The Spirituality of T. S. Eliot: A Gloss on The Waste Land and Four Quartets

Walter Redmond

doi:10.55821/col1.lib9

The Spirituality of T. S. Eliot: A Gloss on The Waste Land and Four Quartets

Authors

Walter Redmond

DOI: https://doi.org/10.55821/col1.lib9

Synopsis

In his preface, Redmond writes: “A century ago, Thomas Sterns Eliot published The Waste Land (1922), the poem that shook the staid world of Anglo-Saxon intellectuals. Eliot thought that the hope of the renaissance, after passing through the rationality of the Enlightenment and the utopia of the 19th century, was ending in a desert of “futility and desperation”. He saw the cause as culture loss. We have broken with our deepest traditions: literary, philosophical, spiritual; we have lost our humanities, our humanity [...] Eliot never lost his pessimism. But he balanced this realism with the hopefulness obvious in his later works, especially in Four Quartets, but hinted at in The Waste Land. He spoke of a turning; we may always turn away from chaos, turn back to our roots, “fare forward”, even “beyond”. In Four Quartets he wished to ‘retune the delicate relation of the Eternal to the transient’“. The Spirituality of T.S. Eliot is Redmond’s gloss to Eliot’s most significant poems focusing on their mysticism. Drawing on Eliot’s literary, philosophical and religious heritage, Redmond offers us the most comprehensive study of the influential Anglo-American poet’s lifelong cultivation of mystic theology. More than another work of literary criticism, Redmond has attempted in this book to explain the poems’ meaning and to point out the relevant sources necessary to understand Eliot’s spiritual background.

Chapters

Preface

DOI: https://doi.org/10.55821/col1.lib9.x

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1. The Waste Land

DOI: https://doi.org/10.55821/col1.lib9.1
1.0 Introduction

DOI: https://doi.org/10.55821/col1.lib9.1.0

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1.1 The Burial of the Dead

DOI: https://doi.org/10.55821/col1.lib9.1.1

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1.2 A Game of Chess

DOI: https://doi.org/10.55821/col1.lib9.1.2

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1.3 The Fire Sermon

DOI: https://doi.org/10.55821/col1.lib9.1.3

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1.4 Death by Water

DOI: https://doi.org/10.55821/col1.lib9.1.4

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1.5 What the Thunder Said

DOI: https://doi.org/10.55821/col1.lib9.1.5

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2. Four Quartets

DOI: https://doi.org/10.55821/col1.lib9.2
2.0 Introduction

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2.1 Burnt Norton

DOI: https://doi.org/10.55821/col1.lib9.2.1

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2.2 East Coker

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2.3 Dry Salvages

DOI: https://doi.org/10.55821/col1.lib9.2.3

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2.4 Little Gidding

DOI: https://doi.org/10.55821/col1.lib9.2.4

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Author Biography

Walter Redmond

Walter Redmond (Chicago, 1933) is a distinguished researcher and professor of philosophy and theology. He has published hundreds of articles and dozens of books on logic and Novohispanic philosophy, theological philosophy, analytic philosophy and phenomenology in German, English, Spanish, and Latin, as well as taught in various countries in Europe and America. Redmond has also translated Edith Stein's works into English and Antonio Rubio’s works on logic into Spanish.