"A Sensuous Embodiment": Sacramental Poetics in T. S. Eliot's Ariel Poems
Building on recent scholarship that seeks to bridge T. S. Eliot's poetic output before and after his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, this article sees in his Ariel poems, written immediately after his conversion, a discrete phase of his career that is distinguished from what comes before and a...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2020
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| In: |
Religion & literature
Year: 2020, Volume: 52, Issue: 2, Pages: 25-44 |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Eliot, T. S. 1888-1965
/ Conversion (Religion)
/ Anglicanism
/ Eliot, T. S. 1888-1965, Ariel poems
/ Sacramentality
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| IxTheo Classification: | CD Christianity and Culture KAJ Church history 1914-; recent history KDE Anglican Church NBP Sacramentology; sacraments |
| Further subjects: | B
POETRY (Literary form)
B Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888-1965 B Maritain, Jacques, 1882-1973 B Anglo-Catholicism B Sacraments |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | Building on recent scholarship that seeks to bridge T. S. Eliot's poetic output before and after his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, this article sees in his Ariel poems, written immediately after his conversion, a discrete phase of his career that is distinguished from what comes before and after by a use of "sacramental poetics." Exploring the specifically Anglo-Catholic form of Eliot's belief, I argue that. while influenced by the neo-Thomism of Jacques Maritain, he sought a more ambiguous instantiation of sacramentalism than that found in neo-Thomism. The Ariel poems enact Eliot's sacramental vision not only in their treatment of the sacraments of baptism and extreme unction but in their method of combining disparate historical moments into a unitive poetic moment. The "temporal loop" created by this conjunction gives the poems a circular structure that elicits re-reading, an act that lends itself simultaneously to the readerly act of "squeezing and squeezing" and to an embrace of ambiguity The Ariel poems are best seen as Eliot's attempt to create a poetic instantiation of the complexities of religious belief in an age of skepticism, a goal which sets them apart from the more fragmented earlier poems as well as the more wide-ranging cultural project of the Four Quartets. |
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| ISSN: | 2328-6911 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Religion & literature
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1353/rel.2020.0001 |