"A Sensuous Embodiment": Sacramental Poetics in T. S. Eliot's Ariel Poems

Abstract:Building on recent scholarship that seeks to bridge T. S. Eliot's poetic output before and after his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, this article sees in his Ariel poems, written immediately after his conversion, a discrete phase of his career that is distinguished from what comes before and after by a use of "sacramental poetics." Exploring the specifically Anglo-Catholic form of Eliot's belief, I argue that, while influenced by the neo-Thomism of Jacques Maritain, he sought a more ambiguous instantiation of sacramentalism than that found in neo-Thomism. The Ariel poems enact Eliot's sacramental vision not only in their treatment of the sacraments of baptism and extreme unction but in their method of combining disparate historical moments into a unitive poetic moment. The "temporal loop" created by this conjunction gives the poems a circular structure that elicits re-reading, an act that lends itself simultaneously to the readerly act of "squeezing and squeezing" and to an embrace of ambiguity. The Ariel poems are best seen as Eliot's attempt to create a poetic instantiation of the complexities of religious belief in an age of skepticism, a goal which sets them apart from the more fragmented earlier poems as well as the more wide-ranging cultural project of the Four Quartets.