Ash Wednesday

ANYONE who sets out to interpret T. S. Eliot's Ash Wednesday may well be preparing a service of penance and humiliation for himself. The poem is difficult, and the attempt to spread out its meaning for the prose eye does not receive much encouragement from some of Mr. Eliot's own utterances, in which he seems content to believe that a poem may contain many meanings at once and that the poet himself is frequently unaware of all the meaning or meanings which readers may allowably find in the work. These are warnings which imply that the interpreter proceeds at his peril. None the less I shall risk my own commination service by saying what I have to say of Ash Wednesday. I start on strictly even terms with the humblest and most perplexed reader. I have no art of divination into confusing works. It is simply that some time ago I underwent the experience, as it seemed, of seeing into Ash Wednesday; and I am moved to report what it seemed to me that I saw

Art · History · Modernist Literature and Criticism