Four Quartets
Encyclopedia
Four Quartets is a set of four poems written by T. S. Eliot
that were published individually over a six-year period. The first poem, "Burnt Norton
", was written and published with a collection of his early works following the production of Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral
. After a few years, Eliot composed the other three poems, "East Coker
", "The Dry Salvages
", and "Little Gidding
", which were written during World War II
and the air-raids on Great Britain
. The poems were not collected until Eliot's New York publisher printed them together in 1943. They were first published as a series in Great Britain in 1944 towards the end of Eliot's poetic career.
Four Quartets are four interlinked meditations with the common theme being man's relationship with time, the universe, and the divine. In describing his understanding of the divine within the poems, Eliot blends his Anglo-Catholicsm with mystical, philosophical and poetic works from both Eastern and Western religious and cultural traditions, with references to the Bhagavad-Gita and the Pre-Socratics
as well as St. John of the Cross and Julian of Norwich
.
Although many critics find the Four Quartets to be Eliot's great last work, some of Eliot's contemporary critics, including George Orwell
, were dissatisfied with Eliot's overt religiosity. Later critics disagreed with Orwell's claims about the poems and argued instead that the religious themes made the poem stronger. Overall, reviews of the poem within Great Britain were favourable while reviews in the United States were split between those who liked Eliot's later style and others who felt he abandoned positive aspects of his earlier poetry.
. The resulting poem, "Burnt Norton", named after a manor house, was published in Eliot's 1936 edition of Collected Poems 1909–1935. Eliot decided to create another poem similar to "Burnt Norton" but with a different location in mind. This second poem, "East Coker", was finished and published by Easter 1940. (Eliot visited East Coker
in 1937 and his ashes now repose there at St. Michael's Church.)
As Eliot was finishing his second poem, World War II began to disrupt his life and he spent more time lecturing across Great Britain and helping out during the war when he could. It was during this time that Eliot began working on "The Dry Salvages", the third poem, which was put together near the end of 1940. This poem was published in February 1941 and Eliot immediately began to plot out his fourth poem, "Little Gidding". Eliot's health declined and he stayed in Shamley Green
to recuperate. His illness and the war disrupted his ability to write and he became dissatisfied with each draft. He believed that the problem with the poem was with himself and that he had started the poem too soon and written it too quickly. By September 1941, he stopped writing and focused on his lecturing. It was not until September 1942 that Eliot finished the last poem and it was finally published.
While writing "East Coker" Eliot thought of creating a "quartet" of poems that would reflect the idea of the four elements and, loosely, the four seasons. As the first four parts of The Waste Land has been associated with one of the four classical elements so has each of the constituent poems of Four Quartets: air
(BN,) earth
(EC,) water
(DS,) and fire
(LG.) However, there is little support for the poems matching with individual seasons. Eliot described what he meant by "quartet" in a 3 September 1942 letter to John Hayward
:
The Four Quartets was first published as a series in New York in 1943 and London in 1944. The original title was supposed to be the "Kensington Quartets" after his time in Kensington
. The poems were kept as a separate entity in the United States until they were collected in 1952 as Eliot's Complete Poems and Plays, and in the United Kingdom until 1963 as part of Eliot's Complete Poems 1909–62. The delay in collecting the Four Quartets with the rest of Eliot's poetry separated them from his other work, even though they were the result of a development from his earlier poems.
, in 1939, pushed Eliot further into the belief that there was something worth defending in society and that Germany had to be stopped. There is little mention of the war in Eliot's writing except in a few pieces, like "Defence of the Islands". The war became central to "Little Gidding" as Eliot adds in aspects of his own experience while serving as a watchman at the Faber
building during the London blitz. The Four Quartets were favored as giving hope during the war and also for a later religious revival movement. By Little Gidding, WWII is not just the present time but connected also to the English Civil War
.
According to C.K. Stead
, the structure is based on:
These points can be applied to the structure of The Waste Land, though there is not necessarily a fulfillment of these but merely a longing or discussion of them.
τοῦ λόγον δέ ἐόντος ξενοῦ ζώουσιν οἱ πολλοί
ὡς ἰδίαν ἔχοντες φρόνησιν
I. p. 77. Fr. 2.
ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή
I. p. 89 Fr. 60.
The first may be translated, "Though wisdom is common, the many live as if they have wisdom of their own"; the second, "the way upward and the way downward is one and the same."
The concept and origin of "Burnt Norton" is connected to Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral
, and was intended to be socially useful. The poem discusses the idea of time and the concept that only the present moment really matters, because the past cannot be changed and the future is unknown. There is an emphasis on order within the universe and a need to believe in the Logos. The poem ends with an argument that God is the only one truly able to exist outside of time and knows of all time and place, but man is still capable of redemption.
