ABSTRACT
The conclusion summarises the book’s main findings and emphasises the achievement and many benefits of T. S. Eliot’s poetic return to the mother. It stresses the importance of both Eliot’s adherence to the Anglo-Catholic faith and its doctrines (the Incarnation, Original Sin and veneration of Mary) and his mid-career maternal poetics in enabling transformations in his relation to the maternal body, a movement into new perspectives and relations with women, and greater recognition of Charlotte Eliot’s contribution to his creative life and spiritual development.
Eliot’s penultimate drama The Confidential Clerk (1953) indicates a developing male recognition of real mothers. Maternal allegory in Eliot’s Four Quartets (1943) is associated with Incarnation and religious faith. The comparison between Eliot’s The Dry Salvages (1941) and his mother’s poem ‘Saved!’ (n.d.) exemplifies what Charlotte gave to her son and how he departed from her example. Moreover, the chapter emphasises Eliot’s remarkable late revaluation of human love as a spiritual power in his final play The Elder Statesman (1958). Charlotte Eliot’s maternal ambivalence, faith, love and idealisations provided her son with the resources to find love and live a poetic and spiritual life. Eliot’s maternal poetics are his Stabat Mater.
