This is the first full-scale analysis of T.S. Eliot's six "Ariel Poems" as Christmas poems. Through close readings, Atkins argues that these poems considered together emerge as clearly related representations of the "impossible union" that occurred...
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This is the first full-scale analysis of T.S. Eliot's six "Ariel Poems" as Christmas poems. Through close readings, Atkins argues that these poems considered together emerge as clearly related representations of the "impossible union" that occurred in the Incarnation. "Written gracefully and engagingly, T.S. Eliot's Christmas Poems creates something akin to narrative drive (clearly absent from most scholarly studies), a progression, journey, to that which is hidden - a mystery (in the most literal sense!) - wherein the reader accompanies Atkins who reveals that which Eliot scholarship has largely missed: the complexity and interdependence of the poems and their distinctive expression of the theological and experiential bases and possibilities of Christmas." - Mark Walters, Oxbridge Chair of English Language and Literature, William Jewell College, USA.
