Word: tempters
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...TEMPTER (225 pp.) - Anthony Bloomfield-Scribner...
...Samson? The bookseller shrouds himself in dialectic and mockery. He rails against society, and conjectures with an unreadable expression that in the "groans of disgust or cynical obscenities" uttered by buyers of his pornography, "one can hear the cry of man seeking a lost paradise." Does the Tempter hope to ensnare man or set him free...
Becket's acceptance of martyrdom is the purest spiritual achievement in Eliot's play. He transcends even the temptation of becoming a martyr so that he may be worshipped. Corum has destroyed Eliot's clear position. He has decided to return the four tempters to stage as the knights who murder the archbishop, and the tempter who offered Becket immortality through martyrdom asks, after the death, whether Becket did not will himself to be killed. For Eliot this was a rhetorical question, answered in the cool detachment of Becket's final lines, and by the contrast between Becket...
...Western world of our day," says Toynbee, "the tempter's role is being played by everything we sum up under the name of Madison Avenue. A considerable part of our ability, energy, time and material resources is being spent today on inducing us to ... find the money for buying material goods that we should never have dreamed of wanting had we been left to ourselves...
...procuresses, chunky peasants with symbolical wraiths, tavern songs and unearthly choruses, the kind of poem that gave Schubert Gretchen's spinning song, the kind of dialectic that prefigures Shaw's "Scene in Hell." It is among all this that Goethe propels his chief characters, Faust and his tempter-companion Mephistopheles, and that Goethe contrives his only real story, of Faust and the young Gretchen, whose seduction leads to madness and death. The Faustian quest makes for a whole kaleidoscope of moods, a whole panorama of settings. To the English-speaking world, Faust is best known, outside opera...