Visions of Origins and Ends: Personhood in the Poetry of T.S. Eliot, John Heath-Stubbs, and Geoffrey Hill

Abstract

In this thesis, I explore the frontiers of the human condition in a secular age through the poetry of T.S. Eliot, discovering that it is in visions of protology and eschatology that Eliot constructs a theological anthropology, challenged and developed by his poetic successors Geoffrey Hill and John Heath-Stubbs, that recovers the integral humanism undergirding Christian belief in the responsible will, action, and knowledge of human persons made for love. If, as Eliot posits in the Four Quartets, “In my beginning is my end,” then the creation of man and woman in the image and likeness of God, and their original sin, reveal their need for redemption from their disordered end as members of Adam, and the fittingness of God’s salvation of the blessed through their incorporation into, and final end in, Christ. Eliot’s vision of persons made for love, and most capable of expressing that love through participation in Christ, informs his portrayal of two purposes of human becoming between the first creation and the new creation: first, ascending images of the good life in the Four Quartets disclose reality to be a school of love, and second, dramatizations of freedom and martyrdom in Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party present this life as a time of trial. Eliot’s teleological interpretation of humanity, made to choose and know love, answers the secular desire for meaning, each person created to develop in knowledge and love, and justice, each person made to face the final judgement, either accepting the love of Christ and communion in beatitude, or rejecting the love of Christ and undergoing excommunication in perdition. Geoffrey Hill responds to Eliot’s eschatological poetry with his own vision of love and universal union in The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy. John Heath-Stubbs likewise responds to Eliot, and his elegies construct an inclusivist eschatology in which faith in poetry holds salvific potential. The latter two poets develop Eliot’s theological anthropology through their poetry, and Heath-Stubbs speculative eschatology demonstrates the compatibility of freedom, love, and a particularist soteriology.