Synopses & Reviews
In this gracefully executed book, G. Douglas Atkins continues his explorations of the poetry and prose of T.S. Eliot. In highly original terms, Atkins offers a major new analysis of Eliot's debt to and use of Lancelot Andrewes, the seventeenth-century Anglican churchman, who was one of the greatest sermon-writers in the language, author of the enormously popular Preces Privatae (Private Prayers), and director of one of six 'companies' responsible for the King James translation of the Bible. Focusing on their shared attention to verbal and linguistic detail, Atkins for studies closely Eliot's 1928 collection For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order; demonstrates the poetic use Eliot makes of Andrewes's writing in Journey of the Magi, and presents a fresh and important, full-scale reading of Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems, a work heavily indebted to Andrewes's emphasis on the central Christian dogma of the Incarnation.
Review
"In his latest book, Atkins brings his characteristic clarity and incisiveness to the previously unexamined relation between Lancelot Andrewes and T.S. Eliot, as mutually influential friends whose writings prefigure the theoretical nuances of latter twentieth-century literary culture. Through Atkins' erudition and eye for essentials, Andrewes' sense of the via media provides a lens to Eliot's dialectical spirit: his pleasures, his difficulties, his art. Rarely does theory meet close-reading with such illuminating grace." - Bruce Bond, Regents Professor of English, University of North Texas, USA and author of Choir of the Wells
Synopsis
With special attention to the poems For Lancelot Andrewes, Journey of the Magi, and Ash-Wednesday, G. Douglas Atkins offers an exciting new analysis of T.S. Eliot's debt to the seventeenth-century churchman Lancelot Andrewes and his theories of reading and writing texts.
About the Author
G. Douglas Atkins is Professor Emeritus at the University of Kansas, USA, where he has taught for 43 years. He has won three awards for outstanding teaching, directed the graduate program at the University of Kansas for 18 years, and is the author of 17 books and 3 edited collections.
Table of Contents
Preface
1. On Reading and Incarnation
2. Eliot Reading Lancelot Andrewes
3. Homage to Lancelot Andrewes
4. The Voice of (An)other: Lancelot Andrewes within and for Eliot's Poems
5. 'Sovegna vos' in Eliot's Marian Poems: Falsehood, Separation, and Ash-Wednesday
6. 'Orare et laborare': Suffer Not Separation or Other Falsehoods
Bibliography