Abstract
Six poems comprise the Ariel Poems that Eliot wrote at the suggestion of Geoffrey Faber to commemorate the Christmas season: Journey of the Magi (1927), A Song for Simeon (1928), Animula (1929), Marina (1930), Triumphal March (1931), and The Cultivation of Christmas Trees (1954, in the new series of Ariel Poems). The poems have received uneven critical and scholarly attention, rarely if ever together. As “Christmas poems,” they are related inter-textually and show remarkable complexity of voice and tone.
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Notes
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943).
T.S. Eliot, For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1929).
B.C. Southam, A Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot, 6th edn (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace, 1996), 235.
Details regarding publication here and elsewhere I draw from Donald Gallup, T.S. Eliot: A Bibliography, revised and extended edn (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1969).
John H. Timmerman, T.S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems: The Poetics of Recovery (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1994). The terms all appear in chapter titles.
T.S. Eliot, “Lancelot Andrewes,” Selected Essays, 3rd edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 347–48.
T.S. Eliot, preface, Anabasis, by St.-John Perse, trans. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1930), 10.
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© 2014 G. Douglas Atkins
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Atkins, G.D. (2014). The Gift Half Understood, or Eliot’s Ariel Poems: Beyond the Old Dispensation. In: T.S. Eliot’s Christmas Poems: An Essay in Writing-as-Reading and Other “Impossible Unions”. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137479129_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137479129_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, New York
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