T. D. Peter

About the Author: Dr Tharappel Devasia Peter (1958-) is a civil servant by profession. His research interests include English poetry and literature, philosophy, religion, spirituality, and yoga. His first book, LIVING IN DEATH (a comparative critique on the death poetry of Emily Dickinson and T S Eliot), was published in 2013 by PARTRIDGE, a Penguin Company.

The uncertainty of one’s life and the inevitability of death is a dilemma that has tormented the minds of men and women in all ages. One way of resolving the conundrum has been to imagine, if not firmly believe, that the individual self is immortal and deathless, notwithstanding the fact that the physical body must perish and be gone. If nothing, it weans one away from the fear of death towards an earnest hope in a blissful afterlife.

LIVING IN DEATH is a scholarly critique on the death poetry of Emily Dickinson and T.S. Eliot, two signature poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—the former an inimitable and indwelling poetic genius who defies classification and transcends time and trends; the latter a trail-blazing and celebrated scion of modern classical poetry who impresses with his erudition and edification, imagism and symbolism. By deftly comparing their styles, diction, and motifs, the author unravels the beauty of contemplating and courting the compelling presence of Death as an ontological reality. He finds more by way of contrast than similarity, owing significantly to the strikingly opposite life patterns and predilections of the poets, and no less to their varying allegiance to faith and reason, religion and spirituality.

INTIMATIONS OF EXISTENTIAL ANGST IN EMILY DICKINSON (2022, KDP):

Existential angst underlines the fabric of life and death, the warp and woof of manifested being. Emily Dickinson is an acknowledged master of ontological analysis through poetry with a signature focus on Death as the primary personification: be it as a romantic knight taking her lady out for a ride into eternity; a loving Father; or a miserly banker. Modern philosophers have looked at life more as a meaningless charade, full of “sound and fury” than as a structured and purposeful phenomenon that can claim a lasting existence. The author plumbs the depths of this existential angst on the wings of the inimitable and deathless poetry of Dickinson.