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Four Quartets #1-4
Four Quartets
Four Quartets is the culminating achievement of T.S. Eliot's career as a poet. While containing some of the most musical and unforgettable passages in twentieth-century poetry, its four parts, 'Burnt Norton', 'East Coker', 'The Dry Salvages' and 'Little Gidding', present a rigorous meditation on the spiritual, philosophical and personal themes which preoccupied the author. It was the way in which a private voice was heard to speak for the concerns of an entire generation, in the midst of war and doubt, that confirmed it as an enduring masterpiece.
56 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1943
About the author
T.S. Eliot
990 books5,260 followersThomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, dramatist and literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry." He wrote the poems The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday, and Four Quartets; the plays Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party; and the essay Tradition and the Individual Talent. Eliot was born an American, moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at the age of 25), and became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39.
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.S._Eliot
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.S._Eliot
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February 4, 2024
How can you prove you are a book nerd?
Finding a first edition of Four Quartets, buying that copy, finding an old scratchy recording of TS Eliot reading the poems, and then voluntarily watching a lecture on these famous poems.
The Four Quartets is a series of poems written in 1943 by T.S. Eliot. Listening to TS Eliot reading these poems was such a unique experience, taking the time to slow down and allowing the imagery to come to mind as these poems were read.
The memories that these poems invoked were so visceral that I could not only imagine the visual aspects but also the smells, being fully transported in the moment. These poems serve as a reminder of our time and place in the world.
These poems are profoundly moving. Eliot talks about time. Are we making good use of our time? I don't mean finding little time saving hacks on TikTok. But, rather, are we fulfilling our destiny? Or are we distracted from distraction by distraction?
If you know you are supposed to be a writer, are you taking time to write every day? Are you copying out works of authors that you admire? No matter what walk of life, are you doing all you can to use your time wisely to become the person that you were destined to be?
First Edition of Four Quartets:
Some of my favorite lines:
“Reconciled among the stars”
“Distracted from distraction by distraction”
“In my beginning is my end.”
“The poetry does not matter.”
“Had they deceived us Or deceived themselves?”
“The only wisdom we can hope to acquire Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.”
“Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure”
“We had the experience but missed the meaning”
“Not fare well, But fare forward, voyagers.”
This book is part of James Mustich’s 1,000 Books to Read.
2024 Reading Schedule
Jan Middlemarch
Feb The Grapes of Wrath
Mar Oliver Twist
Apr Madame Bovary
May A Clockwork Orange
Jun Possession
Jul The Folk of the Faraway Tree Collection
Aug Crime and Punishment
Sep Heart of Darkness
Oct Moby-Dick
Nov Far From the Madding Crowd
Dec A Tale of Two Cities
Connect With Me!
Blog Twitter BookTube Facebook Insta
Finding a first edition of Four Quartets, buying that copy, finding an old scratchy recording of TS Eliot reading the poems, and then voluntarily watching a lecture on these famous poems.
The Four Quartets is a series of poems written in 1943 by T.S. Eliot. Listening to TS Eliot reading these poems was such a unique experience, taking the time to slow down and allowing the imagery to come to mind as these poems were read.
The memories that these poems invoked were so visceral that I could not only imagine the visual aspects but also the smells, being fully transported in the moment. These poems serve as a reminder of our time and place in the world.
These poems are profoundly moving. Eliot talks about time. Are we making good use of our time? I don't mean finding little time saving hacks on TikTok. But, rather, are we fulfilling our destiny? Or are we distracted from distraction by distraction?
If you know you are supposed to be a writer, are you taking time to write every day? Are you copying out works of authors that you admire? No matter what walk of life, are you doing all you can to use your time wisely to become the person that you were destined to be?
First Edition of Four Quartets:
Some of my favorite lines:
“Reconciled among the stars”
“Distracted from distraction by distraction”
“In my beginning is my end.”
“The poetry does not matter.”
“Had they deceived us Or deceived themselves?”
“The only wisdom we can hope to acquire Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.”
“Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure”
“We had the experience but missed the meaning”
“Not fare well, But fare forward, voyagers.”
This book is part of James Mustich’s 1,000 Books to Read.
2024 Reading Schedule
Jan Middlemarch
Feb The Grapes of Wrath
Mar Oliver Twist
Apr Madame Bovary
May A Clockwork Orange
Jun Possession
Jul The Folk of the Faraway Tree Collection
Aug Crime and Punishment
Sep Heart of Darkness
Oct Moby-Dick
Nov Far From the Madding Crowd
Dec A Tale of Two Cities
Connect With Me!
Blog Twitter BookTube Facebook Insta
March 7, 2015
I remember being at my first anatomy dissection as a demonstrator took this slim volume out of his pocket and said to me, in a room full of cadavers, "In my end is my beginning. Isn't that wonderful? TS Eliot. Do you know it? You must read it." If I'd read the scene in a novel I would have thought it contrived and overly theatrical. But I swear it actually happened.
February 2, 2024
Nothing beats a glimpse approaching this attempt to write a few words about Eliot's "Four Quartets."
This long poem, a meditation on life, time, poetry, or quite merely on words, earned its author the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948.
Four poems (called according to places in England and the United States, "Burnt Norton," "East Coker," "The Dry Salvages," and "Little Gidding") were first written separately, only to reappear together in 1943 "Four Quartets."
T. S. Eliot (who belonged with Joyce, Woolf, and Pound among the most excellent representatives of modernist literature in the English language) puts us before his most universal work but also the most difficult to describe.
This long poem, a meditation on life, time, poetry, or quite merely on words, earned its author the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948.
Four poems (called according to places in England and the United States, "Burnt Norton," "East Coker," "The Dry Salvages," and "Little Gidding") were first written separately, only to reappear together in 1943 "Four Quartets."
