Distraction and Attention in T.S. Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday

This essay contextualizes T. S. Eliot’s poem Ash-Wednesday (1930) within Eliot’s increased focus on distraction and attention across his literary criticism and political commentaries of the 1920s and 30s, and within the growing anxiety over distraction as a modern phenomenon in the years leading up to World War II. As the poem’s speaker repeatedly pauses, falters, and recalibrates the spiritual journey, Eliot thinks through the terms under which distraction might prove inevitable to a rigorous spiritual practice, and where strict attention might be more warranted. Through this speaker who constantly must shift attention toward and away from certain prayers, petitions, and rituals in order to inch closer to the divine, Eliot not only anticipates the vision of the “distraction fit” of “The Dry Salvages,” but also unites the more dogmatic prose of his post-conversion writings with the more pluralistic visions of his poetry.