T.S. Eliot, Poetry, and Earth: The Name of the Lotos Rose by Etienne Terblanche (review)

use to scholars focusing on either side of the Atlantic and is sure to invite more discussion of its subject. Elizabeth Fenton The University of Vermont T.S. Eliot, Poetry, and Earth: The Name of the Lotos Rose. By Etienne Terblanche. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016. ISBN 978-0-7391-8957-3. Hardback. ISBN 978-0-7391-8958-0. eBook. Pp. v + 221. $85.00. Etienne Terblanche, a poet and linguistics professor of Afrikaans and Dutch in the school of languages at North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa, applies the tenets of ‘‘new materialism’’ to suggest a new understanding of T. S. Eliot’s major poems. T. S. Eliot, Poetry, and Earth: The Name of the Lotos Rose is the first full-length ecocritical interpretation of Eliot’s major poems, and, therefore, has advanced an important new avenue in Eliot scholarship. ‘‘New materialism’’ is a recent component of ecocriticism, itself an unfolding field of examining the environment in literature. It has at its core a sleuthing out of religious, political, and cultural suppositions that have led to the current environmental crisis. The book is organized with inventive and poetic insights that offer new interpretations based on the juxtaposition of poems and their internal ‘‘material’’ environment. Terblanche’s ecocritical approach focuses on the ‘‘idioletic eco-logos’’ of Eliot’s major poems, by which he means Eliot’s language patterns, speech, and verbal engagement with ‘‘modern nature’’ (2). He narrows down his ecocritical approach to explore the tenets of ‘‘new materialism,’’ a collection of theories seeking new perspectives on old dichotomies: nature vs. culture, body vs. thought, concrete vs. abstract, and so on. The book presents Eliot as a poet who anticipated the movement ’s challenge to reductionist or essentialist interpretations of the material world. Earth, Terblanche argues, has agency and is not mute or nonresponsive to human abuse. The ecocritical facet of ‘‘new materialism’’ decries perceptions of the material world as mechanistic or automatic; instead the approach should be one of immersion, not into an inert site, but into an organic, eternal, yet material, natural process in which human culture and artificiality are minute parts of an everchanging system. Hence, Eliot’s eco-logos recognizes ‘‘entrenched linguistic barriers,’’ such as false dichotomies, and seeks to invent new configurations of understanding existence (190). ‘‘New materialism’’ is a contemporary interdisciplinary philosophical movement that expands upon the monism of materialism and the belief that reality is made up entirely of the physical or corporeal world. The English word ‘‘matter’’ is derived from the Latin m  ateria, literally the woody part of a tree. M ateria, in turn, is derived from m ater, meaning ‘‘mother.’’ ‘‘Matter’’ to new materialists is understood as ‘‘Mother Earth’’ or ‘‘Earth’’ for short. New materialists posit, then, that reality is made up entirely of stuff or substance. The spiritual world is neither 336 Christianity & Literature 66(2) opposed to nor separate from the material world. Rather, the numinous or any divine power is immanent in matter, described by new materialists as ‘‘vibrant matter.’’ A cultural theory that does not prioritize human culture or an a priori God, ‘‘new materialism’’ has become popular on college campuses since the late 1990s and serves as a rebuttal to the subjectivism of postmodern and poststructural theories that take the ‘‘real’’ out of reality. According to the author, his own method is a ‘‘hermeneutic loop (reading the parts of the text in terms of the whole and vice versa)’’ (2). Therefore, he addresses the meaning of images in terms of the meanings internal to the poem. For example, in chapter 1, ‘‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’’ the title character and the persona, in his expression of alienation with the world and society, affirms the importance of connection. ‘‘Prufrock’’ is associated with ‘‘rock’’ and ‘‘matter,’’ and the love song is one of a lost relationship with ‘‘Earth.’’ The question, ‘‘What is the matter with Prufrock’’ is the important question to ask (31). His fear of eating a peach is what keeps him from his own salvation, a reversal on the problem of the forbidden fruit in Genesis. His fear of the living world disbars him from the spiritual one. Prufrock...