'At last, we have a study that tackles these questions, and does so with a wealth of learning, a poet's sensibility and a thorough theological literacy...Murray has given us a superb study.' Rowan Williams, Doctrine and Life 'His point of view is always that of someone practised in meditation, and his book is in consequence one of the half-dozen really valuable guides to Eliot's poetry.' Stephen Medcalf, Times Literary Supplement The story of the composition of Four Quartets, in relation to mysticism, constitutes one of the most interesting pages in modern literary history. T.S. Eliot drew his inspiration not only from the literature of orthodox Christian mysticism and from a variety of Hindu and Buddhist sources, but also from the literature of the occult, and from several unexpected and so far unacknowledged sources such as the 'mystical' symbolism of Shakespeare's later plays and the visionary poetry of Rudyard Kipling. But the primary concern of this study is not with sources as such, nor with an area somewhere behind the work, but rather with that point in Four Quartets where Eliot's own mystical attitude and his poetry unite and intersect.

Based upon manuscript sources and the uncollected prose writings, as well as the published works, this is a profound exploration of Eliot's life-long preoccupation with mysticism. The author advances new readings of the familiar poems and essays through attention to Eliot's concern in poetry and prose with his roles as mystic, son and lover.

While severa] books have dealt with the Buddhism ofT.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, none have focused on its Christian aspect, though this is more fundamental to the poem.

T. S. Eliot’s Ascetic Idealcharts an intellectual history of T. S. Eliot’s interaction with asceticism. Eliot’s early encounters with the ascetic ideal began a lifetime of interplay and reflection upon self-denial, purgation, and self-surrender.

In his preface, Redmond writes: “A century ago, Thomas Sterns Eliot published The Waste Land (1922), the poem that shook the staid world of Anglo-Saxon intellectuals. Eliot thought that the hope of the renaissance, after passing through the rationality of the Enlightenment and the utopia of the 19th century, was ending in a desert of “futility and desperation”. He saw the cause as culture loss. We have broken with our deepest traditions: literary, philosophical, spiritual; we have lost our humanities, our humanity [...] Eliot never lost his pessimism. But he balanced this realism with the hopefulness obvious in his later works, especially in Four Quartets, but hinted at in The Waste Land. He spoke of a turning; we may always turn away from chaos, turn back to our roots, “fare forward”, even “beyond”. In Four Quartets, he wished to ‘retune the delicate relation of the Eternal to the transient’“. The Spirituality of T.S. Eliot is Redmond’s gloss to Eliot’s most significant poems focusing on their mysticism. Drawing on Eliot’s literary, philosophical and religious heritage, Redmond offers us the most comprehensive study of the influential Anglo-American poet’s lifelong cultivation of mystic theology. More than another work of literary criticism, Redmond has attempted in this book to explain the poems’ meaning and to point out the relevant sources necessary to understand Eliot’s spiritual background. Walter Redmond (Chicago, 1933) is a distinguished researcher and professor of philosophy and theology. He has published hundreds of articles and dozens of books on logic and Novohispanic philosophy, theological philosophy, analytic philosophy and phenomenology in German, English, Spanish, and Latin, as well as taught in various countries in Europe and America. Redmond has also translated Edith Stein's works into English and Antonio Rubio’s works on logic into Spanish.

Language Mysticism explores the place granted to language within metaphysical and theological hierarchies traditional to Western culture. Within these hierarchies, language represents embodiment, division, and historical differentiation; whereas silence points to an eternal unity beyond linguistic form and limitation. But this reflects a deeply embedded ambivalence in the Western tradition toward material and temporal conditions in general. The author uses the writings of T. S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, and Paul Celan to show how far-reaching and immediate this history of ambivalence remains in its influence and consequences. In each of these writers, theological traditions inform and situate linguistic imagery and practices, albeit in quite different ways. The author argues that the stances toward language of these three writers register values not only fundamental to their work but general to our culture. Language is the sign of body, of history, of difference; and a negative attitude toward language therefore implies a displacement of value away from concrete, historical condition. The approach to language of Eliot, Beckett, and Celan therefore inscribes their struggle to define and locate the values that endow our lives with meaning, and the possibility of translating these values into historical reality.