Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The Souls of the Devout
- 2 Divisions and Precisions: Ambivalence and Ambiguity
- 3 A Gesture and a Pose: Homo Duplex
- 4 Where Are the Eagles and the Trumpets? American Aesthetes
- 5 The Silhouette of Sweeney: Cultures and Conflict
- 6 Being Between Two Lives: Reading The Waste Land
- Afterword
- Notes
- Index
2 - Divisions and Precisions: Ambivalence and Ambiguity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The Souls of the Devout
- 2 Divisions and Precisions: Ambivalence and Ambiguity
- 3 A Gesture and a Pose: Homo Duplex
- 4 Where Are the Eagles and the Trumpets? American Aesthetes
- 5 The Silhouette of Sweeney: Cultures and Conflict
- 6 Being Between Two Lives: Reading The Waste Land
- Afterword
- Notes
- Index
Summary
It is a sad fact, but there is no doubt that the poor are completely unconscious of their own picturesqueness.
Oscar Wilde, “London Models”Light and Darknes, Life and Death, Contraries one opposed to another. How in an History, in a Theatre do we take the greatest pleasure to have afflicting passions of pity, fear, grief raised in us even unto sighs, a real melancholy, and tears, while we know, that this is only a part in the whole; a Scene, which adorns and heighthens the beauty of the whole, and then loseth the melancholy of its shade, and discord in the universal lustre and sweetness?
In the last place, that which makes the Variety full, is the return of the whole thorow the Contrariety by a sweet and full close into its Unity; the return by the Contrariety from its low estate, to its first and most perfect heighth.
The Lord Jesus in his Mediatory Person, is the fairest, the richest Draught or Portrait of the Divine Design and Work, as it lies in the Divine Mind; animated and heightened by the most immediate, intimate, mutual Union with the Divine Mind. Here therefore is to be expected the most ample Variety.
Peter Sterry, A Discourse of the Freedom of the Will“PRELUDES”
Many themes associated with Eliot's poetry initially appeared in “Preludes,” which Wyndham Lewis's experimental modernist journal, Blast, first published in 1914. Forward looking, inclined to spleen, and bent on social and aesthetic iconoclasm, Blast survived only long enough to prophesy a strident, chaotic postwar scene.
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- Information
- The American T. S. EliotA Study of the Early Writings, pp. 36 - 75Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989