Master Class on T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets"
James Matthew WilsonUniversity of Saint Thomas, Houston
A master class with poet and professor James Matthew Wilson (University of St. Thomas, Houston). Open to current graduate students, faculty, and advanced University of Chicago undergraduate students. Others interested in participating should contact us. Registrants will receive copies of the prepared reading.
Generally regarded as the greatest poem of the twentieth century, T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets is not only an important poem but a masterful modern contribution to the long Christian-Platonist tradition of the West. It is at once a work of art and a suggestive vision of Christian humanist metaphysics, ethics, and mystical theology, one to which perhaps only Dante's Divine Comedy may be compared. In this master class, we will study the form of the poem, make sense of its difficulties, and discover how the sequence as a whole answers that most fundamental of Christian questions: what is the meaning of the Incarnation?
James Matthew Wilson is Cullen Foundation Chair in English Literature and the Founding Director of the Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing, at the University of Saint Thomas, Houston. An award-winning scholar of philosophical-theology and literature, he has authored dozens of essays, articles, and reviews on all manner of subjects secular and divine, and especially on those where we see the two in their intrinsic relation, as truth, goodness, beauty, and being disclose themselves in art and culture, in the political and intellectual life, in our quest for self knowledge and the contemplation of God.