T. S. Eliot (who belonged with Joyce, Woolf, and Pound among the most excellent representatives of modernist literature in the English language) puts us before his most universal work but also the most difficult to describe.
September 10, 2016
T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets are as apocalyptically-sound as his more well-known The Waste Land (at least in terms of bored freshman who, in the fullness of time, will most likely only dimly remember sludging their way through the poem in some requisite English Lit courses), but whereas the latter keeps its cosmic lens rolling on the ecological, religious and human desolation brought to the early 20th century by the wonders of Imperialism and Industrialization, the FQ, on the other hand, carpet bombs the idea of consciousness and its relation with Time and Being. Who would have guessed that having self-awareness could be such a terrifying notion?
Using an effective array of techniques to get his point across—repetition of words, letters and syllables (usually in sets of three); spurts of faux-Middle English; Thesaurus-bending diction; a heady blending of up-to-the-minute psychology, philosophy and multi-religious allusions—Eliot’s poems reject the notion of Time as a flowing line and instead present the concept as a brick wall in which Being moves through or puddles about in a dizzying array of cross-currents. Movement is key to understanding the FQ with its many metaphors involving travel by sea, air and dirt. Published over a period of six years, the heft of these poems is not found in their narrative continuity, but in the revisiting of meditations that are clawed at again and again with Eliot’s lush and articulate narrative voice, all in the hopes of dispensing with notions of endings and beginnings as ways of thinking about anything.
A poet/musician who is a good buddy of mine has been at me for months to read these poems, and all I have to say is that the dude knows what he’s talking about. Four Quartets is a class-act display of poetic virtuosity that I hope to be repeatedly revisiting over however long a time I’ll be kicking around this mortal coil.
Using an effective array of techniques to get his point across—repetition of words, letters and syllables (usually in sets of three); spurts of faux-Middle English; Thesaurus-bending diction; a heady blending of up-to-the-minute psychology, philosophy and multi-religious allusions—Eliot’s poems reject the notion of Time as a flowing line and instead present the concept as a brick wall in which Being moves through or puddles about in a dizzying array of cross-currents. Movement is key to understanding the FQ with its many metaphors involving travel by sea, air and dirt. Published over a period of six years, the heft of these poems is not found in their narrative continuity, but in the revisiting of meditations that are clawed at again and again with Eliot’s lush and articulate narrative voice, all in the hopes of dispensing with notions of endings and beginnings as ways of thinking about anything.
A poet/musician who is a good buddy of mine has been at me for months to read these poems, and all I have to say is that the dude knows what he’s talking about. Four Quartets is a class-act display of poetic virtuosity that I hope to be repeatedly revisiting over however long a time I’ll be kicking around this mortal coil.
August 23, 2022
To be honest, I am not a big fan of hermetic poetry, I always struggle with this kind of literature when I have to look up the specific, very particular background of each word or sentence; that comes at the expense of the reading pleasure. So when I first read this cycle of poems 15 years ago, I was quickly discouraged. Fortunately, a bilingual text edition was recently published in the Dutch-speaking region, with a translation and extensive notes by Paul Claes, one of the most erudite literary connoisseurs still alive. The renewed acquaintance remained a difficult undertaking, but the vistas that Claes opened up really bring the full richness of this cycle in its own. And it is such an intense richness in fact that, even with Claes's excellent guidance, it certainly does not show itself fully on the first reading.
I particularly focused on the aspect of 'time', which is one of the central themes in this cycle among many other elements, even starting with the famous verses:
Claes points out that the word time occurs about 75 times, but the meaning changes constantly. “There is the linear time of the clock and chronometer, the cyclic time of years, seasons and days, the transitory time of rise, bloom and decay, the advancing time of evolution and history, the subjective time of past, present and future, the abolished time of the incarnation and the stagnant time of eternity.” Each of the 4 quartets takes its own approach to time: time as memory in Burnt Norton, time as cyclical pattern in East Coker, time as flow in The Dry Salvages and finally time as history, in Little Gidding.
Four Quartets is often portrayed as Eliot's most religious poem, since it was written after his conversion to anglicanism. It is sometimes seen pre-eminently as a mystical poem, and in that sense it is as much glorified as it is reviled. That mysticism is absolutely present, but I agree with Claes that it does not dominate this collection, that is to say it does not ‘kill’ everything else. For example, I noticed that Eliot sees time both as a concrete, contingent manifestation of history ànd as a revelation of eternity. So, with Eliot, that eternity is not unmoved, as it is often seen by Christian mysticism, but as a constantly moving entity. It is one of the insights in this collection that opens the door to the elusive variation in creation and reality, which Eliot has expressed in an inimitable way, both in terms of content and form. To savour in small portions!
PS. Here's the reference to the bilingual English-Dutch edition of Paul Claes: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6....
I particularly focused on the aspect of 'time', which is one of the central themes in this cycle among many other elements, even starting with the famous verses:
"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."
Claes points out that the word time occurs about 75 times, but the meaning changes constantly. “There is the linear time of the clock and chronometer, the cyclic time of years, seasons and days, the transitory time of rise, bloom and decay, the advancing time of evolution and history, the subjective time of past, present and future, the abolished time of the incarnation and the stagnant time of eternity.” Each of the 4 quartets takes its own approach to time: time as memory in Burnt Norton, time as cyclical pattern in East Coker, time as flow in The Dry Salvages and finally time as history, in Little Gidding.
