T. S. Eliot and the Essay
eBook - PDF

T. S. Eliot and the Essay

  1. 160 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

T. S. Eliot and the Essay

About this book

G. Douglas Atkins here offers an original consideration of T. S. Eliot's essay as a form of embodied thinking. A combination of literature and philosophy, the genre of the essay holds within itself a great tension--that between truth and creative prose. And, as Atkins explains, these conflicting forces of truth and creativity exist not only within the literary format itself but also within the writers and their relationships with the genre, making essay writing a wonderfully enriching "impure art."

Exploring the similarities between Eliot's prose and poetry with the art of essay writing, Atkins discovers remarkably similar patterns of Incarnational thinking that emerge in each. In so doing, he establishes for the first time the essayistic nature of the great poem Four Quartets and provides an eloquent reflection on how the essay in all its impurity functions as Incarnational art, an embodiment of truth.

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Yes, you can access T. S. Eliot and the Essay by G. Douglas Atkins in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & English Literary Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Half Title, About the Series, Title Page, Copyright
  3. Contents
  4. Acknowledgments
  5. Preface
  6. Introduction: Eliot the Essayist
  7. 1. Against (Pure) Transcendence: The Essay and Embodied Truth
  8. 2. Eliot, Montaigne, and the Essay: The Matter of Personality
  9. 3. Turning the Essay: “Tradition and the Individual Talent”
  10. 4. The Perfect Critic and Imperfect Critics: The Essay, Criticism, and Impurity
  11. 5. Eliot’s Prose Voice: The Critical Essayist as Medium
  12. 6. “Restoring / With a New Verse the Ancient Rhyme”
  13. 7. Four Quartets: The Poem as Essay
  14. 8. The Impure Art of Four Quartets: Where Literature and Philosophy Meet
  15. Conclusion: Faring Forward, Exploring Still: Participation Instead of Puritan’s Progress
  16. Notes
  17. Works Cited
  18. Index