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Continuing his explorations of T. S. Eliot's most captivating yet difficult works, G. Douglas Atkins' new and insightful book takes on the question of Eliot and hermeneutics: understanding and being understood, putting-in-other-words, and, in Eliot's own words, 'restoring/ With a new verse the ancient rhyme.' This perspective opens new paths towards the elucidation of Ash-Wednesday and Four Quartets, in particular. Addressed to both the specialist and the non-specialist, the close, meditative readings that form the center of this engaging book mirror its subject, capturing an instance of the 'impossible union' of differences and opposites that lay at the heart of Eliot's Incarnational understanding.
List of contents
Preface
1. Introductory Essay: True Wit and 'the Really New'
2. In Other Words, Death by Water, or 'The Burial of the Dead': The New Verse of The Waste Land
3. The Word and Other Words: Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems
4. Restored in the New Verse of Four Quartets: The 'Ancient Rhyme' of Incarnation
5. A Short Essay concerning Literary Knowledge
Bibliography
About the author
G. Douglas Atkins is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Kansas, USA, where he taught for 44 years. The winner of several awards for outstanding teaching, he is the author of twenty-two books and co-editor of three others, many of them published by Palgrave Macmillan. He now lives in Greenville, SC, and continues to write.
Summary
Continuing his explorations of T. S. Eliot's most captivating yet difficult works, G. Douglas Atkins' new and insightful book takes on the question of Eliot and hermeneutics: understanding and being understood, putting-in-other-words, and, in Eliot's own words, 'restoring/ With a new verse the ancient rhyme.' This perspective opens new paths towards the elucidation of Ash-Wednesday and Four Quartets, in particular. Addressed to both the specialist and the non-specialist, the close, meditative readings that form the center of this engaging book mirror its subject, capturing an instance of the 'impossible union' of differences and opposites that lay at the heart of Eliot's Incarnational understanding.
