Strategy and Purpose in T. S. Eliot's Major Poems ─ Language, Hermeneutics, and Ancient Truth in ew Verse

Continuing his explorations of T. S. Eliot's most captivating yet difficult works, G. Douglas Atkins' new and insightful book takes on the question of Eliot and hermeneutics: understanding and being understood, putting-in-other-words, and, in Eliot's own words, 'restoring/ With a new verse the ancient rhyme.' This perspective opens new paths towards the elucidation ofAsh-Wednesday and Four Quartets, in particular. Addressed to both the specialist and the non-specialist, the close, meditative readings that form the center of this engaging book mirror its subject, capturing an instance of the 'impossible union' of differences and opposites that lay at the heart of Eliot's Incarnational understanding.

G. Douglas Atkins is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Kansas, USA, where he taught for 44 years. The winner of several awards for outstanding teaching, he is the author of twenty-two books and co-editor of three others, many of them published by Palgrave Macmillan. He now lives in Greenville, SC, and continues to write.