, though Eliot never accepted this interpretation. The poem focuses on life, death, and continuity between the two. Humans are seen as disorderly and science is viewed as unable to save mankind from its flaws. Instead, science and reason lead mankind to warfare, and humanity needs to become humble in order to escape the cycle of destruction. To be saved, people must recognize Christ as their savior as well as their need for redemption.
gave mankind hope that it will be able to escape. This hope is not part of the present. What we must do is understand the patterns found within the past in order to see that there is meaning to be found. This meaning allows one to experience eternity
through moments of revelation.
, Edgar Allan Poe
, Jonathan Swift
, and William Butler Yeats
.
Canto Three. When Eliot deals with the past in "The Dry Salvages", he emphasizes its importance in order to combat the influence of evolution as encouraging people to forget the past and care only about the present and the future. The present is capable of always reminding one of the past. These moments also rely on the idea of Krishna
in the Bhagavad-Gita that death can come at any moment, and that the divine will is more important than considering the future.
The Jesuit critic William F. Lynch, who believed that salvation happens within time and not outside of it, explained what Eliot was attempting to do in the Four Quartets when he wrote: "it is hard to say no to the impression, if I may use a mixture of my own symbols and his, that the Christian imagination is finally limited to the element of fire, to the day of Pentecost, to the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the disciples. The revelation of eternity and time is of an intersection ... It seems not unseemly to suppose that Eliot's imagination (and is this not a theology?) is alive with points of intersection and of descent." He continued with a focus on how time operated within the poem: "He seems to place our faith, our hope, and our love, not in the flux of time but in the points of time. I am sure his mind is interested in the line and time of Christ, whose Spirit is his total flux. But I am not so sure about his imagination. Is it or is it not an imagination which is saved from time's nausea or terror by points of intersection? ... There seems little doubt that Eliot is attracted above all by the image and the goal of immobility, and that in everything he seeks for approximations to this goal in the human order." Lynch went on to point out that this understanding of time includes Asian influences.
Throughout the poems, the end becomes the beginning and things constantly repeat. This use of circular time is similar to the way Dante uses time in his Divine Comedy – "Little Gidding" ends with a rose garden image that is the same as the garden beginning "Burnt Norton". The repetition of time affects memory and how one can travel through their own past in order to find permanency and the divine. Memory within the poem is similar to how St. Augustine
discussed it, in that memory allows one to understand words and life. The only way to discover eternity is through memory, understanding the past, and transcending beyond time. Likewise, in the Augustinian view that Eliot shares, timeless words are connected to Christ as the Logos
and how Christ calls upon mankind to join him in salvation.
Eliot focused on sounds or "auditory imagination", as he called it. He doesn't always keep to this device, especially when he is more concerned with thematic development. He did fix many of these passages in revision.
If "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
", "Gerontion
", The Waste Land
, and "The Hollow Men
" are Eliot's Inferno, Ash-Wednesday seems to be Purgatorio, and the Four Quartets seems to be Paradiso. The Four Quartets abandons time, as per Dante's conception of the Empyrean
, and allows for opposites to co-exist together. As such, people are able to experience God directly as long as they know that they cannot fully understand or comprehend him. Eliot tries to create a new system, according to Denis Donoghue
, in which he is able to describe a Christianity that is not restricted by previous views that have fallen out of favor in modern society or contradicted by science. Eliot reasoned that he is not supposed to preach a theological system as a poet, but expose the reader to the ideas of religion. As Eliot stated in 1947: "if we learn to read poetry properly, the poet never persuades us to believe anything" and "What we learn from Dante, or the Bhagavad-Gita, or any other religious poetry is what it feels like to believe that religion."
According to Russell Kirk
, "Nor is it possible to appreciate Eliot-whether or not one agrees with him-if one comes to Four Quartets with ideological blinders. Ideology, it must be remembered, is the attempt to supplant religious dogmas by political and scientistic dogmas. If one's first premise is that religion must be a snare and a delusion, for instance, then it follows that Eliot becomes an enemy to be assaulted, rather than a pilgrim whose journal one may admire-even if one does not believe in the goal of that quest."
. Eliot went so far as to mark where he alludes to Hindu stories in his editions of the Mahabharata by including a page added which compared battle scenes with "The Dry Salvages".
George Orwell
, a contemporary of Eliot and a fellow writer, believed just the opposite. He argued: "It is clear that something has departed, some kind of current has been switched off, the later verse does not contain the earlier, even if it is claimed as an improvement upon it [...] He does not really feel his faith, but merely assents to it for complex reasons. It does not in itself give him any fresh literary impulse." Orwell didn't trust Christianity in general. Years later, Russell Kirk
wrote, "I cannot agree with Orwell that Eliot gave no more than a melancholy assent to doctrines now quite unbelievable. Over the past quarter of a century, most serious critics—whether or not they find Christian faith impossible—have found in the Quartets the greatest twentieth-century achievements in the poetry of philosophy and religion." Like Orwell, Stead also noticed a difference between the Four Quartets and Eliot's earlier poetry, but he disagreed with Orwell's conclusion: "Four Quartets is an attempt to bring into a more exact balance the will and the creative imagination; it attempts to harness the creative imagination which in all Eliot's earlier poetry ran its own course, edited but not consciously directed. The achievement is of a high order, but the best qualities of Four Quartets are inevitably different from those of 'The Waste Land'.
