© Faber & Faber
The ‘Ariel’ poems and Ash-Wednesday
‘I thought my poetry was over after “The Hollow Men”’, said Eliot in
1953, ‘and it was only because my publishers had started the series of “Ariel” poems and
I let myself promise to contribute, that I began again. And writing the “Ariel” poems
released the stream, and led directly to Ash-Wednesday’. The poems were
received in the light of Eliot’s Anglo-Catholicism, but Eliot baulked at the terms
‘religious or devotional’. To him the poems were an attempt at something more personal,
visionary, Dantean: he had hoped ‘to state a particular phase of the progress of one
person. If that progress is in the direction of “religion”, I can’t help that’.
‘… the whole thing aims to be a modern Vita Nuova, on the same plane of hallucination …’
Further Reading
‘T. S. Eliot Talks about Himself and the Drive to Create’, interview with John Lehmann in The New York Times (29 November 1953)
The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume 5, 1930–1931, ed. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (London, 2014), p. 201
‘Journey of the Magi’
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Eliot reading ‘Journey of the Magi’ © The Estate of T. S. Eliot and Faber & Faber
The unstoppering began with ‘Journey of the Magi’, of which Eliot claimed, ‘I wrote it in three quarters of an hour after church time and before lunch one Sunday morning, with the assistance of half a bottle of Booth’s gin.’
Other sources
The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume 3, 1926–1927, ed. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (London, 2012), p. 700