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 Professor of Humanities and the Founding Director of the Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing , at the University of Saint Thomas, Houston. He holds a BA from the University of Michigan, an MA from the University of Massachusetts, and an MFA and PhD from the University of Notre Dame. Wilson is a poet and critic of contemporary poetry, whose work appears regularly in such magazines and journals as First Things,The Wall Street Journal, The Hudson Review, Modern Age, The New Criterion, Dappled Things, Measure, The Weekly Standard, Front Porch Republic, The Raintown Review, National Review, and The American Conservative. He has published ten books, including most recently, The Strangeness of the Good (Angelico, 2020) and the poetic sequence, The River of the Immaculate Conception (Wiseblood, 2019).