Early American reviewers were divided on discussing the theological aspects of the Quartets. F. R. Leavis
, in Scrutiny (Summer 1942), analyzed the first three poems and discussed how the verse "makes its explorations into the concrete realities of experience below the conceptual currency" instead of their Christian themes. Muriel Bradbrook, in Theology (March 1943), did the opposite of F. R. Leavis and emphasized how Eliot captured Christian experience in general and how it relates to literature. D. W. Harding, in the Spring 1943 issue of Scrutiny discussed the Pentecostal image but would not discuss how it would relate to Eliot's Christianity. Although he appreciated Eliot's work, Paul Goodman believed that the despair found within the poem meant that Eliot could not be a Christian poet. John Fletcher felt that Eliot's understanding of salvation could not help the real world whereas Louis Untermeyer
believed that not everyone would understand the poems.
Many critics emphasized the importance of the religious themes. Vincent Bucklet stated that the Four Quartets "presuppose certain values as necessary for their very structure as poems yet devote that structure to questioning their meaning and relevance. The whole work is, in fact, the most authentic example I know in modern poetry of a satisfying religio-poetic meditation. We sense throughout it is not merely a building-up of an intricate poetic form on the foundation of experiences already over and done with, but a constant energy, an ever-present activity, of thinking and feeling." In his analysis of approaches regarding apocalypse and religious in British poetry, M H Abrams claimed, "Even after a quarter-century, T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets has not lost its status as a strikingly 'modern' poem; its evolving meditations, however, merely play complex variations upon the design and motifs of Romantic representation of the poets educational progress."
Late 20th century and early 21st century critics continued the religious emphasis. Craig Raine
pointed out: "Undeniably, Four Quartets has its faults—for instance, the elementary tautology
of 'anxious worried women' in section I of The Dry Salvages
. But the passages documenting in undeniable detail 'the moment in and out of time' are the most successful attempts at the mystical in poetry since Wordsworth's spots of time in The Prelude
—themselves a refiguration of the mystical." Michael Bell
argued for the universality within the poems religious dimension and claimed that the poems "were genuinely of their time in that, while speaking of religious faith, they did not assume it in the reader." John Cooper, in regard to the poem's place within the historical context of World War II, described the aspects of the series appeal: "Four Quartets spoke about the spirit in the midst of this new crisis and, not surprisingly, there were many readers who would not only allow the poem to carry them with it, but who also hungered for it."
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
that were published individually over a six-year period. The first poem, "Burnt Norton
Burnt Norton
"Burnt Norton" is the first poem of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets. He created it while working on his play Murder in the Cathedral and it was first published in his Collected Poems 1909–1935 . The poem's title refers to a Cotswolds manor house Eliot visited. The manor's garden served as an important...
", was written and published with a collection of his early works following the production of Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral
Murder in the Cathedral
Murder in the Cathedral is a verse drama by T. S. Eliot that portrays the assassination of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170, first performed in 1935...
. After a few years, Eliot composed the other three poems, "East Coker
East Coker (poem)
East Coker is the second poem of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets. It was started as a way for Eliot to get back into writing poetry and was modeled after Burnt Norton. It was finished during early 1940 and printed for the Easter edition of the 1940 New English Weekly...
", "The Dry Salvages
The Dry Salvages
"The Dry Salvages" is the third poem of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets and marks the beginning of when the series was consciously being formed as a set of four poems. It was written and published in 1941 during the air-raids on Great Britain, an event that threatened him while giving lectures in the...
", and "Little Gidding
Little Gidding (poem)
"Little Gidding" is the fourth and final poem of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, a series of poems that discuss time, perspective, humanity, and salvation. It was first published in September 1942 after being delayed for over a year because of the air-raids on Great Britain during World War II and...
", which were written during World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
and the air-raids on Great Britain
The Blitz
The Blitz was the sustained strategic bombing of Britain by Nazi Germany between 7 September 1940 and 10 May 1941, during the Second World War. The city of London was bombed by the Luftwaffe for 76 consecutive nights and many towns and cities across the country followed...
. The poems were not collected until Eliot's New York publisher printed them together in 1943. They were first published as a series in Great Britain in 1944 towards the end of Eliot's poetic career.
Four Quartets are four interlinked meditations with the common theme being man's relationship with time, the universe, and the divine. In describing his understanding of the divine within the poems, Eliot blends his Anglo-Catholicsm with mystical, philosophical and poetic works from both Eastern and Western religious and cultural traditions, with references to the Bhagavad-Gita and the Pre-Socratics
Pre-Socratic philosophy
Pre-Socratic philosophy is Greek philosophy before Socrates . In Classical antiquity, the Presocratic philosophers were called physiologoi...
as well as St. John of the Cross and Julian of Norwich
Julian of Norwich
Julian of Norwich is regarded as one of the most important English mystics. She is venerated in the Anglican and Lutheran churches, but has never been canonized, or officially beatified, by the Catholic Church, probably because so little is known of her life aside from her writings, including the...