Four Quartets is often portrayed as Eliot's most religious poem, since it was written after his conversion to anglicanism. It is sometimes seen pre-eminently as a mystical poem, and in that sense it is as much glorified as it is reviled. That mysticism is absolutely present, but I agree with Claes that it does not dominate this collection, that is to say it does not ‘kill’ everything else. For example, I noticed that Eliot sees time both as a concrete, contingent manifestation of history ànd as a revelation of eternity. So, with Eliot, that eternity is not unmoved, as it is often seen by Christian mysticism, but as a constantly moving entity. It is one of the insights in this collection that opens the door to the elusive variation in creation and reality, which Eliot has expressed in an inimitable way, both in terms of content and form. To savour in small portions!
PS. Here's the reference to the bilingual English-Dutch edition of Paul Claes: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6....
April 28, 2021
For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
...
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others' harm
Which you once took for exercise of virtue.
...
History may be servitude.
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
to become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
...
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.
...
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
...
A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.
...
And all shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowded knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
And next year's words await another voice.
...
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others' harm
Which you once took for exercise of virtue.
...
History may be servitude.
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
to become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
...
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.
...
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
...
A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.
...
And all shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowded knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Read
September 21, 2022Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and this is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
-- T. S. Eliot, Quartet #4 ("Little Gidding")
Ah, yes. So bracing, like ice cold water to the face early in the morning! This reminds me a bit of my favorite book in the Bible, Ecclesiastes, which is so relentlessly honest about the vanity of it all. Surely you recall the words of the Prophet:
I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.
That which is crooked cannot be made straight: and that which is wanting cannot be numbered.
I communed with mine own heart, saying, Lo, I am come to great estate, and have gotten more wisdom than all they that have been before me in Jerusalem: yea, my heart had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.
And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit.
18 For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.
If you want to vex your spirit in a more modern way, then, T. S. and Eliot is your law firm. Of the four books in this Quartet, my favorites were the evens: #2 ("East Coker") and #4 ("Little Gidding"). Some parting wisdom from "East Coker":
In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.
In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls
Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
And the deep lane insists on the direction
Into the village, in the electric heat
Hypnotised. In a warm haze the sultry light
Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
Wait for the early owl.
I don't know about you, but I can never get enough circle of life stuff. Ends. Beginnings. Births. Deaths. The closer you get, the clearer it becomes.
Further proof that all great literature, in some way, shape, or form, treats on the folly of desire and craving (thank you, Buddha... did you write Ecclesiastes while no one was looking?) in the face of death.
Yeah, him. The Hooded Reaper. The Dark Muse of all Literature from time immemorial.
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and this is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
-- T. S. Eliot, Quartet #4 ("Little Gidding")
Ah, yes. So bracing, like ice cold water to the face early in the morning! This reminds me a bit of my favorite book in the Bible, Ecclesiastes, which is so relentlessly honest about the vanity of it all. Surely you recall the words of the Prophet:
I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.
That which is crooked cannot be made straight: and that which is wanting cannot be numbered.
I communed with mine own heart, saying, Lo, I am come to great estate, and have gotten more wisdom than all they that have been before me in Jerusalem: yea, my heart had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.
And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit.
18 For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.
If you want to vex your spirit in a more modern way, then, T. S. and Eliot is your law firm. Of the four books in this Quartet, my favorites were the evens: #2 ("East Coker") and #4 ("Little Gidding"). Some parting wisdom from "East Coker":
In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.
In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls
Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
And the deep lane insists on the direction
Into the village, in the electric heat
Hypnotised. In a warm haze the sultry light
Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
Wait for the early owl.
I don't know about you, but I can never get enough circle of life stuff. Ends. Beginnings. Births. Deaths. The closer you get, the clearer it becomes.
Further proof that all great literature, in some way, shape, or form, treats on the folly of desire and craving (thank you, Buddha... did you write Ecclesiastes while no one was looking?) in the face of death.
Yeah, him. The Hooded Reaper. The Dark Muse of all Literature from time immemorial.
Read
October 25, 2020[4.5] Through my years on Goodreads, I've seen reviews of T.S. Eliot's poetry, especially The Wasteland, and it always sounds like something I'd love. But also a lot of work, because he makes allusions mostly to stuff I haven't read yet. I've read quite a lot more classics now, yet still not the ones he references the most.
To whittle down outstanding categories in a reading challenge, I was looking for something very short that was a poetry *collection* yet didn't have too many separate poems, and eventually I lighted on the Four Quartets, which I first seriously contemplated reading about a year ago. All its editions are text only, so unlike with The Wasteland, there isn't the unresolved dilemma over which of many annotated editions to read.
As far as Eliot's references to Hindu texts are concerned, I had thought that my background reading for the Rig Veda - which I've been listening to for a few weeks now - might help. (But it turns out the obvious allusions are to Krishna and Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita (which I read some of, but didn't finish, in the 00s when I did a yoga course that included philosophy.
Anyway, with a writer like Eliot you've got to start somewhere (apart from Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats as a kid). And these poems are short enough that they have re-reading potential. Then, whilst I was looking at the Wikipedia page for the Four Quartets yesterday, but wasn't quite sure whether I would read them, there was a moment of synchronicity with a passing van, and that was me decided.
I found I settled as comfortably into a personal reading of them as of any other twentieth century poems. Perhaps fortuitously, it wasn't until I was around half way through the poems that I was reminded in my background reading (mostly Wiki entries on the poems, and the articles by an English lecturer on the blog Interesting Literature) that Eliot believed in the possibility of an accurate reading as well as personal readings. (Annoyingly I can't find the quote now.) I must have heard that before, years ago, to have made me hesitant to read his work. But now, that as well as stood out.
