Ash Wednesday (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: T. S. Eliot
- First Published: 1930
- Type of Work: Poem
- Genres: Poetry
- Subjects: Intellectuals, Philosophy or philosophers, Religion, Christianity, Sermons, Rites or ceremonies, Pilgrims or pilgrimages, Lent
“Ash Wednesday” contains many traces of Eliot's newly found Anglo-Catholic orientation; he had officially joined the church in 1927. The poem's title comes from the Christian movable feast day celebrating the onset of Lent, forty days before Easter: It is a day of mortification of the flesh and of turning toward the spiritual. The poem exemplifies the tensions between the flesh and the spirit, borrowing much from Dante's medieval mysticism, as the story of conversion is told in a Symbolist dream, a favorite technique of Eliot. As in The Waste Land, characters merge; the...
[The entire page is 794 words long]
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