Eliot’s Christianity in a Contemporary Perspective
Eliot’s Christianity in a Contemporary Perspective

From Hindsight to Insight

Author(s): Małgorzata Grzegorzewska
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Philology, Theory of Literature, British Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: T.S. Eliot; Word made Flesh; divine love; agape
Summary/Abstract: The book offers an analysis of Christian threads in T.S. Eliot’s poetry from the perspectives of World War II, the Holocaust and today’s crisis of Christianity in Western culture. The two most important motifs in the poet’s work are discussed: the issue of the Word made Flesh and the divine love – agape. This book looks into the conversation between literature and religion in the work of T.S. Eliot. It focuses on the figures of John the Baptist and the (Holy) Fool in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the Wise Men in Journey of the Magi and the ʻwounded surgeon’ in East Coker, all of whom point to Eliot’s ongoing concern, both before and after his conversion, with the ‘hint half guessed, the gift half understood’ of poetic incarnation: words made living and suffering flesh. This concern anchors Eliot’s poems in the idea of the Logos as Second Person, which has shaped Western cultures of reading over more than two millennia. It also reverberates in the works of the British and Polish poets invoked here alongside Eliot: W.H. Auden, E. Jennings, R.S. Thomas, G. Hill, K.K. Baczyński and Z. Herbert.

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