Commentaries kept reiterating that it wasn't possible to summarise the poems. Rather than reviewing, this prompted the idea of posting annotations. But that would require printing the poems out and writing on them and scanning it to put on a blog. Can't post that on here, where most people read my stuff, and besides it reminds me too much of the time 15 years ago when I thought it would be cool to write notes by hand and scan and email them, because it was a bit like, er, Pete Doherty. (Who, in fairness, my correspondent did like.)
Already aware that Burnt Norton was inspired by Eliot's visit to said manor house with Emily Hale, I saw obvious traces of an experience like this in the first movement. I usually find biographical interpretations of literature interesting, but this resulted in, or this was something cheaper and more mundane than I ever expected from T.S. Eliot. It wasn't bad by the standards of classic poetry in general, but it wasn't the transcendent greatness I'd expected of Four Quartets. From it, I could see why Eliot was so keen on the idea of 'impersonal' poetry, of transmuting experience into something else to make art out of it, if this was what he produced when he was writing directly personal poetry.
But of course there is soon a lot more going on. Throughout the Quartets it was fun to stumble into famous lines and realise they were from here:
- human kind
Cannot bear very much reality. (BN);
- At the still point of the turning world (BN);
- familiar compound ghost (LG);
- shaft of sunlight (BN, TDS)
This last is probably too generally poetic to be properly an Eliot or 4Q thing, but the weight of finding it here reminded me of reading in a potted bio in the 80s or 90s about the late poet James Kirkup (not to be confused with the contemporary Spectator columnist), whose verses were quite often found in collections for kids, or set at my school, that in his Who's Who entry he'd listed among his recreations 'standing in shafts of sunlight'.
Very soon, in the second movement, BN starts to transcend into history and I could see it was possible these could become poems I loved. I was thinking of Green Knowe, Moondial etc - stories of children exploring ghostly old houses, but history is even more blurred here, deliberately. (In this, a precursor to those stories I had previously not suspected.) It felt useful knowing, as I started, that the English Civil War would feature in these poems; not sure if this early in them. But, here I was feeling the First World War, and something medieval, and the general idea of war and other conflict - hunting - as ever-present through history:
Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.
…
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.
Four Quartets is famous for its Christian and Hindu references, but this was just the first hint I got of references to early twentieth century and inter-war occultism that are rather plentiful in the sequence, but less talked about - and which become more overt in 'East Coker'. Though the very structure, each poem taking the theme of one of the four classical elements, hints at that, and at its fondness for ancient things. I had not expected in reading T.S. Eliot also to be wandering into a world drawn from some of the same places as Machen and Dunsany and Kipling's Puck stories and early Tolkien, and M.R. James. (And Yeats, whom I could never get into on brief tries.)
However, much of the rest of BN is focused on ideas of stillness and being in the moment, which now feel Buddhist more than anything, and related to the strands of Hinduism best known in the West via yoga philosophy. (It turned out that academic commentators have found Buddhist themes and imagery in 'Little Gidding' in particular.)
I imagined a tug of opposites - the meditative & transcendent, feelings often associated in yoga and Catholic tradition with celibacy, but on a day with someone he was sort of having an affair with, perhaps a grubby idea even in a beautiful place. One imagines Eliot struggling with that contradiction, and maybe that was why he arrived at the idea of a chaste relationship with Hale - a well-known part of their collective biography, but it will have to be seen to what extent the newly-opened archive of letters matches up to it.
Lines in movement III of BN made me think of Lowry paintings - but here the information steered me back south: these were about Londoners on the tube although several of the places mentioned are not tube stations. Lowry was active around the same time though, and Eliot may have seen his paintings; one could argue for similar ways of seeing people in city crowds. The tube recurs later in the Quartets too, where I usually enjoyed reading about it as if it only meant some more abstract underground.
East Coker is my favourite, the first movement and parts of the second. It's that sense of numinous history and place hinted at briefly in BN, brought to the fore. A probable early influence I'd previously guessed, on later poets and writers like U.A. Fanthorpe, John Betjeman and Peter Ackroyd - who also specialise in this stuff, which has been called a very English sort of mysticism, but which I, for one feel, some of us might have found wherever we ended up, but that happened to be England. Which isn't to negate the influence of culture on developing a way of thinking like that - what I mean is that England isn't any more special than the landscapes of other countries can be to people living in or visiting them.
In the second movement this is joined by a disturbance of the seasons reminiscent of Dorian Grey and the decadents:
What is the late November doing
With the disturbance of the spring
And creatures of the summer heat,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
intimations of the occult and fantasy and science fiction (very early twentieth century):
Scorpion fights against the Sun
Until the Sun and Moon go down
Comets weep and Leonids fly
Hunt the heavens and the plains
Whirled in a vortex that shall bring
The world to that destructive fire
Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.
…
The houses are all gone under the sea.
The dancers are all gone under the hill.
and an encounter between/melding of Dante and Sherlock Holmes:
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment.
A few weeks ago, I read a low-rated GR review of the Rig Veda saying that the text lacked spirituality and was too focused on material gain (paraphrase as remembered). Some of the differences I'm experiencing will be because I'm listening to the full thing as a very good audio rather than reading the Penguin abridgement. But I find it a much more spiritual experience, to imagine scenes in which it may have originally been used, and think about commonalities between gods thousands of miles apart in different languages, some ancient, some introduced by the Victorian translator echoing Anglicanism, the whole thing like some giant syncretic prayer-wheel, than I do when I read Buddhist or Stoic or Epicurean texts that are meant to be transcendent but are also a lot of instructions and judgements that are still supposed to apply, and I have arguments with them so that I rarely have the affection for them that many readers have. The former is an in-the-moment felt experience; the latter more of an intellectual exercise dragging up life experience and modern psychology in a way that reminds me too much sometimes these days of social media debates.
