An Approach to "Journey of the Magi"Lancelot Andrewes, T. S. Eliot and the late Roger Fowler

Résumé

If Roger Fowler (1998) admitted not long before his death that M. Bakhtin, R. Barthes and M.A.K. Halliday were among the scholars that had had a deepest influence on his work in the field of critical linguistics, it is not less true that he has been highly influential for a generation of critics. Therefore, in this article I intend to deal with a series of issues in the analysis of T.S. Eliot’s «Journey of the Magi», using a selection of his writings for the last thirty-five years. In the first part I will be concerned with metrical analysis, as covered in Fowler (1966b, 1971c, 1971d). In the second part I will study how a multiplicity of different voices and points of view converge in Eliot’s poem. In this way, I am following him (1971a:11) in making, initially, a technical claim, as in the first and second parts of my paper I shall be using descriptive techniques for an analysis of rhythm and point of view. Simultaneously, I shall be discussing some points connected with his theoretical claim about the insights into the nature of literary texts and criticism provided by linguistics (Fowler, 1966a, 1971b, 1979, 1990, 1996).