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Four Quartets (1943)

by T. S. Eliot

Other authors: See the other authors section.

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3,267413,988 (4.33)85
The last major verse written by Eliot and what Eliot himself considered his finest work, Four Quartets is a rich composition that expands the spiritual vision brought out in The Waste Land. Here, in four linked poems, spiritual, philosophical, and personal themes emerge through symbolic allusions and literary and religious references from both Eastern and Western thought. Four Quartets is the culminating achievement by a man considered the greatest poet of the twentieth century and one of the seminal figures in the evolution of modernism.… (more)
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English (37)  French (1)  Catalan (1)  Italian (1)  Dutch (1)  All languages (41)
Showing 1-5 of 37 (next | show all)
[Four Quartets] (T S Eliot) (14/01/24) *****



Finally I have settled to read this extraordinary volume. I saw Ralph Fiennes perform it on stage in 2022 (there is a short bite of that recording below, as well as Eliot reading the complete Quartets).

It really is difficult to say much about it. I read it twice today, and plan to read it at least once a month this year, I really want to know it. The rhythm is wonderful, and in its time original, but so many writers have been inspired by it since, its originality is less noticeable perhaps now. The language is mostly unfussy, but its meditation on time, nature, philosophy and life is hypnotic.

Fiennes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n07_rilmM18

Eliot: https://archive.org/details/lp_t-s-eliot-reads-his-four-quartets_t-s-eliot ( )
  Caroline_McElwee | Jan 14, 2024 |
I read only 'Burnt Norton' and 'East Coker' for now, as they are the ones required for my course. I'm looking forward to studying these as there was lots to think about just on a first read. I also discovered a lot of lines which I have seen quoted in other literature e.g. 'human kind/Cannot bear very much reality.' ( )
  pgchuis | Aug 24, 2023 |
Favourites: “Time present and time past…” and “Time and the bell have buried the day…” from “Burnt Norton”; “In my beginning is my end…” from “East Coker”( which contains the wonderful lines “Out at sea the dawn wind Wrinkles and slides”) and “Midwinter spring is its own season…” “If you came this way…” and “What we call the beginning is often the end…” from “Little Gidding”.
  PollyMoore3 | May 14, 2020 |
I read this slim volume on the plane ride home yesterday. I've picked it up and read a sonnet here and there multiple times this past year. At times, reading this book feels like trying to comprehend infinity. I had to put it down a number of times to write out thoughts and ideas for new poems that kept punching for air. I'll be returning to this one. ( )
  Cail_Judy | Apr 21, 2020 |
After encountering excerpts from Little Gidding again and again in my theology reading I decided to read Four Quartets. I really enjoyed the confidence and structure of the poems and they still maintained a fluidity that invokes mystery and isn't obtuse. The paradoxes and challenges of being a temporal being are grand, indeed, and Eliot brings a beauty to these ruminations, lofty and still grounded in the natural world.
  b.masonjudy | Apr 3, 2020 |
Showing 1-5 of 37 (next | show all)
With the remnants of the twentieth century still surrounding us, it may pay dividends, as the twenty-first century takes off, to take stock of these remnants and begin to make judgments. Newly ended centuries tend to leave detritus; this can create a hostile environment for artists who wish to sew new seeds and blaze new trails. Few seem to remember that when Wordsworth and Coleridge put out Lyrical Ballads (though the release and dissemination of this pivotal text spanned the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century), it received hostile reviews and a good amount of indifference, as well. With hindsight, we realize that this was the text that almost single-handedly initiated British Romanticism. The early twentieth century was also inconclusive; William Butler Yeats was only beginning to receive the recognition that would lead to laurel, Walt Whitman’s poems were yet to receive the blessings of posterity, while a host of lesser lights congregated around minor poets or reveled in the just-dimming glow of Decadence and Aestheticism. What do we see around us in 2010? It is a poetry world stumbling for direction, still largely lost in the theoretical wilderness of post-modernism, which espouses, among other things, the notion that distinctions between high and low art are both superfluous and illusory, that high art is the imaginary creation of hegemonic white males, and that artists can safely toss history in the dustbin and create out of momentary impulses, that have a better chance of capturing authentic effects than the backwards/forwards time-warp effect that Modernists like Eliot and Pound thought efficacious.

I would like to argue, firstly, that the demarcations between high and low art need to be reinstated. My reasons for this are manifold, but the simplest is this: I do not believe that much English language poetry composed after 1943, the year that Eliot’s Four Quartets were released, deserves the title of high art. Before I explain why the twentieth century, post Four Quartets, was mostly a washout for English language poetry, let me explain what distinctions I believe subsist between high and low art. High art is defined by a sense of aesthetic balance; a host of factors must be present and accounted for; technical competence is a necessity, breadth of vision (so that any narrowness of focus is soon dissipated into fusions with larger wholes), narrative solidity (even when, as in Four Quartets, it is a loosely woven narrative, that makes frequent subtle shifts in different directions), and, most importantly, continued serious engagement with serious themes. If this harkens back to Matthew Arnold’s emphasis on truth and seriousness, and if this seems regressive, remember that, in poetry, the impulses of post-modernism have all but flushed these constituent elements. Low art impulses often maintain a stance that technical competence is unnecessary, that breadth of vision is too ambitious, that narrative solidity is a remnant of the nineteenth century (and, to the extent that Yeats and Eliot, the only two twentieth century high art poets in the English language, had strong nineteenth century affiliations, this may be the case), and that “seriousness” is an outdated and outmoded concern. So that, the notions of high art and low art have been both displaced and misplaced, with disastrous results. We are surrounded by detritus that attempts too much with too little; that encompasses not worlds but narrow grooves; that shies away from responsible, serious engagements, or courts these engagements with such brow-beating incompetence that the matters were better left alone; and that uses sly evasions to explain its own horrendous deficits.

