Abstract
Journey of the Magi (1927) is the first of Eliot’s Ariel Poems, published the same year as he was baptized and confirmed in the Church of England. It shows the profound influence of the seventeenth-century churchman Lancelot Andrewes. The account of a journey (that is actually a “journey to Understanding,” which is the first Christmas, at which point all time changed), this supposedly straightforward poem begins puzzlingly with a (modified) quotation from Bishop Andrewes that thus fractures the time-frame of the Magus’s account. The words from Andrewes, though offered as a quotation, are changed to reveal an unreliable voice different from the Magus who then speaks, affected and changed by what he has seen. In reporting and emphasizing the difficulties encountered, the Magus reveals the (difficult) way of Christianity itself.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
The best account of the details of the church position that Eliot committed himself to is Barry Spurr, ‘Anglo-Catholic in Religion’: T.S. Eliot and Christianity (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2010).
T.S. Eliot, Poems (New York: Knopf, 1920).
Nicholas Lossky, Lancelot Andrewes the Preacher (1555–1626): The Origins of the Mystical Theology of the Church of England, trans. Andrew Louth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 50.
T.S. Eliot, “The Pensées of Pascal,” Selected Essays, 3rd edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 408.
T.S. Eliot, “I [Untitled],” in Revelation, by Gustaf Aulen, Karl Barth, Sergius Bulgakoff, M.C. D’Arcy, T.S. Eliot, Walter M. Horton, William Temple, ed. John Baillie and Hugh Martin (London: Faber and Faber, 1937), 1–2.
T.S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” The Dial 80.5 (November 1923), 480–83.
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943).
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922). Starting with this paragraph and going to the end of the chapter, I have taken, and sometimes modified, passages from my T.S. Eliot: The Poet as Christian (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
T.S. Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations (London: Egoist Press, 1917).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2014 G. Douglas Atkins
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Atkins, G.D. (2014). Journey of the Magi: A Fable of Commentary: With a Second Coming to the Inexhaustible. 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_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137479129_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-50377-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-47912-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)