T. S. Eliot‘s ”Ash Wednesday”

Following up on the apotheosis of Eliot's pre-conversion to Christianity in his epochal poem, THE WASTELAND, his post-conversion work strikes an entirely new tone. The Rt Reverend Lord Harries wrote this:

"T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” was the voice of a disillusioned generation and reflected a world in disarray. Then in 1928 Eliot announced to a startled world, and the disapproval of his contemporaries, that his general point of view could be described as ‘classicist in literature, royalist in politics and anglo-catholic in religion.’ The previous year he had been baptised behind closed doors in Finstock Church, near Oxford."

https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/the-conversion-of-t-s-eliot

Like today, for a cultural thought-leader to announce a perspective that is Christian and/or conservative is to ostracize oneself from approval and acceptance by the cultural elite, especially the academic cultural elite, of which Eliot was an established member.

As such, his first major post-conversion poem, "Ash Wednesday," was both a departure and a rebirth of Eliot's poetic genius. I hope you love it, as I do!

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