Poet and scholar James Matthew Wilson will take the audience through the form, meaning, and achievement of T.S. Eliot’s greatest poem, a poem Wilson describes as one of the greatest works of theological art since Dante’s Comedy. Obscure on its surface, Eliot’s poem draws its reader into the experience of epiphany and asks us to contemplate the relation of our embodied, temporal life to the eternal presence of God. Why are we here? How shall we live? Eliot’s answers are definitive and beautiful.
Bio
James Matthew Wilson is the Cullen Foundation Chair in English Literature and the founding director of the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Saint Thomas. The author of eleven books, his most recent collection of poems, The Strangeness of the Good (2020), won the Poetry Book of the Year award from the Catholic Media Awards. The Dallas Institute of Humanities awarded him the Hiett Prize in 2017; Memoria College gave him the Parnassus Prize, in 2022; and the Conference on Christianity and Literature twice gave him the Lionel Basney Award. He serves as poet-in-residence of the Benedict XVI Institute, editor of Colosseum Books, and poetry editor of Modern Age magazine. His next book, Catholic Modernism and the Irish “Avant-Garde” will be published in 2023.
