Tag Archives: T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot on Resisting Tyrants

By Robin Bates | Published: September 26, 2019

Columnist Gerson invokes “Murder in the Cathedral” to predict the impeachment of Donald Trump.

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Come, Holy Spirit

By Robin Bates | Published: June 8, 2019

Pentecost Sunday Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz uses the occasion of Pentecost to explore the nature of faith in his poem “Veni Creator.” Although the apostles may have been filled with the Holy Spirit, what about those of us who don’t experience tongues of flame? Here’s Luke’s description of moment (Acts 2:1-4): When the […]

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Lent: The Air Heavy and Thick

By Robin Bates | Published: March 9, 2019

Spiritual Sunday I share today a good Lenten poem by Denise Levertov where the poet finds herself in a funk, albeit not a dramatic funk. She’s experiencing neither a “dark night of the soul” nor a scorching wasteland desert, those extreme moments of crisis that have pushed people to revelation. (Today’s Gospel reading is Jesus’s […]

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Sen. Flake Is No Hamlet

By Robin Bates | Published: October 24, 2018

Comparisons of Sen. Flake to Hamlet over the Brett Kavanaugh is an insult to Hamlet.

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Live in the Layers, Not on the Litter

By Robin Bates | Published: September 15, 2018

Stanley Kunitz writes a variation of Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” that beautifully captures Yom Kippur themes.

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Will Hollow Senators Stand Up to Trump?

By Robin Bates | Published: June 29, 2018

If pro-choice Senate Republicans are like the hollow people described by Dante and T. S. Eliot, we can’t expect them to vote down an anti-abortion Supreme Court justice.

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The Bloody Flesh Our Only Food

By Robin Bates | Published: March 30, 2018

I share a Good Friday poem by T. S. Eliot and a Passover poem by Norman Finkelstein.

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Lit Frees Us from Our Mental Ghettos

By Robin Bates | Published: July 7, 2017

In a fine “New Yorker” article, Shakespearean Stephen Greenblatt argues that Shakespeare was incapable to showing anything less than the full humanity of his characters, even the villains. He thereby liberates us from our “mental ghettos.”

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Will No One Rid Me of This Russia Probe?

By Robin Bates | Published: June 9, 2017

When former FBI Director James Comey, in his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, quoted Henry II–“Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest”–he brought to mind both T.S. Eliot’s “Murder in the Cathedral” and Shakespeare’s “Richard II.” He took the right lessons from history by not murdering the Russia investigation.

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