Letter
Eliot’s End
6 March 1980
SIR: I enjoyed Graham Hough’s review of my Thomas Stearns Eliot: Poet (LRB, 6 March). But what I wrote about the middle passage of ‘Ash-Wednesday’ II was not that the ‘litany is the mode of paradox and a form of chant’, but that it ‘is the mode of transition or ascent … Its two-stress line is at once a mode of purposeful paradox and a form of chant, as if the conscious meaning were spelt...
