T.S. Eliot and the Essay

G. Douglas Atkins is Professor of English at the University of Kansas. His previous books include Reading Essays: An Invitation and Tracing the Essay: Through Experience to Truth. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas.

Preface Introduction: Eliot the Essayist 1. Against (Pure) Transcendence: The Essay and Embodied Truth 2. Eliot, Montaigne, and the Essay: The Matter of Personality 3. Turning the Essay: ""Tradition and the Individual Talent"" 4. The Perfect Critic and Imperfect Critics: The Essay, Criticism, and Impurity 5. Eliot's Prose Voice: The Critical Essayist as Medium 6. ""Restoring / With a New Verse the Ancient Rhyme"" 7. Four Quartets: The Poem as Essay 8. The Impure Art of Four Quartets: Where Literature and Philosophy Meet Conclusion Faring Forward, Exploring Still: Participation Instead of Puritan's Progress Notes Works Cited Index

"Douglas Atkins' T.S. Eliot and the Essay offers a compelling argument for rethinking the common understanding of Eliot's essayistic writing as cold and pedantic. Instead, Atkins argues--and his argument is a good one--we should recognize the Eliot who moves gracefully between verse and prose as a poet-essayist driven to discover the crucible in which Incarnational truth can provisionally be found. A fine stylist, Atkins' book extends his substantial contribution to scholarship on the essay, while also further solidifying his reputation as a wide-ranging thinker and perceptive writer."--Tod Marshall, Associate Professor of English, Gonzaga University "Nuanced and perceptive. A marvelous exposition. Atkins takes the reader on a leisurely walk, carefully comparing Montaigne and Bacon, Pope and Dryden, Thoreau, Belloc and modern essayist Scott Russell Sanders. Refusing to accept criticism that marks Eliot as a puritan, Atkins instead sees both Eliot's prose and poetry as essays that express the 'impurity' of the genre and of Eliot's work."--Dr. Steven Faulkner, Assistant Professor of Creative Nonfiction, Longwood University