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You might be interested in this article by William Edgar from The Trinity Forum's online journal PROVOCATIONS. The opening text is below; see this link for the rest: http://www.ttf.org/index/journal/detail/shoring-up-the-fragments/ ---------- Shoring up the Fragments: Thoughts on T. S. Eliot’s Poetry Senior Fellow William Edgar offers an overview of T. S. Eliot’s life and thinking to help introduce readers to his poetry. He also compares the approaches of Eliot and his contemporary and critic C. S. Lewis, to ask some deeper questions about the role of the Christian artist. Poetry is about crafting words. It is not data, but lyrical, imaginative verbal invention. Unlike other art forms, even creative prose, poetry addresses the soul at its very source, at the place where language intermingles with deepest consciousness, with God’s own image. To catch the difference, try saying in descriptive prose, “Death be not proud.” You might at best explain that death has been conquered by God’s power, or that it can no longer hold us in bondage. You might succeed in describing the aging process, the agony of disease, the separation of spirit and body, and then the hope of heaven and the resurrection. But you would have missed everything important: the defiance, the victory song, the stance, looking at the last enemy in the face, and dressing it down. John Donne’s entire sonnet leads up to the final line, “Death, thou shalt die!” Poetry, as Matthew Arnold puts it, has power “to awaken in us a wonderfully full, new, and intimate sense of [things], and our relation to them.” Poetry, like music, is a performance, not just a message. At times it resembles prayer. Poetry, as John Ciardi puts it, is “the natural language of man’s most exalted thoughts.”1 To accomplish that, “the essence of a poem is that one thing in it requires another . . . The poem, that is, is forever generating its own context. Like a piece of music, it exists as self-entering, self-generating, self-complicating, self resolving form.”2 That is not to say there is no relation of poetry to outside facts. But it relates to them mostly with connotations, feelings, words as historical repositories, and less with denotations. ---------- The entry has 3556 more words. http://www.ttf.org/index/journal/detail/shoring-up-the-fragments/