogy, and the essay.
Summary
Eliot: The Poet as Christian, this gracefully executed new book brings to a triumphant conclusion the unique effort to pinpoint and identify the Christian characteristics of Eliot's poetic art. The book offers a close but companionable reading of each of the complex poems that make up Four Quartets, the essay-poem that is Eliot's masterwork.
Additional text
"Atkins' signature prose plays well for this project: a personal voice which challenges the reader to slow down and think carefully because of the necessary complexity of the ideas expressed. The scholarship is sound, the conversational tone inviting. The book can add to work on Eliot by its combination of the scholarly and conversational approaches, which give it gravitas while inviting the reader to enjoy and respond to the work, not merely gain intellectual understanding." - Beth Impson, Professor of English, Bryan College, USA
