Divine Cartographies

Recent critical studies of late modernism have explored the changing sense of both history and artistic possibility that emerged in the years surrounding World War II. However relatively little attention has been devoted to the impact of poets' theological deliberations on their visions of history and their poetic strategies. Divine Cartographies: God History and Poiesis in W. B. Yeats David Jones and T. S. Eliot triangulates key texts asattempts to map theologically driven visions of the relation between history and eternity. W. David Soud considers several poems of Yeats's final and most fruitful engagement with Indic traditions Jones's The Anathemata and Eliot's Four Quartets. For these three poets working at the height of their powers that projectwas inseparable from reflection on the relation between the individual self and God; it was also bound up with questions of theodicy subjectivity and the task of the poet in the midst of historical trauma. Drawing on the fields of Indology theology and history of religions as well as literary criticism Soud explores in depth and detail how in these texts theology is poetics.