T.S. Eliots Christmas Poems: An Essay in Writing-as-Reading and Other Impossib [Hardcover]

This is the first full-scale analysis of T.S. Eliot's six Ariel Poems as Christmas poems. Through close readings, Atkins argues that these poems considered together emerge as clearly related representations of the impossible union that occurred in the Incarnation.1. Challenging Critical Orthodoxies, Confronting Binary Oppositions: The Commentator par lui-meme 2. The Gift Half Understood, or Eliot's Ariel Poems: Beyond the Old Dispensation 3. "Triumphal March": The Problem Lies in Our Perceiving 4. "The Cultivation of Christmas Trees": Through the Eyes of Children (and the Child-like) 5. "Journey of the Magi": A Fable of Commentary: With a Second Coming to the Inexhaustible 6. "Animula": What the Simple Soul Knows, or "Living first in the silence after the viaticum" 7. "A Song for Simeon": The Difference the Letter Makes: Prayer, Self-Criticism, Validity 8. "Marina": "Living to live in a world of time beyond me": Recognizing, Perceiving, and Understanding

Written gracefully and engagingly, T.S. Eliot's Christmas Poems creates something akin to narrative drive (clearly absent from most scholarly studies), a progression, journey, to that which is hidden - a mystery (in the most literal sense!) - wherein the reader accompanies Atkins who reveals that which Eliot scholarship has largely missed: the complexity and interdependence of the poems and their distinctive expression of the theological and experiential bases and possibilities of Christmas. - Mark Walters, Oxbridge Chair of English Language and Literature, William Jewell College, USA

G. Douglas Atkins is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Kansas, USA, where he taught for 44 years. The winner of several awards for outstanding teaching, he is the author of twenty-one books and co-editor of three others.