Back to T.S. Eliot; what is it that makes Four Quartets high art, and almost everything that followed in the twentieth century dross? Four Quartets, however sententiously, starts from a high ground; the artist is coming to grips with the limitations of living in space and time. Eliot flattens space and time out in the context of an investigation of four places, each with its own peculiar resonances, which birth separate and discrete impulses in the poet, resulting in slight shifts in perspective and emphasis. Four Quartets is useful, also, because it demonstrates the loosest narrative emphasis possible in a poem that attempts to achieve and maintain the durability and permanence traces of high art. Narrative is the backbone of serious poetry; Four Quartets has an “I” that dictates terms, but in such a way that “I” is not an obtrusive presence. If there is an imbalance in Four Quartets, it is or may be a sense of oscillating perspectives that leads to a less than unitary presentation, or a loose sense of coherence that sometimes meanders away from central points. However, there is a sense that this is redeemed by a spirit of inquiry that balances philosophical concerns with concrete details, fragments of colloquial speech with natural imagery, traces of humanity’s past with visions of possible human futures. That Four Quartets spans all this ground does not, in and of itself, make it high art; but that Eliot’s language is taut, sinewy, disciplined, and rich makes the whole of Four Quartets ring as a solid, major work of high literary art. If another such work exists that was released between 1943 and 2000, I haven’t seen it.

The Objectivists, the Beats, the New York School (first and second generation), the Confessional poets— what do these poets lack, so that the appellation high art does not affix to their work, nor the appellation high artist affix to them? For many of these poets, it is the ragged lack of discipline in the language of their poems themselves. Trying to read Beat poetry is like trying to eat raw slabs of uncooked red meat. Thematically, the Beats might have been redeemed by an egalitarianism that harkened back to Whitman; formally, they were creators of tremendous Babels that are even now beginning to collapse. The Objectivists did have ambitions consonant with the approach of high artists— but their panoramic viewpoints were undermined by impoverished lines that displayed little heft, music, and which demonstrate, rather than the rawness of uncooked red meat, an overwhelming brittle dryness. The New York School poets evinced significantly more delicacy, thematically and formally, than the Objectivists and the Beats; however, the primary perpetuators of New York School poetry tended to get lost in certain extremes: either language so steeped in colloquialisms that it lost its sense of itself as art, or language so bent against narrative that it lost its sense altogether. Had the Confessional poets widened their scope, they might have gained a sense of consonance with poetry as a high art form—but the narrowness of their thematic scope precluded a sense of serious engagement with issues that transcended the personal. As such, they, along with the Objectivists, the Beats, and the New York School poets, fall squarely under the rubric that covers minor poetry and poets, when placed next to the scope and achievements of Eliot and Yeats. Other groups, like the San Francisco Renaissance poets and the Language poets, seem like a mélange and a mish-mash of these styles. Minor Modernists (Pound, Williams, Stevens, Stein) initiated many trends toward disjuncture and colloquialism; because the high art balance of Yeats and Eliot was (and remains) more rigorous and more difficult to achieve, it has inspired fewer immediate imitations.

High art balance, as such, depends on serious engagements with the history of poetry, and also with a sense of discernment. Though Eliot did dote upon some minor French poets, his knowledge of the history of major poetry artists, as expressed in his early essays, was complete and solid. It allowed him vantage points that set his sense of aesthetic equilibrium on a high level. Because he had the discerning impulse to separate wheat from chaff, he could accomplish the major feat of moving poetry forward in innovative ways while also conserving the best of poetry that had come before. Yeats’ engagement with history was no less complete; though he lacked the theoretical bent that defined Eliot, it would have been unthinkable for him not to know the Romantics, the Neo-Classical poets, the Metaphysical poets, Elizabethans, back to Dante, Chaucer, and beyond. Yeats also had a comprehensive knowledge of Irish mythology, which added an ancillary resource to his repertoire. Put simply: these are men that did their homework, on any number of levels. Because they maintained a sense of discipline and responsibility about their traces, moving forward meant taking history into account at each juncture. The idea that history is a flush, that the canon of English language poetry was largely created by and for white males and so has a built-in obsolescence, is pitifully shallow and ultimately pernicious. If this canon is not yet a fully multicultural canon, it is nonetheless an indispensable resource; it is the only true measure we have of how far our own arrows can sail out into the universe. Century XX encouraged poets, after 1943, to eschew the essential challenge presented by Eliot and Yeats; how to move forward and conserve at once. As the twenty-first opens, it is this dual impulse which again presents itself as our brightest hope to rise to the challenges presented by a rich, if increasingly distant, past.

 

» Add other authors (7 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Eliot, T. S.primary authorall editionsconfirmed
Gaos, VicenteTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Matthiessen, F. O.Introductionsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Svintila, VladimirTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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Epigraph
του λογου δ'εοντος ξυνου ζϖουσιν οι πολλοι ϖς ιδιαν εχοντες φρονησιν.

1. p. 77. Fr. 2.

οδος ανϖ κατϖ μια και ϖυτη.

1. p. 89 Fr. 60.

Diels: Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Herakleitos).
Dedication
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Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
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For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
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(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
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The last major verse written by Eliot and what Eliot himself considered his finest work, Four Quartets is a rich composition that expands the spiritual vision brought out in The Waste Land. Here, in four linked poems, spiritual, philosophical, and personal themes emerge through symbolic allusions and literary and religious references from both Eastern and Western thought. Four Quartets is the culminating achievement by a man considered the greatest poet of the twentieth century and one of the seminal figures in the evolution of modernism.

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