2018英国
In Return To T. S. Eliotland writer and critic A.N. Wilson explores the life and work of one of the twentieth century’s greatest poets, T.S. Eliot.
Andrew Wilson has been reading and rereading Eliot for much of his life. Now from the halls of Harvard University to a Somerset village, via a Margate promenade shelter, he follows the spiritual and psychological journey that Eliot took in his most iconic poems.
From The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock to The Waste Land and from Ash Wednesday to Four Quartets, Wilson traces Eliot’s life story as it informs his greatest works. He travels to the places that inspired them, visiting the Eliot family’s holiday home on the Massachusetts coast, following him to Oxford where he met and rapidly married his first wife, the lively and bohemian Vivien Haigh-Wood, and on to London where he made his home and his name. He explores how Eliot’s realisation that he and Vivien were fundamentally incompatible and their resulting unhappiness influenced The Waste Land and examines how his subsequent conversion to Christianity coloured his later works, concluding his journey by visiting some of the key locations around which he structured his final masterpiece, Four Quartets.
Chock full of allusion, at times opaque and elliptical, Eliot’s poetry is widely regarded as complex and difficult - but here A.N. Wilson eloquently makes the case that grappling with it has immense rewards. In these works, Eliot takes on weighty ideas of time and memory and faith and belief, themes which Wilson argues have as much relevance today as during his lifetime. And whilst hailing his genius, Wilson does not shy away from confronting the discomforting and dark side of his work.