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Tongued with Fire: T.S. Eliot's Poetics of Prayer

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 May 2012

Kenneth P. Kramer
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Abstract

What makes prayer valid? For the poet, T.S. Eliot, there is something more, something that is sometimes unnoticed, but which, if realized, can reanimate prayer life. This brief essay unfolds in three steps: (1) pointing to the contemplative influence of Eliot's conversion to the Church of England; (2) depicting the seventeenth-century Little Gidding lay-monastic community as the definitive influence on Eliot's final quartet; and (3) unpacking six interrelated prayer-revitalizing insights from a passage in ‘Little Gidding’, practices that help make prayer valid.

Keywords

AnglicancontemplativeconversionKelhamLittle GiddingmonasticprayerT.S. Eliot
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Anglican Studies , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , November 2012 , pp. 147 - 160
Copyright
Copyright © The Journal of Anglican Studies Trust 2012

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Footnotes

1.

Kenneth P. Kramer is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Religious Studies, San José (CA) State University, USA.

References

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6. Eliot, T.S., ‘Preface’, For Lancelot Andrews (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), p. 11. In contrast with the pre-Vatican II official Roman Catholic teaching that the English Church was established at the Reformation, for Eliot the Eastern Church, the Roman Church and the Church of England were three branches of the Universal Catholic Church. Indicating that commentators on Eliot's faith often confuse Anglo-Catholicism with Roman Catholicism, or present it as if it were another term for High Church Anglicanism, Barry Spurr writes that ‘the three branches sprang from the common root of apostolic Christianity’. ‘Anglo-Catholic in Religion’: T.S. Eliot and Christianity (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2010), p. 67.Google Scholar

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