Title: Tracing T.S. Eliot's spirit
Subtitle: essays on his poetry and thought
First published: 1996
Description: T. S. Eliot's lifelong quest for a world of the spirit is the theme of this book by leading Eliot scholar A. David Moody. The first four essays in the collection map Eliot's spiritual geography: the American taproot of his poetry; his profound engagement with the philosophy and religion of India; his near and yet detached relations with England; and his problematic cultivation of a European mind.

At the centre of the collection is a study of the Latin poem Pervigilium Veneris, a fragment of which figures enigmatically in the concluding lines of The Waste Land. The third part of the collection is a set of five investigations of Eliot's poems, dealing particularly with The Waste Land, Ash-Wednesday and Four Quartets, and attending to how they express and shape what he called 'the deeper unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being'.
Subjects: Religion, Criticism and interpretation, Pilgrims and pilgrimages in literature, Spiritual life in literature, Eliot, t. s. (thomas stearns), 1888-1965
People: T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
LC classification: PS3509.L43 Z7875 1996