Four Quartets
Four Quartets represents the culmination of Eliot’s career as both a modernist and a Christian poet; he completes the spiritual quest that has been apparent in his work since his first published poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The conclusion of this quest is in what Eliot calls “the timeless moment,” those points in life where the eternal and the temporal intersect, making meaning possible in an otherwise trivial world.
Eliot explores these timeless moments in four specific settings that have significance in his own life, three in England and one in New England. Among the themes common to the quartets is the need for escape from the tyranny of self and from the emptiness of a distracted and distracting world. Another, explored in the same section of each quartet, is the questionable ability of language, specifically poetry, to serve as a vehicle for meaning.
Eliot finds ultimate meaning in an emptying of self that makes possible recognition of a truer self in union with God, “the still point of the turning world.” He seeks this union in the concreteness of his own life, realizing at last the optimism at the heart of faith--that, despite appearances, “All shall be well.”
This work typifies Eliot’s later style--it is more personal, symbolist, and philosophical than the poems that made him famous. It shows an Eliot who, while still struggling, has reached a new level of peace and acceptance. For some, Four Quartets represents a falling off from Eliot’s early greatness; for others, it is his best poetry and one of the landmarks of religious, philosophical poetry in the English language.
Bibliography:
Gardner, Helen Louise. The Art of T. S. Eliot. London: Cresset Press, 1949. A skillful and informative analysis of the poetry and verse dramas of Eliot. The chapter treating the Four Quartets offers a helpful interpretation of the poem as a musical work.
Gardner, Helen Louise. The Composition of “Four Quartets.” New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Easily one of the best critics of Eliot’s poetry, Gardner employs her ample resources in examining his process of composition. Gardner’s work is a helpful summary of primary documents and includes many notes on versions of the text.
Lobb, Edward, ed. Words in Time: New Essays on Eliot’s “Four Quartets.” Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. A fine collection of ten essays by authors such as Denis Donoghue, Lyndall Gordon, and Louis L. Martz, which expands the discussion of Eliot’s Four Quartets. Useful for new readers and scholars alike.
Smith, Grover Cleveland. T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. A detailed and probing exploration of Eliot’s clever use of allusions and quotations to express his spiritual and philosophical concerns. This book remains a standard critical work on Eliot’s poetry, a good sourcebook for scholars.
Traversi, Derek Antona. T. S. Eliot: The Longer Poems: “The Waste Land,” “Ash Wednesday,” “Four Quartets.” London: Bodley Head, 1976. A scholarly, objective analysis of the Four Quartets. Traversi sees Eliot’s poetry as a continuous whole and offers a detailed study of these poems on their own terms rather than primarily as expressions of a given ideology, Christian or otherwise.
Places Discussed
*Burnt Norton
*Burnt Norton. English country house in Ebrington, that T. S. Eliot once visited. His 178-line philosophical poem about the nature of reality and time begins and ends with references to the house’s gardens. The speaker suggests an edenic world of innocence and timelessness when he imagines walking through the door that opens into the rose garden,...
(This entire section contains 570 words.)
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following the elusive voices of the hiding/playing children echoing in memory there, and following tentatively those sounds. But this “first world” is hardly a lush verdant place teeming with life and simple beauty; rather, the speaker takes readers into an empty alley, to look down into a “drained pool.” The dry concrete pool, stands for the illusiveness of time and meaning. In fact, the lack of extensive specific description of place in the poem is a deliberate teasing about the tangible boundaries of the physical world, underscored by the haunting suggestion that humans cannot bear much reality.
*East Coker
*East Coker. English village in Somersetshire where Eliot’s ancestors originated and where Eliot himself is buried. Again, the specific place is valued only because it stands for a general, universal process of dying and regeneration. This poem is about the idea of origin and destination and ironic redemption. A key to understanding Eliot’s detachment from actual place is seeing the essentially paradoxical nature of place: “where you are is where you are not.” For Eliot, setting is essentially metaphysical, a part of a moral endeavor. That moral process values the dissociation from place; he favors union not with place but with state of being. Eliot’s inclination is to escape the world’s increasing strangeness through love. Time and place decline in importance so love can increase.
*Dry Salvages
*Dry Salvages. Group of rocks, with a beacon, off the coast of Cape Anne, Massachusetts. This third part of Four Quartets relies on water symbolism and the play between relative stability of rock or earth and changeability of sea as they relate to the themes of variation and timelessness. The only American place in the “Quartets,” the Dry Salvages is paradoxically both a place symbolic of guidance and a place of wreckage, a place of concealment and of revelation. As with the other places mentioned in Four Quartets, the Dry Salvages is important as a metaphoric backdrop for a philosophical or moral process: the ways time and experience wash over human beings, the ways moments or occurrences guide people by being monuments or beacons. The refrain of the poem, “fare forward voyagers,” suggests the sea as the place for travel; however, the course covered by travel is not as important to Eliot as the process itself of faring. Similarly, the experience of place is valuable only as a prompt toward meaning.
*Little Gidding
*Little Gidding. Religious community established in England’s Huntingdonshire by Nicholas Ferrar in 1625. This culminating quartet implies the value of creating a religious community in times of political and religious upheaval. Like the other quartets, it is essentially a call for exploration: Besides exploring time and place, this poem suggests that the power of immediate love for one’s own fields develops into the extended love of country. Despite this attachment to field and land, for Eliot all spirits are “unappeased and peregrin”; human beings are all between oppositional worlds, worlds that can be variously conceived as time and place, immediacy and generality, or earth and heaven.
