Word: grail
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Dear me!" exclaims the archdeacon, and well he may. He has just been informed that the Holy Grail, the very chalice from which Christ drank at the Last Supper, sits at that very moment in his own parish church at Fardles. The archdeacon rushes home and hides the battered old cup in a cupboard, but almost before he can say Sanctus he is conked cold, and the Grail is hijacked by one of the Devil's disciples...
Before the Grail is restored to its keeper, the Prester John of early Christian lore, the reader sees murder done and a black mass sung, right in broad British daylight. In short, he enters the other world of Charles Williams (TIME, Nov. 8 et seq.), the English religious mystic who toward the end of his life (1945) set on paper a series of modern visions which he called novels (All Hallows' Eve, Descent into Hell...
...richly and fearfully storied past; he had taken the way that only the greatest modern men of letters-Joyce, Mann,, Eliot-have been able to take without being engulfed, into the mystery of the long ago that becomes myth. Though he took his humor and toughness with him, his Grail-poem, "Directive" (1947), has a sorrowful magic like nothing he had written before. If this was the old man's intolerable touch of poetry, A Masque of Reason (1945) and A Masque of Mercy (1947) carried on his vein...
...Waste Land was not mere poetic journalism. Eliot found the world in bits & pieces, reported it in snips & snatches of allusions to the Grail legend, to Frazer's Golden Bough, to Hindu philosophy. At the end, he says: "These fragments I have shored against my ruins." The shoring was not shoveling; it was the orderly construction of a mosaic. His purpose was not merely to describe disorder and frustration, but to contrast it with the possibility of a return to order and fulfillment...
...group of graduate and undergraduates--anonymous in fear of the aftermath has banded together to put out "Irregularly" a magazine to be known as The Unholy Grail. They promise to print University literature which finds no takers elsewhere...