Abstract
The Cultivation of Christmas Trees is the last of Eliot’s Ariel Poems, appearing in the “new series” in 1954. An essay in verse form, it has not been highly regarded in the commentary. “There are several attitudes towards Christmas,” it opens, rather unimpressively. But voice here is critical; it is “child-like,” in its capacity for “both/and” that allows for the angel atop the tree to be seen as both decoration and angel. Herein lies the real character of Christmas, apparent in the child, represented in the child-like, and dramatized in the poem’s texture and structure. The humbleness of the poem is thus appropriate, participating in the “meanness” that surrounds the Birth in a stable, a mere decoration (or so it seems) that is a gift, both decoration and angel.
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Notes
Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959), 106.
Paul Murray, T.S. Eliot and Mysticism: The Secret History of “Four Quartets” (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991);
Denis Donoghue, Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2000).
John H. Timmerman, T.S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems: The Poetics of Recovery (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1994), 134.
T.S. Eliot, The Cultivation of Christmas Trees (London: Faber and Faber, 1954).
E.B. White, Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), vii.
T.S. Eliot, Triumphal March (London: Faber and Faber, 1931).
Nicholas Lossky, Lancelot Andrewes the Preacher (1555–1626): The Origins of the Mystical Theology of the Church of England, trans. Andrew Louth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 329.
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© 2014 G. Douglas Atkins
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Atkins, G.D. (2014). The Cultivation of Christmas Trees: Through the Eyes of Children (and the Child-like). 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_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137479129_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, New York
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