T.S. Eliot Materialized Literal Meaning and Embodied Truth

By reading T.S. Eliot literally and laterally, and attending to his intra-textuality, G. Douglas Atkins challenges the familiar notion of Eliot as bent on escaping this world for the spiritual. This study culminates in the necessary, but seemingly impossible, union of reading and writing, literature and commentary.

G. Douglas Atkins is a professor of English at the University of Kansas. He is the author and editor of more than a dozen books, including Reading T.S. Eliot: 'Four Quartets' and the Journey Towards Understanding; T.S. Eliot and the Essay; On the Familiar Essay: Challenging Academic Orthodoxies; and Literary Paths to Religious Understanding: Essays on Dryden, Pope, Keats, George Eliot, Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and E.B. White. He has been the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including NEH, Mellon, and American Council of Learned Societies and was the winner of the Kenyon Review's prize for literary excellence in nonfiction prose.

'Building on Eliot's own theory of lateral reading, G. Douglas Atkins engages in the sort of interpretation that Eliot himself endorsed. A fresh and original approach, Eliot Materialized: Literal Meaning and Embodied Truth changes the way we read the works of T. S. Eliot.'  - Kevin Gardner, Department of English, Baylor University, USA