Challenging Critical Orthodoxies, Confronting Binary Oppositions: The Commentator par lui-même

Abstract

This introductory chapter outlines the approach to reading taken in the book. The approach involves writing-as-reading and focuses, with attention to both Eliot and his “mentor” Lancelot Andrewes, on the “squeezing and squeezing” of words, attention to words in their immediate and remote contexts, and (eventually) deep and extended meditation. Here, commentary and poems mirror one another. The poems included in the two Ariel series are read as parts of a certain whole, around the idea for which they were commissioned, Christmas. This marks the first time they have been extensively considered (together) as Christmas poems.