In Four Quartets I found both types in one short set of pages (though the person who felt the Rig Veda was about material gain probably wouldn't see a similarity in 4Q, whereas I feel in it something like a version of movement I of 'East Coker' for its own culture, time and place - if you are on desktop, movement I should be below in the quotes). This close juxtaposition helped me work a few things out for myself.
Even if Eliot might not see it as especially elevated. (Regardless of the place he gives to imagining the world of his pre-Reformation ancestors in East Coker - idealising what was repudiated by the particular 17th-century Eliots who sailed to America - and an order/chaos schema of nature that may be artificial.) As Oliver Tearle paraphrases it on Interesting Literature, "the third section of ‘Little Gidding’ opens with a discussion of three stages of spiritual development: attachment to people and things; detachment from people and things; and, finally, indifference to such temporal and material things, and a devotion to the spiritual and eternal". Which sounds like some types of Buddhism and Hinduism, and also westernised systems drawing on them, like Theosophy, whose currents would have been around in pre-war bohemian circles.
One may argue in social justice fashion with such hierarchies that maintaining the physical and mental conditions for such detachment is dependent on other people and things; that not everyone is in a position to be able to detach. Or that there are other ways to be spiritual. But it's rarely a winnable argument and would get answers such as understanding of the interconnectedness is implicit in the detachment; that if someone *really* can't detach, perhaps because of some illness, not merely because they don't care to try, they need to wait for another lifetime, and so on. *Shrug* you may as well let them get on with it and pick your battles, or your systems, and enjoy where you are, whenever you can.
Throughout 4Q I found stuff I loved - maybe at least 60% - and occasional phrases and opinions that I disagreed with or even got my hackles up - probably less than 10%, but still enough that I didn't want to give five stars. (Sometimes both can be in the same sentence, such as the passages about the difficulty of finding the right words, which are - paradoxically - fantastically described, yet also a case of 'some people don't know they're born' because it's a universe away from people who really can't find more basic ones for medical reasons and desperately need to.) As with, though not as much as with, Vladimir Nabokov's Speak Memory, which I finished a couple of weeks ago, I was surprised to find many moments in which I felt resonance with one of the sternest old men of letters of the twentieth century. But then, they are respected in part because their works have that effect on enough readers.
Back to 'East Coker', its context as a wartime poem meant to inspire the British, and its fourth movement about a surgeon: read now, that can seem as if it's about the recent UK secular religion of the NHS, perhaps first visible in the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony, and all the more visible in public life in 2020. Yet this was written before the service was established, and even a year before the Beveridge Report was commissioned.
The early part of The Dry Salvages is apparently one of the least-liked sections of the 4Q, but I took to its idea of a mostly-forgotten river god, and recalled U.A. Fanthorpe's poems about London's lost underground rivers, especially Rising Damp, which I first grew to love as a sixth former. As the first movement shifted into its second half and into the sea it gains a strange vividness and I was listening again to the shipping forecast on the radio at my gran's, twenty-five or thirty years ago, pictures in my head of what it was like out there at sea.
(review continued in comment field)
(read & reviewed September 2020)
To whittle down outstanding categories in a reading challenge, I was looking for something very short that was a poetry *collection* yet didn't have too many separate poems, and eventually I lighted on the Four Quartets, which I first seriously contemplated reading about a year ago. All its editions are text only, so unlike with The Wasteland, there isn't the unresolved dilemma over which of many annotated editions to read.
As far as Eliot's references to Hindu texts are concerned, I had thought that my background reading for the Rig Veda - which I've been listening to for a few weeks now - might help. (But it turns out the obvious allusions are to Krishna and Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita (which I read some of, but didn't finish, in the 00s when I did a yoga course that included philosophy.
Anyway, with a writer like Eliot you've got to start somewhere (apart from Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats as a kid). And these poems are short enough that they have re-reading potential. Then, whilst I was looking at the Wikipedia page for the Four Quartets yesterday, but wasn't quite sure whether I would read them, there was a moment of synchronicity with a passing van, and that was me decided.
I found I settled as comfortably into a personal reading of them as of any other twentieth century poems. Perhaps fortuitously, it wasn't until I was around half way through the poems that I was reminded in my background reading (mostly Wiki entries on the poems, and the articles by an English lecturer on the blog Interesting Literature) that Eliot believed in the possibility of an accurate reading as well as personal readings. (Annoyingly I can't find the quote now.) I must have heard that before, years ago, to have made me hesitant to read his work. But now, that as well as stood out.
Commentaries kept reiterating that it wasn't possible to summarise the poems. Rather than reviewing, this prompted the idea of posting annotations. But that would require printing the poems out and writing on them and scanning it to put on a blog. Can't post that on here, where most people read my stuff, and besides it reminds me too much of the time 15 years ago when I thought it would be cool to write notes by hand and scan and email them, because it was a bit like, er, Pete Doherty. (Who, in fairness, my correspondent did like.)
Already aware that Burnt Norton was inspired by Eliot's visit to said manor house with Emily Hale, I saw obvious traces of an experience like this in the first movement. I usually find biographical interpretations of literature interesting, but this resulted in, or this was something cheaper and more mundane than I ever expected from T.S. Eliot. It wasn't bad by the standards of classic poetry in general, but it wasn't the transcendent greatness I'd expected of Four Quartets. From it, I could see why Eliot was so keen on the idea of 'impersonal' poetry, of transmuting experience into something else to make art out of it, if this was what he produced when he was writing directly personal poetry.
