Eliot's Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art

ISBN-13: 9780195147025 / Angielski / Miękka / 2001 / 304 str.

Ronald Schuchard

Opis

Schuchard's critical study draws upon previously unpublished and uncollected materials in showing how Eliot's personal voice works through the sordid, the bawdy, the blasphemous, and the horrific to create a unique moral world and the only theory of moral criticism in English literature. The book also erodes conventional attitudes toward Eliot's intellectual and spiritual development, showing how early and consistently his classical and religious sensibility manifests itself in his poetry and criticism. The book examines his reading, his teaching, his bawdy poems, and his life-long attraction to music halls and other modes of popular culture to show the complex relation between intellectual biography and art.

Recenzje

"[Schuchard] elucidates those moments in which he finds that the life presses with particular insistence upon the poems. The method is justified by the perceptions at which it arrives.... The fourth [chapter], one of the most original, argues that Eliot's comic sense, fortified by Baudelaire's 'On the Essence of Laughter,' expressed itself in a respect for farce, burlesque, caricature, and obscenity.... This superb essay leads to another just as good, a study of Eliot's feeling for the art of the music hall, Marie Lloyd and her peers, and the ballet of Diaghilev and Massine as inspirations toward a possible poetic theater.... The book ends...with a splendid analysis of St. John of the Cross, the English mystical writers, and—crucially—the centrality of George Herbert in Eliot's later poetry and criticism.... I recommend to your attention [Eliot's Dark Angel]."—Denis Donoghue, The Southern Review