By comparing and contrasting the pre-conversion and the post-conversion poetics and poetic practices of T.S. Eliot, this book elucidates the responsibilities and opportunities for a poet who is also Christian. This book is the second in a trilogy which includes T.S. Eliot, Lancelot Andrewes, and the Word.

The culmination of a trilogy that began with T.S. Eliot, Lancelot Andrewes, and the Word, and continued with T.S. Eliot: The Poet as Christian, this gracefully executed new book brings to a triumphant conclusion the unique effort to pinpoint and identify the Christian characteristics of Eliot's poetic art. The book offers a close but companionable reading of each of the complex poems that make up Four Quartets, the essay-poem that is Eliot's masterwork. Focusing on the range of speaking voices dramatized, Atkins reveals for the first time the Incarnational form that governs the work's 'purposive movement' toward purification and fulfilment of points of view that were represented earlier in the poems.

Consisting of six essayistic chapters, this book centers on two seminal yet not often associated Irish texts: Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (1916). Practicing a comparative way of reading indebted to T.S. Eliot, Atkins traces the patterns of response the protagonists of these works show in leaving home and separating themselves from family and friends. Both Lemuel Gulliver and Stephen Dedalus flee from the messy burdens of ordinary life, seeking a transcendent existence, which Gulliver finds in the Flying or Floating Island, Laputa, whereas Stephen in art. Atkins also shows how Swift and Joyce both stand opposed to their characters, joined in the understanding that an ordinary life and an extra-ordinary one are often inseparable. Thus, Gulliver's Travels and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man can appear as essential critiques of modern misunderstandings.

This is the first full-scale analysis of T.S. Eliot's six "Ariel Poems" as Christmas poems. Through close readings, Atkins argues that these poems considered together emerge as clearly related representations of the "impossible union" that occurred in the Incarnation.

This lively, accessible book reveals the character - and timeliness - of Alexander Pope's thinking and art. G. Douglas Atkins focuses on the religious position of a poet who would not abandon the Roman Catholic Church. In our own highly partisan culture, such a position offers an important example. Bringing his expertise in religion and literature to bear, Atkins establishes that Pope was, as an anti-sectarian, not a Deist but a Catholic, a layman, and essayist. Through comparison with John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, and T.E. Eliot, this study sheds new light on 'The Universal Prayer, ' 'An Essay on Criticism, ' Moral Essays, and the four-part Dunciad. Ultimately, Pope emerges as a religious poet of the first rank.

This stimulating and provocative book focuses on the failure to connect that T.S. Eliot saw setting in during the seventeenth century. With special attention to The Waste Land and 'Gerontion, ' G. Douglas Atkins shows that Eliot roundly satirized modern misunderstandings and urges readers to make the connections that the "wastelanders" fail to make. Thus, a new approach to reading Eliot opens up, based on suggestions he himself made in the prose and enacted in the poetry.

In this gracefully executed book, G. Douglas Atkins continues his explorations of the poetry and prose of T.S. Eliot. In highly original terms, Atkins offers a major new analysis of Eliot's debt to and use of Lancelot Andrewes, the seventeenth-century Anglican churchman, who was one of the greatest sermon-writers in the language, author of the enormously popular Preces Privatae (Private Prayers), and director of one of six 'companies' responsible for the King James translation of the Bible. Focusing on their shared attention to verbal and linguistic detail, Atkins for studies closely Eliot's 1928 collection For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order; demonstrates the poetic use Eliot makes of Andrewes's writing in Journey of the Magi, and presents a fresh and important, full-scale reading of Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems, a work heavily indebted to Andrewes's emphasis on the central Christian dogma of the Incarnation.

This is the first book-length critical study of E.B. White, the American essayist and author of Stuart Little, Charlotte's Web, The Trumpet of the Swan . G. Douglas Atkins focuses on White and the writing life, offering detailed readings of the major essays and revealing White's distinctiveness as an essayist.

More than three centuries since their first publication, Jonathan Swift's A Tale of a Tub, 'The Battle of the Books, ' 'The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, ' and An Argument against Abolishing Christianity remain striking, prescient, and still-relevant challenges to Modern commitments to inwardness, reflection, and spiritualism. In this lively and engaging study - grounded in the intellectual and historical currents of Swift's time, with an eye on the implications for the present day - G. Douglas Atkins brings forty-plus years of scholarly and critical experience to bear on some of the greatest satires ever written. The study reveals new contexts for understanding Swift's satires, including post-Reformation reading practices and the development of the modern personal essay. This book revisits, from fresh perspectives, the late seventeenth-century version of the perennial warfare between Ancients and Moderns, then often instanced as 'the battle of the books

"This book offers an exciting new approach to T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets as it shows why it should be read both closely and in relation to Eliot's other works, notably the poems The Waste Land, "The Hollow Men," and Ash-Wednesday. In Four Quartets, Incarnation is the universal, timeless pattern, the paradigmatic instance of which occurs in and as the Incarnation"--

This highly readable book represents a unique approach to the controversial matter of the relations of literature and religion. From the minor seventeenth-century English tradition of "layman's faiths," Atkins moves seamlessly through a wide range of post-Reformation writers encountering and sometimes confronting institutional Christianity. After fresh, engaging discussions of John Dryden's and Alexander Pope's work come insightful, new readings of John Keats, George Eliot, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and perhaps most surprisingly, E.B. White. Atkins eschews linear argument in favor of a nuanced essayistic manner that elucidates texts and issues of immediate and lasting concern.

