{"id":8291,"date":"2003-12-30T02:24:52","date_gmt":"2003-12-30T02:24:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aletheiabaptistministries.org\/Blog\/?post_type=catbird-seat&#038;p=8291"},"modified":"2020-04-23T02:25:49","modified_gmt":"2020-04-23T02:25:49","slug":"t-s-eliot","status":"publish","type":"catbird-seat","link":"http:\/\/aletheiabaptistministries.org\/Blog\/catbird-seat\/t-s-eliot\/","title":{"rendered":"T.S. Eliot"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n\r\nIf you are beginning to look at an author before you read his works, you have reached a pinnacle in critical thinking. The man is the means, and any literary critic worth his weight must admit that all literature is colored with its author\u2019s philosophy. A powerful author, Thomas Stearns Eliot, who preferred the signature T.S. Eliot, is a study in contrasts.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nHis early works, <em>The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock<\/em> (1917) and <em>The Wasteland<\/em> (1922) express the poet\u2019s hopelessness, \u201chaving omitted it [faith] from my picture of life.\u201d It was during his early years that Eliot, as many of his colleagues, despaired because no faith grounded them, no hope remained, and they believed life to be a meaningless drop in the cosmos. In 1927, Eliot became a Christian. Instead of hiding from this conversion, his writing reflected the changes. An immediate assurance of his purpose in life can be seen in his works. Read his poem, J<em>ourney of the Magi<\/em>, which is a three part revelation of his searching for faith, his conversion, and his transformation from doubt and despair. Few famous writers have given us what Eliot did: he laid out his entire life\u2019s works by the influence of each period in his life and openly shows what a dramatic change occurred from his conversion. We have examples from both sides of the fence, if you will.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nIt is Eliot who probably first used the term \u2018Secularism\u2019 in reference to writers of his genre. His own words define a secular writer as, \u201cone who is simply unaware of, simply cannot understand the meaning of, the pri-macy of the super-natural over the natural\u201d (Religion and Literature, p. 24). Eliot described the current generation as \u201cthose who have never heard the Christian faith spoken of as anything but an anachronism\u201d (Ibid., p.28). So entrenched were Eliot\u2019s contemporaries in the whole philosophy of transcendentalism and naturalism that they had no ability to acknowledge other possibilities. It is refreshing to read an author who has come out of such philosophical bondage, who then shares his work with the world as a God-given talent.\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":7974,"template":"","categories":[132],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8291","catbird-seat","type-catbird-seat","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-from-the-catbird-seat"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.8 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>T.S. Eliot - Aletheia Baptist Ministries<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/aletheiabaptistministries.org\/Blog\/catbird-seat\/t-s-eliot\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"T.S. Eliot - Aletheia Baptist Ministries\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"If you are beginning to look at an author before you read his works, you have reached a pinnacle in critical thinking. The man is the means, and any literary critic worth his weight must admit that all literature is colored with its author\u2019s philosophy. 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