.
Although many critics find the Four Quartets to be Eliot's great last work, some of Eliot's contemporary critics, including George Orwell
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair , better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist...
, were dissatisfied with Eliot's overt religiosity. Later critics disagreed with Orwell's claims about the poems and argued instead that the religious themes made the poem stronger. Overall, reviews of the poem within Great Britain were favourable while reviews in the United States were split between those who liked Eliot's later style and others who felt he abandoned positive aspects of his earlier poetry.
Background
While working on his play, Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot came up with the idea for a poem that was structured similarly to The Waste LandThe Waste Land
The Waste Land[A] is a 434-line[B] modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922. It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century." Despite the poem's obscurity—its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its...
. The resulting poem, "Burnt Norton", named after a manor house, was published in Eliot's 1936 edition of Collected Poems 1909–1935. Eliot decided to create another poem similar to "Burnt Norton" but with a different location in mind. This second poem, "East Coker", was finished and published by Easter 1940. (Eliot visited East Coker
East Coker
East Coker is a village and civil parish in the South Somerset district of Somerset, England. Its nearest town is Yeovil, which is situated two miles north from the village. The village has a population of 1,781...
in 1937 and his ashes now repose there at St. Michael's Church.)
As Eliot was finishing his second poem, World War II began to disrupt his life and he spent more time lecturing across Great Britain and helping out during the war when he could. It was during this time that Eliot began working on "The Dry Salvages", the third poem, which was put together near the end of 1940. This poem was published in February 1941 and Eliot immediately began to plot out his fourth poem, "Little Gidding". Eliot's health declined and he stayed in Shamley Green
Shamley Green
Shamley Green is a small village in the county of Surrey, England. Neighbouring villages include Wonersh, Chilworth, Farncombe and Bramley. Nearby railway stations include Chilworth railway station and Farncombe railway station . Although Shalford Station is in fact closer as the route to...
to recuperate. His illness and the war disrupted his ability to write and he became dissatisfied with each draft. He believed that the problem with the poem was with himself and that he had started the poem too soon and written it too quickly. By September 1941, he stopped writing and focused on his lecturing. It was not until September 1942 that Eliot finished the last poem and it was finally published.
While writing "East Coker" Eliot thought of creating a "quartet" of poems that would reflect the idea of the four elements and, loosely, the four seasons. As the first four parts of The Waste Land has been associated with one of the four classical elements so has each of the constituent poems of Four Quartets: air
Air (classical element)
Air is often seen as a universal power or pure substance. Its supposed fundamental importance to life can be seen in words such as aspire, inspire, perspire and spirit, all derived from the Latin spirare.-Greek and Roman tradition:...
(BN,) earth
Earth (classical element)
Earth, home and origin of humanity, has often been worshipped in its own right with its own unique spiritual tradition.-European tradition:Earth is one of the four classical elements in ancient Greek philosophy and science. It was commonly associated with qualities of heaviness, matter and the...
(EC,) water
Water (classical element)
Water is one of the elements in ancient Greek philosophy, in the Asian Indian system Panchamahabhuta, and in the Chinese cosmological and physiological system Wu Xing...
(DS,) and fire
Fire (classical element)
Fire has been an important part of all cultures and religions from pre-history to modern day and was vital to the development of civilization. It has been regarded in many different contexts throughout history, but especially as a metaphysical constant of the world.-Greek and Roman tradition:Fire...
(LG.) However, there is little support for the poems matching with individual seasons. Eliot described what he meant by "quartet" in a 3 September 1942 letter to John Hayward
John Davy Hayward
John Davy Hayward was an English editor, critic, anthologist and bibliophile.-Early life:Hayward was educated at Gresham's School and in France before going up to King's College, Cambridge in 1923 to read English and modern languages...
:
...these poems are all in a particular set form which I have elaborated, and the word "quartet" does seem to me to start people on the right tack for understanding them ("sonata" in any case is too musical). It suggests to me the notion of making a poem by weaving in together three or four superficially unrelated themes: the "poem" being the degree of success in making a new whole out of them.
The Four Quartets was first published as a series in New York in 1943 and London in 1944. The original title was supposed to be the "Kensington Quartets" after his time in Kensington
Kensington
Kensington is a district of west and central London, England within the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. An affluent and densely-populated area, its commercial heart is Kensington High Street, and it contains the well-known museum district of South Kensington.To the north, Kensington is...
. The poems were kept as a separate entity in the United States until they were collected in 1952 as Eliot's Complete Poems and Plays, and in the United Kingdom until 1963 as part of Eliot's Complete Poems 1909–62. The delay in collecting the Four Quartets with the rest of Eliot's poetry separated them from his other work, even though they were the result of a development from his earlier poems.