By reading T.S. Eliot literally and laterally, and attending to his intra-textuality, G. Douglas Atkins challenges the familiar notion of Eliot as bent on escaping this world for the spiritual. This study culminates in the necessary, but seemingly impossible, union of reading and writing, literature and commentary.

The influence of Nazism on German culture was a key concern for many Anglo-American writers, who struggled to reconcile the many contributions of Germany to European civilization, with the barbarity of the new regime.

In German Literature Through Nazi Eyes, H.G. Atkins gives an account of how the Nazis undertook a re-evaluation of German literature, making it sub-ordinate to their own interests. All reference to Jewish writers and influence was virtually eliminated, and key writers such as Goethe and Lessing were re-interpreted. What was left was a military history that was avowedly militant and propagandist.

Rooted in close reading of texts, including the essays of E.B. White, this comprehensive assessment of the oft-slighted subform of the literary essay situates the familiar at the heart of the essay as form. This book transforms our understanding of the recent political history of Central Africa. It charts the complex life and thought of Harry Nkumbula (ca. 1917-1983), the first openly nationalist African politician in Northern Rhodesia and, later, the leader of parliamentary opposition during Zambia's multi-party First Republic. Based mainly on his personal papers and the newly opened archives of UNIP, Zambia's ruling party between 1964 and 1991, the volume looks at how Nkumbula imagined a Zambian nation for the first time and, later, presented a liberal alternative to dominant state-led models of political and economic development. By exploring the trajectory of Nkumbula's ANC, a minority liberal party with strong ethnic roots, the book throws new light on the under-acknowledged fractiousness of Zambian nationalism and warns against reading African post-colonial politics solely in terms of clientelism.

The influence of Nazism on German culture was a key concern for many Anglo-American writers, who struggled to reconcile the many contributions of Germany to European civilization, with the barbarity of the new regime. In German Literature Through Nazi Eyes, H.G. Atkins gives an account of how the Nazis undertook a re-evaluation of German literature, making it sub-ordinate to their own interests. All reference to Jewish writers and influence was virtually eliminated, and key writers such as Goethe and Lessing were re-interpreted. What was left was a military history that was avowedly militant and propagandist.

This book offers an exciting new approach to T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets as it shows why it should be read both closely and in relation to Eliot's other works, notably the poems The Waste Land, 'The Hollow Men,' and Ash-Wednesday.

This is the first book-length critical study of E.B. White, the American essayist and author of Stuart Little, Charlotte's Web, The Trumpet of the Swan . G. Douglas Atkins focuses on White and the writing life, offering detailed readings of the major essays and revealing White's distinctiveness as an essayist.

This highly readable book represents a unique approach to the controverted matter of the relations of literature and religion, eschewing linear argument in favor of a nuanced essayistic manner that elucidates texts and issues of immediate and lasting concern.

Rooted in close reading of texts, including the essays of E.B. White, this comprehensive assessment of the oft-slighted subform of the literary essay situates the familiar at the heart of the essay as form.

Can a Christian have a Demon? It might surprise you to know that you could be living in a house along side of a fallen angel. This book is conversational in tone and is about how the possibility is there for two sentient beings to reside along side of each other and not even know it Fallen angels who left their first estate and were the subject of one-third of Christ's ministry are alive and doing well on planet Earth Biblical knowledge is used by the author to stir the thinking of people who are asking, "Why is this happening to me? Why are good people experiencing so many bad things?" In easy to understand language mixed with biblical references, the author tackles a dark subject that the devil would like for Christians to remain uninformed about

It was a cloudy night the mist was approaching through the North soon the little village where I was born would be engulf with a cloudy white smoke atmosphere, but I was too little to know what was going on. My mother Sylvestina, Tina as she was called by her friends was parking her cloths in her suitcase getting ready to take a long trip in the morning she would be gone sitting near the window facing the wall was my father Gonzague but everyone call him Hugh, with a loud voice I heard him say to my mother have you finish parking yet we must be on our way before the fog get too bad, my name is Kenvil folks around here just call me Wings, and this is my story. I was born in the Village of Micoud on the Island of Saint Lucia in the year nineteen hundred and fifty two, it is a rare story, the story of my child hood days is one of