But of course there is soon a lot more going on. Throughout the Quartets it was fun to stumble into famous lines and realise they were from here:
- human kind
Cannot bear very much reality. (BN);
- At the still point of the turning world (BN);
- familiar compound ghost (LG);
- shaft of sunlight (BN, TDS)
This last is probably too generally poetic to be properly an Eliot or 4Q thing, but the weight of finding it here reminded me of reading in a potted bio in the 80s or 90s about the late poet James Kirkup (not to be confused with the contemporary Spectator columnist), whose verses were quite often found in collections for kids, or set at my school, that in his Who's Who entry he'd listed among his recreations 'standing in shafts of sunlight'.
Very soon, in the second movement, BN starts to transcend into history and I could see it was possible these could become poems I loved. I was thinking of Green Knowe, Moondial etc - stories of children exploring ghostly old houses, but history is even more blurred here, deliberately. (In this, a precursor to those stories I had previously not suspected.) It felt useful knowing, as I started, that the English Civil War would feature in these poems; not sure if this early in them. But, here I was feeling the First World War, and something medieval, and the general idea of war and other conflict - hunting - as ever-present through history:
Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.
…
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.
Four Quartets is famous for its Christian and Hindu references, but this was just the first hint I got of references to early twentieth century and inter-war occultism that are rather plentiful in the sequence, but less talked about - and which become more overt in 'East Coker'. Though the very structure, each poem taking the theme of one of the four classical elements, hints at that, and at its fondness for ancient things. I had not expected in reading T.S. Eliot also to be wandering into a world drawn from some of the same places as Machen and Dunsany and Kipling's Puck stories and early Tolkien, and M.R. James. (And Yeats, whom I could never get into on brief tries.)
However, much of the rest of BN is focused on ideas of stillness and being in the moment, which now feel Buddhist more than anything, and related to the strands of Hinduism best known in the West via yoga philosophy. (It turned out that academic commentators have found Buddhist themes and imagery in 'Little Gidding' in particular.)
I imagined a tug of opposites - the meditative & transcendent, feelings often associated in yoga and Catholic tradition with celibacy, but on a day with someone he was sort of having an affair with, perhaps a grubby idea even in a beautiful place. One imagines Eliot struggling with that contradiction, and maybe that was why he arrived at the idea of a chaste relationship with Hale - a well-known part of their collective biography, but it will have to be seen to what extent the newly-opened archive of letters matches up to it.
Lines in movement III of BN made me think of Lowry paintings - but here the information steered me back south: these were about Londoners on the tube although several of the places mentioned are not tube stations. Lowry was active around the same time though, and Eliot may have seen his paintings; one could argue for similar ways of seeing people in city crowds. The tube recurs later in the Quartets too, where I usually enjoyed reading about it as if it only meant some more abstract underground.
East Coker is my favourite, the first movement and parts of the second. It's that sense of numinous history and place hinted at briefly in BN, brought to the fore. A probable early influence I'd previously guessed, on later poets and writers like U.A. Fanthorpe, John Betjeman and Peter Ackroyd - who also specialise in this stuff, which has been called a very English sort of mysticism, but which I, for one feel, some of us might have found wherever we ended up, but that happened to be England. Which isn't to negate the influence of culture on developing a way of thinking like that - what I mean is that England isn't any more special than the landscapes of other countries can be to people living in or visiting them.
In the second movement this is joined by a disturbance of the seasons reminiscent of Dorian Grey and the decadents:
What is the late November doing
With the disturbance of the spring
And creatures of the summer heat,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
intimations of the occult and fantasy and science fiction (very early twentieth century):
Scorpion fights against the Sun
Until the Sun and Moon go down
Comets weep and Leonids fly
Hunt the heavens and the plains
Whirled in a vortex that shall bring
The world to that destructive fire
Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.
…
The houses are all gone under the sea.
The dancers are all gone under the hill.
and an encounter between/melding of Dante and Sherlock Holmes:
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment.
A few weeks ago, I read a low-rated GR review of the Rig Veda saying that the text lacked spirituality and was too focused on material gain (paraphrase as remembered). Some of the differences I'm experiencing will be because I'm listening to the full thing as a very good audio rather than reading the Penguin abridgement. But I find it a much more spiritual experience, to imagine scenes in which it may have originally been used, and think about commonalities between gods thousands of miles apart in different languages, some ancient, some introduced by the Victorian translator echoing Anglicanism, the whole thing like some giant syncretic prayer-wheel, than I do when I read Buddhist or Stoic or Epicurean texts that are meant to be transcendent but are also a lot of instructions and judgements that are still supposed to apply, and I have arguments with them so that I rarely have the affection for them that many readers have. The former is an in-the-moment felt experience; the latter more of an intellectual exercise dragging up life experience and modern psychology in a way that reminds me too much sometimes these days of social media debates.
In Four Quartets I found both types in one short set of pages (though the person who felt the Rig Veda was about material gain probably wouldn't see a similarity in 4Q, whereas I feel in it something like a version of movement I of 'East Coker' for its own culture, time and place - if you are on desktop, movement I should be below in the quotes). This close juxtaposition helped me work a few things out for myself.
Even if Eliot might not see it as especially elevated. (Regardless of the place he gives to imagining the world of his pre-Reformation ancestors in East Coker - idealising what was repudiated by the particular 17th-century Eliots who sailed to America - and an order/chaos schema of nature that may be artificial.) As Oliver Tearle paraphrases it on Interesting Literature, "the third section of ‘Little Gidding’ opens with a discussion of three stages of spiritual development: attachment to people and things; detachment from people and things; and, finally, indifference to such temporal and material things, and a devotion to the spiritual and eternal". Which sounds like some types of Buddhism and Hinduism, and also westernised systems drawing on them, like Theosophy, whose currents would have been around in pre-war bohemian circles.
