“Faith in Eliot”
Christopher Ricks, Boston University, The Editorial Institute
Work in progress on Eliot’s poems (towards a full critical edition), as well as on the publication of his letters and on the gathering of all his prose, provides an opportunity to re-consider the relations of his art to his religious beliefs – even perhaps the relations of literature to religious belief. It is not only an unbeiiever for whom these matters are (to put it mildly) complicated.
Professor Ricks is currently co-editing the first complete critical edition of T.S. Eliot’s poetry. From the Editorial Institute’s Web site:
Although Eliot was perhaps the foremost English language poet of the twentieth century and died more than forty years ago, his writings have never been collected before, and many manuscripts have been in restricted archives. The Complete Poems, to be published by Faber & Faber in Britain, will contain not only Eliot’s masterpieces such asThe Waste Land and Four Quartets but also his Practical Cats, his translation of St.-John Perse’s Anabase, and a number of unpublished or neglected verses.
The lecture will be followed by a reception. This event is free and open to the public.
On November 13, 2008, 5:30pm: W. Ronald Schuchard, Goodrich C. White Professor of English, Emory University, is to give a talk at 5:30 pm in the Editorial Institute Library on editing T. S. Eliot’s prose writings. Part of the Editorial Institute’s Conversations with Scholars Series.
Click here for the event flyer.
Click here to listen to the lecture as aired on World of Ideas on WBUR radio.