The Spirituality of T. S. Eliot

In his preface, Redmond writes: A century ago, Thomas Sterns Eliot published The Waste Land (1922), the poem that shook the staid world of Anglo-Saxon intellectuals. Eliot thought that the hope of the renaissance, after passing through the rationality of the Enlightenment and the utopia of the 19th century, was ending in a desert of futility and desperation. He saw the cause as culture loss. We have broken with our deepest traditions: literary, philosophical, spiritual; we have lost our humanities, our humanity. […] Eliot never lost his pessimism. But he balanced this realism with the hopefulness obvious in his later works, especially in Four Quartets, but hinted at in The Waste Land. He spoke of a turning; we may always turn away from chaos, turn back to our roots, fare forward, even beyond. In Four Quartets, he wished to ‘retune the delicate relation of the Eternal to the transient’. The Spirituality of TS Eliot is Redmond’s gloss to Eliot’s most significant poems focusing on their spirituality. Drawing on Eliot’s literary, theological, philosophical and religious heritage, Redmond offers us the most comprehensive study of the influential Anglo-American poet’s lifelong cultivation of mysticism. More than another work of literary criticism, Redmond has attempted in this book to explain the poems’ spiritual meaning and to unearth the relevant sources necessary to understand Eliot’s mystical background.