"All Aboard for Natchez, Cairo, and St. Louis": Minstrelsy and Conversion in T.S. Eliot's Ash-Wednesday

Abstract:An important inspiration for T.S. Eliot's Ash-Wednesday is the minstrel comedy of The Two Black Crows. Both puzzling and obscure, this inspiration has not yet received the critical attention it deserves. By reading Eliot's interest in minstrel comedy alongside his concurrent religious conversion and change of citizenship, a fuller understanding of the poet's attempt to transform earlier influences into a new, Christian identity can emerge. In this way, minstrelsy proves to be an essential source of inspiration for both his early, pre-conversion writing, as others have shown, as well as for his later work as a conservative polemicist and religious poet.