World War II
The outbreak of World War IIWorld War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, in 1939, pushed Eliot further into the belief that there was something worth defending in society and that Germany had to be stopped. There is little mention of the war in Eliot's writing except in a few pieces, like "Defence of the Islands". The war became central to "Little Gidding" as Eliot adds in aspects of his own experience while serving as a watchman at the Faber
Faber and Faber
Faber and Faber Limited, often abbreviated to Faber, is an independent publishing house in the UK, notable in particular for publishing a great deal of poetry and for its former editor T. S. Eliot. Faber has a rich tradition of publishing a wide range of fiction, non fiction, drama, film and music...
building during the London blitz. The Four Quartets were favored as giving hope during the war and also for a later religious revival movement. By Little Gidding, WWII is not just the present time but connected also to the English Civil War
English Civil War
The English Civil War was a series of armed conflicts and political machinations between Parliamentarians and Royalists...
.
Poems
Each poem has five sections. The later poems connect to the earlier sections with "Little Gidding" synthesizing the themes of the earlier poems within its sections. Within Eliot's own poetry, the five sections connect to The Waste Land. This allowed Eliot to structure his larger poems, which he had difficulty with.According to C.K. Stead
C. K. Stead
Christian Karlson Stead, ONZ, CBE is a New Zealand writer whose works include novels, poetry, short stories, and literary criticism....
, the structure is based on:
1. The movement of time, in which brief moments of eternity are caught.
2. Worldly experience, leading on to dissatisfaction.
3. Purgation in the world, divesting the soul of the love of created things.
4. A lyric prayer for, or affirmation of the need of, IntercessionIntercessionIntercession is the act of interceding between two parties. In both Christian and Islamic religious usage, it is a prayer to God on behalf of others....
.
5. The problems of attaining artistic wholeness which becomes analogue for, and merge into, the problems of achieving spiritual health.
These points can be applied to the structure of The Waste Land, though there is not necessarily a fulfillment of these but merely a longing or discussion of them.
Burnt Norton
The poem begins with two epigraphs taken from the fragments of Heraclitus:τοῦ λόγον δέ ἐόντος ξενοῦ ζώουσιν οἱ πολλοί
ὡς ἰδίαν ἔχοντες φρόνησιν
I. p. 77. Fr. 2.
ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή
I. p. 89 Fr. 60.
The first may be translated, "Though wisdom is common, the many live as if they have wisdom of their own"; the second, "the way upward and the way downward is one and the same."
The concept and origin of "Burnt Norton" is connected to Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral
Murder in the Cathedral
Murder in the Cathedral is a verse drama by T. S. Eliot that portrays the assassination of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170, first performed in 1935...
, and was intended to be socially useful. The poem discusses the idea of time and the concept that only the present moment really matters, because the past cannot be changed and the future is unknown. There is an emphasis on order within the universe and a need to believe in the Logos. The poem ends with an argument that God is the only one truly able to exist outside of time and knows of all time and place, but man is still capable of redemption.
East Coker
Eliot started writing "East Coker" in 1939, and modeled the poem after "Burnt Norton" as a way to focus his thoughts. The poem served as a sort of opposite to the popular idea that The Waste Land served as an expression of disillusionment after World War IWorld War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
, though Eliot never accepted this interpretation. The poem focuses on life, death, and continuity between the two. Humans are seen as disorderly and science is viewed as unable to save mankind from its flaws. Instead, science and reason lead mankind to warfare, and humanity needs to become humble in order to escape the cycle of destruction. To be saved, people must recognize Christ as their savior as well as their need for redemption.
The Dry Salvages
Eliot began writing "The Dry Salvages" at the end of 1940 during air-raids on London, and managed to finish the poem quickly. The poem included many personal images connecting to Eliot's childhood, and emphasized the image of water and sailing as a metaphor for humanity. According to the poem, there is a connection to all of mankind within each man. If we just accept drifting upon the sea, then we will end up broken upon rocks. We are restrained by time, but the AnnunciationAnnunciation
The Annunciation, also referred to as the Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin Mary or Annunciation of the Lord, is the Christian celebration of the announcement by the angel Gabriel to Virgin Mary, that she would conceive and become the mother of Jesus the Son of God. Gabriel told Mary to name her...
gave mankind hope that it will be able to escape. This hope is not part of the present. What we must do is understand the patterns found within the past in order to see that there is meaning to be found. This meaning allows one to experience eternity
Eternity
While in the popular mind, eternity often simply means existence for a limitless amount of time, many have used it to refer to a timeless existence altogether outside time. By contrast, infinite temporal existence is then called sempiternity. Something eternal exists outside time; by contrast,...
through moments of revelation.
