In this episode, I speak to Anthony Domestico about the poetry of TS Eliot. We discuss Eliot the man, the critic, and the poet. We contrast the Wasteland and The Four Quartets, and discuss the reasons we prefer the latter to the former.

As always, I hope you enjoy our conversation!

Anthony Domestico is Chair of the Literature Department at Purchase College, State University of New York and the books columnist for Commonweal. His reviews and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The Baffler, Book Post, the Boston Globe, and the Times Literary Supplement, among other places. His book, Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period, is available from Johns Hopkins University Press.

Jennifer Frey is an associate professor of philosophy and Peter and Bonnie McCausland Faculty Fellow at the University of South Carolina. She is also a fellow of the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America and the Word on Fire Institute. Prior to joining the philosophy faculty at USC, she was a Collegiate Assistant Professor of Humanities at the University of Chicago, where she was a member of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts and an affiliated faculty in the philosophy department. She earned her Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, and her B.A. in Philosophy and Medieval Studies (with a Classics minor) at Indiana University, in Bloomington, Indiana. She has published widely on action, virtue, practical reason, and meta-ethics, and has recently co-edited an interdisciplinary volume, Self-Transcendence and Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Theology, and Psychology. Her writing has also been featured in Breaking Ground, First Things, Fare Forward, Image, Law and Liberty, The Point, and USA Today. She lives in Columbia, SC, with her husband, six children, and chickens. You can follow her on Twitter @ jennfrey.

Sacred and Profane Love is a podcast in which philosophers, theologians, and literary critics discuss some of their favorite works of literature, and how these works have shaped their own ideas about love, happiness, and meaning in human life. Host Jennifer A. Frey is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina. The podcast is generously supported by The Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America and produced by Catholics for Hire.

Episode Links:

Words Alone, by Denis Donoghue

https://amzn.to/3W8lquU

Dig it up Again, Ryan Ruby

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Joanna Winant on difficulty

https://bit.ly/3QK3Wnv

Tradition and the Individual Talent

https://bit.ly/2YONtSv

Portrait of the Artist as a Grown Man

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