T.S. Eliot's Christmas Poems

T.S. Eliot’s Christmas Poems

DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0001 Also by G. Douglas Atkins

THE FAITH OF JOHN DRYDEN: Change and Continuity READING DECONSTRUCTION/DECONSTRUCTIVE READING WRITING AND READING DIFFERENTLY: Deconstruction and the Teaching of Composition and Literature (co-edited with Michael L. Johnson) QUESTS OF DIFFERENCE: Reading Pope’s Poems SHAKESPEARE AND DECONSTRUCTION (co-edited with David M. Bergeron) CONTEMPORARY LITERARY THEORY (co-edited with Laura Morrow) GEOFFREY HARTMAN: Criticism as Answerable Style ESTRANGING THE FAMILIAR: Toward a Revitalized Critical Writing TRACING THE ESSAY: Through Experience to Truth READING ESSAYS: An Invitation ON THE FAMILIAR ESSAY: Challenging Academic Orthodoxies LITERARY PATHS TO RELIGIOUS UNDERSTANDING: Essays on Dryden, Pope, Keats, George Eliot, Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and E.B. White T.S. ELIOT AND THE ESSAY: From The Sacred Wood to Four Quartets READING T.S. ELIOT: Four Quartets and the Journey toward Understanding E.B. WHITE: The Essayist as First-Class Writer T.S. ELIOT MATERIALIZED: Literal Meaning and Embodied Truth SWIFT’S SATIRES ON MODERNISM: Battlegrounds of Reading and Writing ALEXANDER POPE’S CATHOLIC VISION: “Slave to no sect” T.S. ELIOT AND THE FAILURE TO CONNECT: Satire and Modern Misunderstandings T.S. ELIOT, LANCELOT ANDREWES, AND THE WORD: Intersections of Literature and Christianity SWIFT, JOYCE, AND THE FLIGHT FROM HOME: Quests of Transcendence and the Sin of Separation T.S. ELIOT: The Poet as Christian T.S. ELIOT AND THE FULFILLMENT OF CHRISTIAN POETICS

DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0001 T.S. Eliot’s Christmas Poems: An Essay in Writing-as-Reading and Other “Impossible Unions”

G. Douglas Atkins Professor Emeritus of English, University of Kansas, USA

All rights reserved. First published in 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

ISBN: 978–1–137–47912–9 PDF ISBN: 978-1-349-50377-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Atkins, G. Douglas (George Douglas), 1943– author. T. S. Eliot’s Christmas poems: an essay in writing-as-reading and other “impossible unions” / G. Douglas Atkins, Professor Emeritus of English, University of Kansas, USA. pages cm Includes bibliographical references. 1. Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888–1965—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888–1965. Ariel poems. 3. Christmas in literature. I. Title. PS3509.L43Z5997 2014 821.912—dc23 2014030394 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. First edition: 2014 www.palgrave.com/pivot doi: 10.1057/9781137479129 Contents

Preface vi 1 Challenging Critical Orthodoxies, Confronting Binary Oppositions: The Commentator par lui-même 1 2 The Gift Half Understood, or Eliot’s Ariel Poems: Beyond the Old Dispensation 10 3 Triumphal March: The Problem Lies in Our Perceiving 18 4 The Cultivation of Christmas Trees: Through the Eyes of Children (and the Child-like) 29 5 Journey of the Magi: A Fable of Commentary: With a Second Coming to the Inexhaustible 39 6 Animula: What the Simple Soul Knows, or “Living first in the silence after the viaticum” 54 7 A Song for Simeon: The Difference the Letter Makes: Prayer, Self-Criticism, Validity 64 8 Marina: “Living to live in a world of time beyond me”: Recognizing, Perceiving, and Understanding 72 Bibliography 86 Index 89

DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0001 v Preface

You do not usually associate Thomas Stearns Eliot with “the Christmas spirit.” Even though he did write the joyous Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, from which came the phenomenally successful and popular London and Broadway musical, a book of verse that was made for his friend Geoffrey Faber’s kids. You may know that Old Possum liked Groucho Marx and admired the music hall, but you are still likely to think of him, as his friend Virginia Woolf did: dressed in a “four-piece” suit, stiffen- ing him more than the collar of his morning coat did J. Alfred Prufrock, often thought to be Eliot’s alter ego. But as the author of The Cultivation of Christmas Trees, with its embrace of the angel atop? “The child wonders at the Christmas Tree,” writes the author of The Waste Land and “The Hollow Men,” “Let him continue in the wonder,” never losing delight in the surprises, the “new possessions,” as well as “The expectation of the goose or the turkey / And the expected awe on its appearance.” For many readers, adult in their childishness, this poem is a sorry come- down from the poetic heights (supposedly reached before baptism into the Church of England, twenty-seven years earlier). Even more sympathetic readers, some of them offended, charge the Master with somehow equating the expectation of the Messiah with that of a seasonal turkey! What audacity, some shout! What pusillanimous discharge of misguided thinking and feeling, others proclaim! A problem—arguably, the problem—lies in our perceiving. It is my argument in this book—totally new, despite my having written about these Ariel Poems before, this

vi DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0002 Preface vii one unique in being made of complete and pure readings—that Old Possum here explores with feeling, insight, and impressive poetic skill the meaning of Christmas, its demands and its joys, and our problems in coming to terms with it and the “new dispensation” that it signals and inaugurates: the “great joy” is inseparable from the “great fear,” and accordingly so much is exacted of us in the way of understanding. In these six poems, Eliot ranges widely, offering works linked in ways that have not before now been adequately explored, nor specifically related to Christmas. Read closely, and carefully, with due attention to their words and their “rhymes” with each other and with other Eliot poems (and prose), these Ariel Poems emerge. The poems need, deserve, and repay responsible reading. In them, T.S. Eliot defines, de-mythologizes, and defends child-like wonder, “the glittering rapture, the amazement / Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree”and , at the same time, the Birth with which Christmas began, in the Magus’s words, as “Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.” The issue remains what it has been for Eliot since “The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: what you see, how you see. In exploring “what Christmas means,” in, through, and by means of Eliot’s Ariel Poems, I am concerned, of course, with his definition of Christmas, that is, with his (Anglo-Catholic) understanding of the Incarnation: as “impossible union” (Four Quartets). My interests are also wide. Just as the Incarnation is more than an idea, or dogma, Christmas, in Eliot’s terms, also has to do, perhaps principally, with its demands— that “Hard and bitter agony” and the relationship of Birth and Death— and so with its effects on the person who comes in serious contact with it. It is, in other words, a matter of practice as well as “theory.” The Christmas poems, diverse, demanding, and never simple or simplistic, are a remarkable achievement. I wish you a happy embrace of them. Along with the demands and difficulties of both the poems and their subject(s), there is joy in the child-like recognition that atop the Christmas tree stands both a decoration and an angel. Typically, as I have said, the works that make up Eliot’s Christmas poems go unrelated to one another (although one recent critic, at least, has admirably advanced the effort to address this part-iality [John H. Timmerman, T.S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems: The Poetics of Recovery]). My own point of view takes its cue, and more, from Eliot’s own principles enunci- ated in Four Quartets, particularly his definition of “rightness” of phrase and sentence: “where every word is at home, / Taking its place to support

DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0002 viii Preface the others.” This may be the most satisfactory perspective ever managed of the way to relate responsibly the part to the poetic whole; indeed, the Christmas poems foreground, in more than one way, the age-old matter of part and whole. It is also an act of undesirable partiality to overlook “the word within a word” (also Eliot, in “Gerontion”) and, ultimately, the Word within a word, “the Word within / The world and for the world” (Eliot one more time, in Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems).

I am happy to acknowledge again, and still, my unpayable debt to my lovely wife Rebecca, my loving children Leslie and Christopher, their delightful spouses Craig and Sharon, and our wonderful grandchildren Kate and Oliver. Then there is Dancing Diva, at once loving and fun- loving, taking but giving so much more. Also, the incomparable Brigitte Shull at Palgrave Macmillan, Pam LeRow at KU.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0002