Little Gidding
"Little Gidding" was started after "The Dry Salvages" but was delayed because of Eliot's declining health and his dissatisfaction with early drafts of the poem. Eliot was unable to finish the poem until September 1942. Like the three previous poems of the Four Quartets, the central theme is time and humanity's place within it. Each generation is seemingly united and the poem describes a unification within Western civilization. When discussing World War II, the poem states that humanity is given a choice between the bombing of London or the Holy Spirit. God's love allows mankind to redeem themselves and escape the living hell through purgation by fire. The end of the poem describes how Eliot has attempted to help the world as a poet, and he parallels his work in language with working on the soul or working on society.Themes
Eliot believed that even if a poem can mean different things to each reader, the "absolute" meaning of the poem needs to be discovered. The central meaning of the Four Quartets is to connect to European literary tradition in addition to its Christian themes. It also seeks to unite with European literature to form a unity, especially in Eliot's creation of a "familiar compound ghost" who is supposed to connect to those like Stéphane MallarméStéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...
, Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
, Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift was an Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer , poet and cleric who became Dean of St...
, and William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms...
.
Time
Time is viewed as unredeemable and problematic, whereas eternity is beautiful and true. Living under time's influence is a problem. Within "Burnt Norton" section 3, people trapped in time are similar to those stuck in between life and death in InfernoInferno (Dante)
Inferno is the first part of Dante Alighieri's 14th-century epic poem Divine Comedy. It is followed by Purgatorio and Paradiso. It is an allegory telling of the journey of Dante through what is largely the medieval concept of Hell, guided by the Roman poet Virgil. In the poem, Hell is depicted as...
Canto Three. When Eliot deals with the past in "The Dry Salvages", he emphasizes its importance in order to combat the influence of evolution as encouraging people to forget the past and care only about the present and the future. The present is capable of always reminding one of the past. These moments also rely on the idea of Krishna
Krishna
Krishna is a central figure of Hinduism and is traditionally attributed the authorship of the Bhagavad Gita. He is the supreme Being and considered in some monotheistic traditions as an Avatar of Vishnu...
in the Bhagavad-Gita that death can come at any moment, and that the divine will is more important than considering the future.
The Jesuit critic William F. Lynch, who believed that salvation happens within time and not outside of it, explained what Eliot was attempting to do in the Four Quartets when he wrote: "it is hard to say no to the impression, if I may use a mixture of my own symbols and his, that the Christian imagination is finally limited to the element of fire, to the day of Pentecost, to the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the disciples. The revelation of eternity and time is of an intersection ... It seems not unseemly to suppose that Eliot's imagination (and is this not a theology?) is alive with points of intersection and of descent." He continued with a focus on how time operated within the poem: "He seems to place our faith, our hope, and our love, not in the flux of time but in the points of time. I am sure his mind is interested in the line and time of Christ, whose Spirit is his total flux. But I am not so sure about his imagination. Is it or is it not an imagination which is saved from time's nausea or terror by points of intersection? ... There seems little doubt that Eliot is attracted above all by the image and the goal of immobility, and that in everything he seeks for approximations to this goal in the human order." Lynch went on to point out that this understanding of time includes Asian influences.
Throughout the poems, the end becomes the beginning and things constantly repeat. This use of circular time is similar to the way Dante uses time in his Divine Comedy – "Little Gidding" ends with a rose garden image that is the same as the garden beginning "Burnt Norton". The repetition of time affects memory and how one can travel through their own past in order to find permanency and the divine. Memory within the poem is similar to how St. Augustine
St. Augustine
-People:* Augustine of Hippo or Augustine of Hippo , father of the Latin church* Augustine of Canterbury , first Archbishop of Canterbury* Augustine Webster, an English Catholic martyr.-Places:*St. Augustine, Florida, United States...
discussed it, in that memory allows one to understand words and life. The only way to discover eternity is through memory, understanding the past, and transcending beyond time. Likewise, in the Augustinian view that Eliot shares, timeless words are connected to Christ as the Logos
Logos
' is an important term in philosophy, psychology, rhetoric and religion. Originally a word meaning "a ground", "a plea", "an opinion", "an expectation", "word," "speech," "account," "reason," it became a technical term in philosophy, beginning with Heraclitus ' is an important term in...
and how Christ calls upon mankind to join him in salvation.
Music
The title Four Quartets connects to music, which appears also in Eliot's poems "Preludes," "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" and "A Song for Simeon" along with a 1942 lecture called "The Music of Poetry". Some critics have suggested that there were various classical works that Eliot focused on while writing the pieces. In particular, within literary criticism there is an emphasis on Beethoven serving as a model, although these claims rarely pan out. The purpose of the quartet was to have multiple themes that intertwined with each other. Each section, as in the musical image, would be distinct even though they share the same performance. East Coker and The Dry Salvages are written in such a way as to make the poems continuous and create a "double-quartet".Eliot focused on sounds or "auditory imagination", as he called it. He doesn't always keep to this device, especially when he is more concerned with thematic development. He did fix many of these passages in revision.
