Abstract
This introductory chapter outlines the approach to reading taken in the book. The approach involves writing-as-reading and focuses, with attention to both Eliot and his “mentor” Lancelot Andrewes, on the “squeezing and squeezing” of words, attention to words in their immediate and remote contexts, and (eventually) deep and extended meditation. Here, commentary and poems mirror one another. The poems included in the two Ariel series are read as parts of a certain whole, around the idea for which they were commissioned, Christmas. This marks the first time they have been extensively considered (together) as Christmas poems.
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Notes
T.S. Eliot, “Lancelot Andrewes,” Selected Essays, 3rd edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 347–48.
Borrowed from Michael Werth Gelber, The fust and the Lively: The Literary Criticism of John Dryden (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999), 187.
Roland Barthes, The Neutral, trans. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier (New York: Columbia UP, 2005), 7.
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922).
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943).
T.S. Eliot, Journey of the Magi (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1927).
John Keats, Poems and Letters, ed. Douglas Bush (Boston, MA: Riverside-Houghton Mifflin, 1959.
T.S. Eliot, Preface, Thoughts for Meditation: A Way to Recovery from Within, selected and arranged by N. Gangulee (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 12.
T.S. Eliot, Triumphal March (London: Faber and Faber, 1931).
T.S. Eliot, The Cultivation of Christmas Trees (London: Faber and Faber, 1954).
T.S. Eliot, “Baudelaire in Our Time,” Essays Ancient and Modern (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), 66n.
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© 2014 G. Douglas Atkins
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Atkins, G.D. (2014). Challenging Critical Orthodoxies, Confronting Binary Oppositions: The Commentator par lui-même. In: T.S. Eliot’s Christmas Poems: An Essay in Writing-as-Reading and Other “Impossible Unions”. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137479129_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137479129_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-50377-3
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