Since the Bible and T. S. Eliot's poetry are highly verbal texts, both manifest the intertextual effects of rhetoric which unify sound and sense. The various rhetorical patterns and devices of the Bible play the crucial role of creating mystic experience in Eliot's poetry. While the Bible used authentic oration of primary rhetoric and secondary rhetoric to create divine experience, Eliot poeticized mainly secondary rhetoric to recreate mystic experience. As Greek oratory rhetoricians deliberately used art as an argument from probability to maximize aesthetic experience beyond human reason since the 5th century BC, Eliot employed synthetic rhetoric which he was preconceptualized by the Bible for artistic experience. In this sense, C. S. Lewis and Eliot resisted the rational literary study of the Bible because the Bible required the religious experience. Therefore, just as the Bible needs creative readers, Eliot's poetry requires creative readers because his poetry is an expressive tool. Rhetorical and figurative devices of the Bible influenced the poetics of Eliot in that biblical allusion, symmetry, parallelism, antithesis, chiasmus, authority, mysticism, homily exegesis, typology, and paradox were consistently used by the poet from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" through Four Quartets. In particular, Eliot's "Four Quartets" is full of these rhetorical patterns and devices of the Bible which include redemption, atonement, and incarnation. In the poem, Eliot used this biblical pattern of Christ's incarnation which united antithetical forces of the physical and the spiritual, in time and out of time, possibility and impossibility, mortality and immortality, death and life, moment and eternity, coldness and hotness, and stillness and movement. Since Eliot used biblical myth, parable, allusion, and reference in his poems, his poetry became self-consuming, timeless, open, and prophetic as the Bible did. He poeticized his text to maximize the mystic experience of multiple meanings by using biblical rhetoric. Therefore, the biblical rhetoric furnishes the important role of promoting the divine novelty in Eliot's artistic poetry and strengthening the assertion of authority for the total mystic experience.

• Han-Mook Lee(Myongji University)