Dante and Christianity
To give a sense of what Eliot is doing in terms of Christian imagery and his understanding of the universe, critics tend to compare Eliot to Yeats. Yeats believed that we live in a cyclical type of world, saying, "If it be true that God is a circle whose centre is everywhere, the saint goes to the centre, the poet and the artist to the ring where everything comes round again." Eliot believed that such a system is stuck within time. Eliot was influenced by Yeats's reading of Dante. This appears in Eliot's "Ash-Wednesday" by changing Yeats's "desire for absolution" away from a humanistic approach. When Eliot wrote about personal topics, he tended to use Dante as a reference point. He also relied on Dante's imagery: the idea of the "refining fire" in the Four Quartets and in The Waste Land comes from Purgatorio and the celestial rose and fire imagery of Paradiso makes its way into the series.If "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, commonly known as Prufrock, is a poem by T. S. Eliot, begun in February 1910 and published in Chicago in June 1915. Described as a "drama of literary anguish," it presents a stream of consciousness in the form of a dramatic monologue, and marked the beginning of...
", "Gerontion
Gerontion
"Gerontion" is a poem by T. S. Eliot that was first published in 1920. The work relates the opinions and impressions of a gerontic, or elderly man, through a dramatic monologue which describes Europe after World War I through the eyes of a man who has lived the majority of his life in the 19th...
", The Waste Land
The Waste Land
The Waste Land[A] is a 434-line[B] modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922. It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century." Despite the poem's obscurity—its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its...
, and "The Hollow Men
The Hollow Men
The Hollow Men is a major poem by T. S. Eliot. Its themes are, like many of Eliot's poems, overlapping and fragmentary, but it is recognised to be concerned most with post-World War I Europe under the Treaty of Versailles , the difficulty of hope and religious conversion, and, as some critics...
" are Eliot's Inferno, Ash-Wednesday seems to be Purgatorio, and the Four Quartets seems to be Paradiso. The Four Quartets abandons time, as per Dante's conception of the Empyrean
Empyrean
Empyrean, from the Medieval Latin empyreus, an adaptation of the Ancient Greek ἔμπυρος empyrus "in or on the fire ", properly Empyrean Heaven, is the place in the highest heaven, which in ancient cosmologies was supposed to be occupied by the element of fire .-Use in literature:The Empyrean was...
, and allows for opposites to co-exist together. As such, people are able to experience God directly as long as they know that they cannot fully understand or comprehend him. Eliot tries to create a new system, according to Denis Donoghue
Denis Donoghue
Denis Donoghue is an Irish literary critic. He is currently the Henry James Chair of English and American Letters at New York University....
, in which he is able to describe a Christianity that is not restricted by previous views that have fallen out of favor in modern society or contradicted by science. Eliot reasoned that he is not supposed to preach a theological system as a poet, but expose the reader to the ideas of religion. As Eliot stated in 1947: "if we learn to read poetry properly, the poet never persuades us to believe anything" and "What we learn from Dante, or the Bhagavad-Gita, or any other religious poetry is what it feels like to believe that religion."
According to Russell Kirk
Russell Kirk
Russell Kirk was an American political theorist, moralist, historian, social critic, literary critic, and fiction author known for his influence on 20th century American conservatism. His 1953 book, The Conservative Mind, gave shape to the amorphous post–World War II conservative movement...
, "Nor is it possible to appreciate Eliot-whether or not one agrees with him-if one comes to Four Quartets with ideological blinders. Ideology, it must be remembered, is the attempt to supplant religious dogmas by political and scientistic dogmas. If one's first premise is that religion must be a snare and a delusion, for instance, then it follows that Eliot becomes an enemy to be assaulted, rather than a pilgrim whose journal one may admire-even if one does not believe in the goal of that quest."
Krishna
Eliot's poetry is filled with religious images beyond those common to Christianity: the Four Quartets brings in Hindu stories with a particular emphasis on the Bhagavad-Gita of the MahabharataMahabharata
The Mahabharata is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India and Nepal, the other being the Ramayana. The epic is part of itihasa....
. Eliot went so far as to mark where he alludes to Hindu stories in his editions of the Mahabharata by including a page added which compared battle scenes with "The Dry Salvages".
Critical responses
Reviews were favourable for each poem. The completed set received divided reviews in the United States while it was received overall favourably by the British. The American critics liked the poetry but many did not appreciate the religious content of the work or that Eliot abandoned philosophical aspects of his earlier poetry. The British response was connected to Eliot's nationalistic spirit, and the work was received as a series of poems intended to help the nation during difficult times. Santwana Haldar went so far as to assert that the "Four Quartets has been universally appreciated as the crown of Eliot's achievement in religious poetry, one that appeals to all including those who do not share Orthodox Christian creed."George Orwell
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair , better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist...
