Side by side: T. S. Eliot's 'Four Quartets'

Four Quartets, first published in full in 1943, is generally considered to be Thomas Stearns Eliot’s last great work and instrumental in his receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948 (although surely we must also recognise the timeless power of Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats). Four Quartets consists of four long poems, each in five unnamed sections, which were first published individually: Burnt Norton (1936), East Coker (1940), The Dry Salvages (1941) and Little Gidding (1942). Here is what Jeremy and Daniela think of it:

Daniela

It is difficult for me to write a piece like this because, when I like poems, the quality that makes me like them is not easy to define. It is a feeling rather than an opinion. I do not read a lot of poetry, though more than the average person, and I certainly do not like everything I read. So, when it comes to poems I love, I can easily list them. The common denominator is not a style or a period or even a poet. It is that same feeling, of transcending across planes of human experience. 

After completing a Masters of Philosophy, T.S. Eliot supposedly considered his work in philosophy done as he transitioned to poetry. However, Four Quartets is a poem which attempts to do the work of philosophy by way of poetic language. It is utilitarian but also something more.

Four Quartets is a poem to let wash over you.

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now.

It is a poem to read aloud and let resonate in a high-ceilinged room. It is a work of aesthetic.

Eliot uses Four Quartets to work through his philosophical understanding of time. It is an exercise rather than a statement. And, as such, something is lost in its analysis. The line breaks are like tiny sculptures; beautifully crafted and thoughtful but not meant for dissection. The fluid motion from the conceptual to the concrete is smooth and inviting. It is a poem I could read endlessly because it works as meditation rather than a conquest.

Eliot attempts to capture a fundamental paradox of human nature, the tension between the universality and the transience of experience, using imagery from his childhood and early adulthood. The point of view feels akin to looking through a lens as it goes in and out of focus. Or a mind as it moves seamlessly from memories to present thoughts to ideas about the future.

These perceptive shifts are framed around negative space. He uses movement to express stillness, noise to express silence. And in doing this he discovers the uncanny closeness of opposites, ecstasy’s indebtedness to horror, ‘the enchainment of past and future.’ Finally, he settles on a thesis: ‘Only through time is time conquered.’ 

Eliot wrote the Four Quartets over the course of eight years and, though it can be read easily in one sitting, the stages of philosophical processing he goes through can be felt acutely. It is worth mentioning his oft quoted conclusion:

           

            We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Here is a quintessential example of Eliot’s reappropriation of literary language to accomplish philosophical pursuits. Not only does he execute a kind of symmetrical hypothesis/conclusion style poem but he also demonstrates the evolution of his thinking and expression in both scope and sophistication.

In the Four Quartets, Eliot embraces a more general readership and tightens up the flights of fancy and wild allusions of The Waste Land and the result is, at its very core, a joy to read. What more can you hope for from poetry?

Jeremy

If there is a subject running throughout Four Quartets it is time, a subject which, in Eliot’s hand, lends itself almost difficultly well to both a poetic and prosaic analysis. There are parts of Four Quartets which are overtly lyrical, reflective and test ideas through metaphor; and parts which, to me, read and sound a little like an essay put in lines. This is not a mix that always works. I quote, partially, from part I of Burnt Norton:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.

We must allow Eliot a boring introduction I suppose. After some further abstractions, the poem continues:

So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool,
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present. 

I think I preferred it when April was the cruellest month. Still, this is all elegantly rendered. There is a lyricism and a strangeness (“Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children”) that is not totally compromised by the fact that Eliot has, cough cough, something to say.

I have found myself thinking up a rule recently: you shouldn’t write a poem if you could express that same poem as an essay; if you cannot express whatever it is in a poem in a way that you couldn’t in prose…don’t do it! Is this a very hardline modernist idea? If it is, it seems ironic that Four Quartets has dredged it to the top of my head again. 

George Orwell did not care for Four Quartets even as he was a little suspicious of his own dislike:

…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. I think one is justified in explaining this by a deterioration in Mr Eliot’s subject-matter. 

Has Eliot’s subject matter deteriorated? Orwell was certainly suspicious of Eliot’s religiosity and it is undeniable that after certain sections you feel like finishing with an amen. 

It is not that there are not great and beautiful passages in Four Quartets - there are; nor that there are not well-crafted symmetries and patterns spanning across the whole - Eliot’s realisation of the first line of East Coker, “In my beginning is my end”, an adaption of the embroidered motto of Mary Queen of Scots, in part V of Little Gidding as a meditation on the construction of both poetic lines and sentences; or the non-cliché entwining of images of the rose and fire throughout; or even that Four Quartets is somehow abstract from our own time - “Distracted from distraction by distraction/ filled with fancies and empty of meaning”.

It is just that, having read The Waste Land shortly before, so famous for the supposed impregnability of its allusions, I cannot deny that these meditative poems have less music and if they seem more coherent, they are not more powerful for it.