ts eliot – Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

Collected Poems: 1909 – 1962 by T.S. Eliot

By Scott J. Pearson | February 24, 2020February 24, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

T.S. Eliot surely resides in history as one of the greatest twentieth-century poets in the English language. He spanned the American-English landscape in life as well as in literature. His poetry is replete with imagery yet relatively devoid of obvious meaning. Even a poem entitled “Ash Wednesday” (a seemingly religious topic) skirts on just conjuring a sense of beauty in the reader and avoiding a tone traditionally reminiscent of a church. Of course, one poem…

T.S. Eliot: A Life by Peter Ackroyd

By Scott J. Pearson | January 26, 2020January 26, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

T.S. Eliot was one of the great poets in the English language during the twentieth century. He grew up in St. Louis and after graduating from college, moved to England. He loved his new country so much that he eventually became a subject of the English king. He wrote noted poems and plays over his lifespan. He also worked as a banker and as an editor for a publishing firm. The author of this biography…

History Poetry

Murder in the Cathedral

By Scott J. Pearson | January 20, 2020January 20, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

The greatest work of verse by the great American/English poet T.S. Eliot was not in a poem (though some readers of The Waste Land might disagree). It is surely Murder in the Cathedral. In a short play, Eliot shows his mastery of the British form of Church and State. In so doing, he sends a message that those who do not practice justice shall some day receive vengeance. The story of the 12th-century Archbishop of…

Religion-Philosophy Society

Christianity and Culture by TS Eliot

By Scott J. Pearson | January 18, 2020January 18, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

I first read these essays while a senior at college. Now, about twenty years later, I reread them in a study on the English poet TS Eliot. Eliot uses language very carefully, as any poet should, but he is a poet approaching the world of an anthropologist. Further, he writes in an era (pre- and post-World-War-II) in which European culture was pulled apart at the seams and remade again. Eliot himself is an American transplant…