Divine Cartographies: God, History, and Poiesis in W. B. Yeats, David Jones, and T. S. Eliot

by W. David Soud

Overview

Recent critical studies of late modernism have explored the changing sense of both history and artistic possibility that emerged in the years surrounding World War II. However, relatively little attention has been devoted to the impact of poets' theological deliberations on their visions of history and their poetic strategies. Divine Cartographies: God, History, and Poiesis in W. B. Yeats, David Jones, and T. S. Eliot triangulates key texts as attempts to map theologically driven visions of the relation between history and eternity. W. David Soud considers several poems of Yeats's final and most fruitful engagement with Indic traditions, Jones's The Anathemata, and Eliot's Four Quartets. For these three poets, working at the height of their powers, that project was inseparable from reflection on the relation between the individual self and God; it was also bound up with questions of theodicy, subjectivity, and the task of the poet in the midst of historical trauma. Drawing on the fields of Indology, theology, and history of religions as well as literary criticism, Soud explores in depth and detail how, in these texts, theology is poetics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780191083341
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	09/01/2016
Series:	Oxford English Monographs
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	264
File size:	471 KB

About the Author

W. David Soud is an Instructor in the Department of English at the University of Delaware.

Table of Contents

General Introduction
1. The Divine Self at Play: History and Liberation
2. The Figure and the Map: The Anathemata of David Jones
3. The Silence and the Moment: The Dialectical Poetics of Four Quartets
Afterword
Bibliography