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Sean Cotter Eliot's baptism and confirmation in the Anglican Church in 1927 is usually taken to mark a conversion, not only in his spiritual life, but also in his aesthetics. This year divides the "early" from the "late" Eliot, the author of "Prufrock" and The Waste Land from the author of Ash- Wed- nesday and Four Quartets, the ironic avant-garde ventriloquist from the dogmatic czar of letters. Helen Gardner's statement is exemplary: The change in Mr Eliot's poetry cannot be discussed without reference to the fact that the author ofAsh Wednesday is a Christian while the author of The Waste Land was not. Nobody can underrate the momentousness for any mature person of acceptance of all that membership of the Christian Church entails. (103) While it is not clear what all is entailed, we can hear in "momentousness" the solemn tone reserved for this moment in Eliot's life, as though he has made a desperate and possibly fatal choice. I will argue that we are mourning a false sense of rupture. We know from his Harvard notebooks (Gordon 537-8) and from poems such as "The Love Song of St. Sebastian" that Eliot wrestled with Christian belief throughout his
The Comparatist – University of North Carolina Press
Published: Oct 3, 2002
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