One may argue in social justice fashion with such hierarchies that maintaining the physical and mental conditions for such detachment is dependent on other people and things; that not everyone is in a position to be able to detach. Or that there are other ways to be spiritual. But it's rarely a winnable argument and would get answers such as understanding of the interconnectedness is implicit in the detachment; that if someone *really* can't detach, perhaps because of some illness, not merely because they don't care to try, they need to wait for another lifetime, and so on. *Shrug* you may as well let them get on with it and pick your battles, or your systems, and enjoy where you are, whenever you can.
Throughout 4Q I found stuff I loved - maybe at least 60% - and occasional phrases and opinions that I disagreed with or even got my hackles up - probably less than 10%, but still enough that I didn't want to give five stars. (Sometimes both can be in the same sentence, such as the passages about the difficulty of finding the right words, which are - paradoxically - fantastically described, yet also a case of 'some people don't know they're born' because it's a universe away from people who really can't find more basic ones for medical reasons and desperately need to.) As with, though not as much as with, Vladimir Nabokov's Speak Memory, which I finished a couple of weeks ago, I was surprised to find many moments in which I felt resonance with one of the sternest old men of letters of the twentieth century. But then, they are respected in part because their works have that effect on enough readers.
Back to 'East Coker', its context as a wartime poem meant to inspire the British, and its fourth movement about a surgeon: read now, that can seem as if it's about the recent UK secular religion of the NHS, perhaps first visible in the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony, and all the more visible in public life in 2020. Yet this was written before the service was established, and even a year before the Beveridge Report was commissioned.
The early part of The Dry Salvages is apparently one of the least-liked sections of the 4Q, but I took to its idea of a mostly-forgotten river god, and recalled U.A. Fanthorpe's poems about London's lost underground rivers, especially Rising Damp, which I first grew to love as a sixth former. As the first movement shifted into its second half and into the sea it gains a strange vividness and I was listening again to the shipping forecast on the radio at my gran's, twenty-five or thirty years ago, pictures in my head of what it was like out there at sea.
(review continued in comment field)
(read & reviewed September 2020)
September 10, 2016
This is the first record of my reading that I have not posted on this website in 6 and a half years.
You can find my full review of the amazing experience of this book at soapboxing: http://soapboxing.net/2013/10/four-qu...
* * *
ORIGINAL: Well. I just... I... what I mean to say is... I think I...
Holy fuck.
Yeah, gimme a minute on this one, guys.
You can find my full review of the amazing experience of this book at soapboxing: http://soapboxing.net/2013/10/four-qu...
* * *
ORIGINAL: Well. I just... I... what I mean to say is... I think I...
Holy fuck.
Yeah, gimme a minute on this one, guys.
October 6, 2020
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.
Read
September 5, 202193rd book of 2021.
Eliot's favourite of his work and his self-proclaimed best. FQ is beautiful as it is elusive, and with those adjectives reminds me of some of Rilke's work. And of course, Eliot's other work. I'm leaving it unrated so I can read it again, and again. I never used to like Prufrock when it came up in "Modernism to the Present" in university (what I wouldn't give to take that class again...) and I still didn't like it when my housemate wrote an essay on it. Several reads later, and several years later, and now I'm very fond of it. Perhaps this will be the same case. Though I must say I adored The Waste Land from my very first read. Eliot remains one of my favourite poets all the same, but this is a tricky old nut to crack, as they say.
Eliot's favourite of his work and his self-proclaimed best. FQ is beautiful as it is elusive, and with those adjectives reminds me of some of Rilke's work. And of course, Eliot's other work. I'm leaving it unrated so I can read it again, and again. I never used to like Prufrock when it came up in "Modernism to the Present" in university (what I wouldn't give to take that class again...) and I still didn't like it when my housemate wrote an essay on it. Several reads later, and several years later, and now I'm very fond of it. Perhaps this will be the same case. Though I must say I adored The Waste Land from my very first read. Eliot remains one of my favourite poets all the same, but this is a tricky old nut to crack, as they say.
March 3, 2021
Rating: 4.75* of five
Poetry done right. There are no comparable poets because Eliot was sui generis. I dislike poetry and I own a bookstore-purchased copy of this collection.
Poetry done right. There are no comparable poets because Eliot was sui generis. I dislike poetry and I own a bookstore-purchased copy of this collection.
May 28, 2023
I've listened and read (Paul Scofield's reading is masterful), listened only, and now read only. I read one poem per day - or a couple of days 2.
I understand a tiny bit more every reading and love it more each time.
I understand a tiny bit more every reading and love it more each time.
March 26, 2023
Some consider the Quarter T.S Eliot’s finest work. I favour The Wasteland. The four poems Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages and Little Gidding are a meditation on time, death and a masterpiece written midst war and doubt.
I also listened on YouTube to the authors reading of the Quartet. Something you can come back to and listen to over and over. Poignant.
I also listened on YouTube to the authors reading of the Quartet. Something you can come back to and listen to over and over. Poignant.
May 28, 2019
Too much depth for me to give it 5 stars like I got it all. Lovely lines and metaphors but hard to grasp.
June 19, 2011
This is something that I've been reading and returning to for more than 40 years. Few works are so intimately connected with my own life changes. Truly, all poems are read afresh with each reading: as oneself changes, the poems change. In the case of Four Quartets, I used to go o it for melancholy comfort, a vague spiritual longing too balmed with its reverberations of paradox and eastern thoughts while rooted in the soil of an East Anglian mysticism. I also found its original influence (along with Auden et al) on me towards Leavisite cultural pessimism now reflected back, refracted rather, through prisms of my own beginnings and ends. I have swerved away from both such indulgences, especially the second which I now feel as naive and elitist.
