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The Representation of Old Truths in T.S. Eliot's New Verse

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Continuing his explorations of T. S. Eliot's most captivating yet difficult works, G. Douglas Atkins' new and insightful book takes on the question of Eliot and hermeneutics: understanding and being understood, putting-in-other-words, and, in Eliot's own words, 'restoring/ With a new verse the ancient rhyme.' This perspective opens new paths towards the elucidation of Ash-Wednesday and Four Quartets, in particular. Addressed to both the specialist and the non-specialist, the close, meditative readings that form the center of this engaging book mirror its subject, capturing an instance of the '...

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Anthony Cuda, Associate Professor of English, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, USA

This is a brief and approachable work of literary criticism-written by an accomplished scholar in lucid prose-that allows readers to see a difficult modernist poet from a useful perspective. While this perspective may not ultimately prove of enduring significance to Eliot studies, the book is engaging, well written, and will benefit students and general readers; I recommend publication.

Overview and synopsis:
Atkins analyzes a selection of Eliot's major poetry by using the concept that he calls 'putting in other words,' a phrase that aims to convey how readers and writers understand words by 'translating' them into other words.

The phrase allows Atkins to illustrate the similarities between Eliot as a poet (who adapts and translates texts, both his own and others') and his readers (who must interpret Eliot's poems by similar means). It is also an umbrella concept that allows him to address key issues in Eliot's thinking, including the relationship between tradition and innovation, the question of language and its efficacy, the problem of the divided self, and theological matters pertaining to Incarnation and the sacred. The conceptual framework is essentially hermeneutic and implicitly (though perhaps not intentionally) owes its linguistic bias to Hans Georg Gadamer, who viewed knowledge and understanding as the products of ongoing interpretative conversations in which each participant translates the other's language into his or her own.

The book proceeds roughly chronologically, with an introductory chapter that helps to define his terms and that gestures toward the enduring importance of the theme. Three body chapters address three major poems of Eliot's career, including The Waste Land, Ash-Wednesday, and Four Quartets, each with the aim of demonstrating how 'putting in other words' (what one may refer to as translation) helps readers to discern both (1) new ways of understanding particular poems and (2) unifying threads across poems and Eliot's career more generally. A concluding chapter meditates briefly upon the implications of Atkins's argument for our understanding of the kinds of knowledge that literature can offer. Atkins aims to use a method that mirrors his subject by including frequent and often lengthy quotations and then translating them into 'other words.'

Critical analysis:
Atkins does indeed interpret Eliot's poems with insight and lucidity, and the concept of 'putting in other words' proves a surprisingly useful way to think about the unity of Eliot's career as well as the acts of reading and interpretation that his work informs and influences. The chapter on The Waste Land is perhaps the least persuasive because it focuses so exclusively on very selective portions of the text (and perhaps because, by intention, it does not account for the vast array of scholarship on the poem). The fourth chapter (on Four Quartets) is the strongest because that each poem in that sequence dramatically echoes and translates themes from Eliot's earlier work and from earlier poems in the sequence. This iterative richness lends itself to Atkins's method, which is best when explaining how the new builds upon (translates or 'rhymes' with, in his phrase) the old.

I found the passages of distinct personal voice in the preface and the final chapter to be engaging and compelling; they reflect openly upon the scholarly life of this expert reader, and I wished for more of them. Conversely, I found the a weakness of the book to be a frequent paucity of commentary and interpretation following passages that the author quotes. On p. 10, for instance, Atkins could expound upon the key elements of this passage more fully; otherwise, why include it at such great length? Other instances appear on pp. 28 and 29, and pp. 30 and 31. I was struck by the seemingly unreflective use of dogmatic Christian terminology in chapter 3: Atkins refers

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