, a contemporary of Eliot and a fellow writer, believed just the opposite. He argued: "It is clear that something has departed, some kind of current has been switched off, the later verse does not contain the earlier, even if it is claimed as an improvement upon it [...] He does not really feel his faith, but merely assents to it for complex reasons. It does not in itself give him any fresh literary impulse." Orwell didn't trust Christianity in general. Years later, Russell Kirk
Russell Kirk
Russell Kirk was an American political theorist, moralist, historian, social critic, literary critic, and fiction author known for his influence on 20th century American conservatism. His 1953 book, The Conservative Mind, gave shape to the amorphous post–World War II conservative movement...
wrote, "I cannot agree with Orwell that Eliot gave no more than a melancholy assent to doctrines now quite unbelievable. Over the past quarter of a century, most serious critics—whether or not they find Christian faith impossible—have found in the Quartets the greatest twentieth-century achievements in the poetry of philosophy and religion." Like Orwell, Stead also noticed a difference between the Four Quartets and Eliot's earlier poetry, but he disagreed with Orwell's conclusion: "Four Quartets is an attempt to bring into a more exact balance the will and the creative imagination; it attempts to harness the creative imagination which in all Eliot's earlier poetry ran its own course, edited but not consciously directed. The achievement is of a high order, but the best qualities of Four Quartets are inevitably different from those of 'The Waste Land'.
Early American reviewers were divided on discussing the theological aspects of the Quartets. F. R. Leavis
F. R. Leavis
Frank Raymond "F. R." Leavis CH was an influential British literary critic of the early-to-mid-twentieth century. He taught for nearly his entire career at Downing College, Cambridge.-Early life:...
, in Scrutiny (Summer 1942), analyzed the first three poems and discussed how the verse "makes its explorations into the concrete realities of experience below the conceptual currency" instead of their Christian themes. Muriel Bradbrook, in Theology (March 1943), did the opposite of F. R. Leavis and emphasized how Eliot captured Christian experience in general and how it relates to literature. D. W. Harding, in the Spring 1943 issue of Scrutiny discussed the Pentecostal image but would not discuss how it would relate to Eliot's Christianity. Although he appreciated Eliot's work, Paul Goodman believed that the despair found within the poem meant that Eliot could not be a Christian poet. John Fletcher felt that Eliot's understanding of salvation could not help the real world whereas Louis Untermeyer
Louis Untermeyer
Louis Untermeyer was an American poet, anthologist, critic, and editor. He was appointed the fourteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1961.-Life and career:...
believed that not everyone would understand the poems.
Many critics emphasized the importance of the religious themes. Vincent Bucklet stated that the Four Quartets "presuppose certain values as necessary for their very structure as poems yet devote that structure to questioning their meaning and relevance. The whole work is, in fact, the most authentic example I know in modern poetry of a satisfying religio-poetic meditation. We sense throughout it is not merely a building-up of an intricate poetic form on the foundation of experiences already over and done with, but a constant energy, an ever-present activity, of thinking and feeling." In his analysis of approaches regarding apocalypse and religious in British poetry, M H Abrams claimed, "Even after a quarter-century, T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets has not lost its status as a strikingly 'modern' poem; its evolving meditations, however, merely play complex variations upon the design and motifs of Romantic representation of the poets educational progress."
Late 20th century and early 21st century critics continued the religious emphasis. Craig Raine
Craig Raine
Craig Raine is an English poet and critic born in Bishop Auckland, County Durham, England. Along with Christopher Reid, he is the best-known exponent of Martian poetry.-Life:...
pointed out: "Undeniably, Four Quartets has its faults—for instance, the elementary tautology
Tautology (rhetoric)
Tautology is an unnecessary or unessential repetition of meaning, using different and dissimilar words that effectively say the same thing...
of 'anxious worried women' in section I of The Dry Salvages
The Dry Salvages
"The Dry Salvages" is the third poem of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets and marks the beginning of when the series was consciously being formed as a set of four poems. It was written and published in 1941 during the air-raids on Great Britain, an event that threatened him while giving lectures in the...
. But the passages documenting in undeniable detail 'the moment in and out of time' are the most successful attempts at the mystical in poetry since Wordsworth's spots of time in The Prelude
The Prelude
The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet's Mind is an autobiographical, "philosophical" poem in blank verse by the English poet William Wordsworth. Wordsworth wrote the first version of the poem when he was 28, and worked over the rest of it for his long life without publishing it...
—themselves a refiguration of the mystical." Michael Bell
Michael Bell
Michael Patrick Bell is an American actor and voice actor. He is most commonly credited in video games, animated movies, and television series.-1970s and 1980s voice work:Bell is a mainstay of 1970s and 1980s animation...
argued for the universality within the poems religious dimension and claimed that the poems "were genuinely of their time in that, while speaking of religious faith, they did not assume it in the reader." John Cooper, in regard to the poem's place within the historical context of World War II, described the aspects of the series appeal: "Four Quartets spoke about the spirit in the midst of this new crisis and, not surprisingly, there were many readers who would not only allow the poem to carry them with it, but who also hungered for it."