T.S. Eliot, Lancelot Andrewes, and the Word: Intersections of Literature and Christianity

In this gracefully executed book, G. Douglas Atkins continues his explorations of the poetry and prose of T.S. Eliot. In highly original terms, Atkins offers a major new analysis of Eliot's debt to and use of Lancelot Andrewes, the seventeenth-century Anglican churchman, who was one of the greatest sermon-writers in the language, author of the enormously popular Preces Privatae (Private Prayers), and director of one of six 'companies' responsible for the King James translation of the Bible. Focusing on their shared attention to verbal and linguistic detail, Atkins for studies closely Eliot's 1928 collection For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order; demonstrates the poetic use Eliot makes of Andrewes's writing in Journey of the Magi, and presents a fresh and important, full-scale reading of Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems, a work heavily indebted to Andrewes's emphasis on the central Christian dogma of the Incarnation.