... that the cynic and lyric met for Douglas as two forms of special knowing, the “combat gnosticism” of war poetry, and a parallel gnosticism in love lyric. Each proposes that a special experience can utterly transform a subject: the soldier’s kind of knowing transformed by battle experience, and the lover’s...

... : Indiana University Press . Butler Judith . 2004 . Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence . London : Verso . Butler Judith . 2010 . Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London : Verso . Campbell James . 1999 . “ Combat Gnosticism: The Ideology of First...

..., as Oser indicates, of a “gnostic remove[d] from moral life” (123). It is true that The Waste Land predates by five years Eliot’s formal conversion to Christianity, and Oser identi- fies the Eliot of this poem as “a Christian skeptic” (83). But it seems to me unmistakable that the Eliot of The Waste...