T. S. Eliot – Critical Readings

CR Episode 127: The Waste Land, Part IV

23 May 2022 Critical Readings

The Waste Land series concludes with readings and analysis of the final two parts--"Death by Water" and "What the Thunder Said"--with special attention to the biblical and grail quest imagery, the Wheel of Fortune, and contrasting aquatic extremes.

CR Episode 125: The Waste Land, Part II

2 May 2022 Critical Readings

The panel continues with the second of a four-part series on The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot, reading "A Game of Chess", with special attention given to the idea of death and rebirth, and to the presence and significance of baptismal imagery.

CR Episode 124: The Waste Land, Part I

25 April 2022 Critical Readings

The panel embarks upon a four-week study of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, beginning with a discussion of the allusive connexions and the imagistic and modernist effects of the poem's opening epigram and its first section, "The Burial of the Dead".

CR Episode 36: Eliot’s Four Quartets IV – Little Gidding

30 March 2020 Critical Readings

After a brief delay, the panel concludes its review of Eliot's Four Quartets with a discussion of Little Gidding, focusing on its cyclicality, pentecostal imagery, connexions to Dante's Commedia, and what the poem suggests about the communion of saints.

CR Episode 35: Eliot’s Four Quartets III – The Dry Salvages

2 March 2020 Critical Readings

The panel examines 'The Dry Salvages' (rhymes with 'assuages'), the third of Eliot's Four Quartets, and ponders over the speaker's shift away from temporal considerations and towards intercessory prayer and overtly Christian theological symbolism.

CR Episode 34: Eliot’s Four Quartets II – East Coker

24 February 2020 Critical Readings

The panel examines 'East Coker', the second of Eliot's Four Quartets, with particular attention to the poet's developing understanding about the search for meaning in life, the connexion to ancestral history, and the necessity of identifying a telos.

CR Episode 33: Eliot’s Four Quartets I – Burnt Norton

17 February 2020 Critical Readings

The panel begins a four-week reading of T. S. Eilot's 'Four Quartets', beginning with 'Burnt Norton', and with particular attention to the ways in which the poem develops the ideas of the Eternal Present and the human experience of the passage of time.