Tracing T.S. Eliot's spirit

the long version

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'.