Agricultural approaches to T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral and Four Quartets.

This project considers the convergence of T. S. Eliot's agrarian and Anglo-Catholic views in Murder in the Cathedral and Four Quartets. Drawing on Jeremy Diaper's book T. S. Eliot and Organicism, I explore how Eliot performs and communicates his agrarian politics through these works and how his agrarianism intersects with a Christian understanding of time, martyrdom, and Incarnation. Chapter two examines how Eliot performs his pro-agrarian politics in Murder in the Cathedral through the agricultural imaginary of the Women of Canterbury. I discuss the connection that Eliot makes between ecological and spiritual renewal in the play and explore the eschatological implications of this connection. Chapter three then considers Eliot’s emphasis on the Incarnation in Four Quartets, particularly in the way it elevates the spiritual value of the material world. Fittingly, Eliot stages images of proper and disordered land management at key moments of spiritual crisis and renewal in this work.