Lunchtime Learning - T S Eliot

T S Eliot (full name Thomas Stearns Eliot) was an American who became a very English poet (even renouncing his American citizenship, and in whose poetry over the years we see reflected a journey from arid despair (The Waste Land) through his conversion to Christianity (Ash Wednesday) to a masterpiece of maturity and profound faith (The Four Quartets).

This workshop will especially focus on the last of these works, The Four Quartets, while also looking and some other works, and explore how the resources of this poem have so much to teach us about prayer.

Eliot writes out of both a wide literary and spiritual background, and a deeply complex and an at times troubled personal life. England with both its real and mythic history became central to his sense of who he was, and that was reflected both in his poetry, and the way he served his local parish as churchwarden. He once described his views as “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion.” He remains one of the most important and influential poets of the twentieth-century.

Doug Chaplin, the Discipleship and Lay Training Officer who is leading this session, has been a fan of Eliot’s poetry from finding echoes of his teenage disillusion in The Waste Land, through to still ongoing resources for his prayer and spiritual reflection in The Four Quartets.

To book your please, please click here.