Abstract
The great familiar essayist Elwyn Brooks (“Andy”) White, New Yorker writer, author of Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web, one of the most agreeable prose masters in English, one of the most engaging and sympathetic makers of story fictional and nonfictional, participated in, embodying, what he ascribes to his mentor Henry David Thoreau a century earlier: he too renders “religious feeling without religious images.”1 The feelings are there, the ideas too, but absent are the familiar and conventional religious images, doctrine, and dogma.
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Notes
E.B. White, Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 235. Page references as here are given in the text for the reader’s convenience.
Quoted in Marie Cabaud Meaney, Simone Weil’s Apologetic Use of Literature: Her Christological Interpretation of Greek Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 5.
T.S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages (London: Faber and Faber, 1941).
T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding (London: Faber and Faber, 1942).
T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1920), 18.
T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 3rd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 408.
Cynthia Ozick, Metaphor and Memory (New York: Knopf, 1989), 279.
Richard Selzer, “A Worm from My Notebook,” in Lydia Fakundiny, ed., The Art of the Essay (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), 435. I have written about this essay at some length in Reading Essays: An Invitation (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 159–66.
Paul H. Fry, The Reach of Criticism: Method and Perception in Literary Theory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 200.
See Joseph Epstein, A Line Out for a Walk: Familiar Essays (New York: Norton, 1991).
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© 2009 G. Douglas Atkins
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Atkins, G.D. (2009). “Religious feeling without religious images”: E.B. White’s Essays and the Poetics of Participation. In: Literary Paths to Religious Understanding. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230104174_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230104174_7
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