Keeping Faith & Breaking Ground

When love begins to sicken and decay,

Eliot in his earlier poetry had described a world where love had begun to ‘sicken and decay’. In the Hollow Men he is trying to re-appropriate the ritual dimension of life and to wrestle with the proposition that such a re-appropriation is no longer possible or perhaps even legitimate. Eliot seems to have arrived at an impasse in his life which was both poetic in terms of his literary career, and religious in terms of his spiritual development.

This 3 part series explores Eliot’s poetic works produced after The Hollow Men and before The Four Quartets. Bailie suggests that Ash Wednesday is The Waste Land “contextualized” – a Lenten journey through the desert leading to the Promised Land reflecting Eliot’s own journey into an affirmed Christian faith.

This 3 part series explores Eliot’s poetic works produced after The Hollow Men and before The Four Quartets. Bailie suggests that Ash Wednesday is The Waste Land “contextualized” – a Lenten journey through the desert leading to the Promised Land reflecting Eliot’s own journey into an affirmed Christian faith.

This 3 part series explores Eliot’s poetic works produced after The Hollow Men and before The Four Quartets. Bailie suggests that Ash Wednesday is The Waste Land “contextualized” – a Lenten journey through the desert leading to the Promised Land reflecting Eliot’s own journey into an affirmed Christian faith.

“To readers who want not amusement or magic, but poetry, and who want to know what poetry can be, if it is to be neither of these things, The Waste Land supplies an answer. And by reflecting on it we can perhaps detect one more characteristic which art must have, if it is to forgo both entertainment value and magical value, and draw a subject matter from its audience themselves. It must be prophetic. An artist must prophesy not in the sense that he foretells things to come, but in the sense that he tells his audience, at risk of their displeasure, the secrets of their own hearts.”

R. G. Collingwood

"And who will parse the broken measure of

"Essay on Rime"  by Karl Shapiro

In this series on TS Eliot’s Early poetry Gil Bailie explores The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Cousin Nancy, Aunt Helen, Sweeney Among the Nightingales, and Gerontion.