ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 broadens Geary’s conceptualisation of maternal allegory and the understanding of it as part of a complex ‘maternal poetics’ in T. S. Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday by bringing it into relation with the work of three prominent psychoanalytic theorists on such aesthetics in poetry and art: Julia Kristeva, Kenneth Wright and Jan Campbell. Demonstrated by letters between Eliot and his mother, the chapter shows flowers and poetry to be a point of connection and an important expression of love and comfort nourishing the Eliot mother–son relationship throughout Charlotte’s life, and especially during moments of crisis and separation. Geary uses Campbell’s reading of flowers and the garden as a ‘lived maternal form’ in Virginia Woolf’s A Sketch of the Past (1941) to analyse the evolution of these themes across Eliot’s poetry: from his earliest poems (1905–10), through ‘La Figlia Che Piange’ (1916) to Ash-Wednesday (1930). Wright’s work on vision and facial mirroring make clear the numinous significance of the face in Ash-Wednesday. Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic shows Eliot’s use of colour and rhythm in the same poem as corresponding with early perception and recognition of the maternal. The chapter indicates a relation between maternal form, the semiotic and the revelatory moments of maternal allegory in parts II and IV of Ash-Wednesday. Eliot’s maternal poetics not only move, express and translate passion—they also open him up to love, future becoming and to moments of the most profound illumination.