One thing that hasn't changed is that these are excellent poems by any standard. I heard not long ago a world-famous novelist decry Eliot's poetry on the ground that he was anti-semitic. He said that if Eliot's stuff was good poetry it doesn't say much for poetry. Leaving aside the intense debates about Eliot's views (debates without any agreed conclusion), less controversial would be his adherence to a strict and disciplined anglicanism, royalism and belief in tradition - none of which I personally have any time for. As it happens, I don't think Eliot was any more 'anti-semitic' than, say Winston Churchill, or any of the thousands of other establishment figure's in England's torrid history of discrimination against Jewry. The poems themselves gain their power not from statements, affirmations and exclusions, but from their formal qualities. Insofar as I have just re-read them it was to appreciate again Eliot's persistent difficulty in expressing the ineffable, in using words no matter how brilliantly, to go beyond themselves. For me, the best poets and writers have as their chief energy a longing which can at best be partially expressed only by dismantling the very means of expression:
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
(East Coker V)
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. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.
(Burnt Norton V)
One thing that hasn't changed is that these are excellent poems by any standard. I heard not long ago a world-famous novelist decry Eliot's poetry on the ground that he was anti-semitic. He said that if Eliot's stuff was good poetry it doesn't say much for poetry. Leaving aside the intense debates about Eliot's views (debates without any agreed conclusion), less controversial would be his adherence to a strict and disciplined anglicanism, royalism and belief in tradition - none of which I personally have any time for. As it happens, I don't think Eliot was any more 'anti-semitic' than, say Winston Churchill, or any of the thousands of other establishment figure's in England's torrid history of discrimination against Jewry. The poems themselves gain their power not from statements, affirmations and exclusions, but from their formal qualities. Insofar as I have just re-read them it was to appreciate again Eliot's persistent difficulty in expressing the ineffable, in using words no matter how brilliantly, to go beyond themselves. For me, the best poets and writers have as their chief energy a longing which can at best be partially expressed only by dismantling the very means of expression:
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
(East Coker V)
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. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.
(Burnt Norton V)
March 24, 2012
The Four Quartets by TS Eliot is a classic. The Four Quartets are regarded by many to be the greatest philosophical poem of this century. The titles of the four sections which make up the Quartets are place names, each corresponding to a phase of spiritual development. What particularly satisfies about the Four Quartets is that they complete Eliot's broad spiritual landscape begun with "Prufrock," "Gerontion," and The Wasteland, poems about failure in a bankrupt universe, but with the words from the Upanishads, "Datta . . . Dayadhvam . . . Damyata1" spoken by the thunder at The Wasteland's conclusion, Eliot anticipates a revitalized world that he fully conceives in the Four Quartets. In this later poem, Eliot once again includes the world of desire, fear, and death that haunted The Wasteland and other earlier efforts; but in the Quartets the importance of this darker world has been diminished, relegated to the sphere of time to form a mere backdrop to Eliot's expanded vision of life as unblemished eternity. The greatest achieve of Eliot in Four Quartets, is the way he manages to reach out to the greatest poet in history, who lived a number of centuries ago, and have the language speak with his tongue, simultaneously admitting that Dante's world view cannot be copied in today's world - but that does not mean that his form of structure and vivid allusions should not be employed: in this poem, the Trecento and the century of the atomic bomb have found common ground to behold each other as not quite congenial, yet deeply related brothers. The past is not dead - it's not even past yet.
May 18, 2015
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.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Fuck Me!!!!
June 13, 2024
What is slightly amusing about this, is the fact that I thought I'd already read this, when actually, I hadn't. It wasn't until I ventured into a National Trust secondhand bookshop last weekend I realised I hadn't. (In case anyone wondered, I bought it for a fair price, too.) I'm finding it difficult to put together some words to say, despite the fact I'm usually full of them, but I'm certainly going to try.
I now realise why my Mother has always had a passion for T.S. Eliot's works. I mean, "Four Quartets" is a profoundly beautiful series of poems, and although I admit I couldn't get my head around it all, I do question whether one is expected to. I found myself closing my eyes to enjoy the rich and thought-provoking imagery these poems invent, even going as far as feeling like I was transported to another time, noticing the scents of that particular moment. I found it enticing, and I read particular passages over again, just to enjoy that experience washing over me once more.
I think if I absolutely had to say, Burnt Norton was my favourite, but really, they are all uniquely wonderful in their own right, and I intend to return to these rather often in the future.
I now realise why my Mother has always had a passion for T.S. Eliot's works. I mean, "Four Quartets" is a profoundly beautiful series of poems, and although I admit I couldn't get my head around it all, I do question whether one is expected to. I found myself closing my eyes to enjoy the rich and thought-provoking imagery these poems invent, even going as far as feeling like I was transported to another time, noticing the scents of that particular moment. I found it enticing, and I read particular passages over again, just to enjoy that experience washing over me once more.
I think if I absolutely had to say, Burnt Norton was my favourite, but really, they are all uniquely wonderful in their own right, and I intend to return to these rather often in the future.
March 5, 2010
Question 1 (5 points)
Contrast the treatment of denotation and reference in the following works:
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
- T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
- Marcel Proust, A L'Ombre Des Jeunes Filles En Fleurs
Well, that's what I think's wrong with formal examinations.
_______________________________________
(Gratuitous cross-promotion)
Question 2 (3 points)
Order the following by the extent to which they glorify substance abuse:
- Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting
- Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
- Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
- Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
- notgettingenough, Review of "The Marijuana Papers"
Contrast the treatment of denotation and reference in the following works:
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
- T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
- Marcel Proust, A L'Ombre Des Jeunes Filles En Fleurs
Well, that's what I think's wrong with formal examinations.
_______________________________________
(Gratuitous cross-promotion)
Question 2 (3 points)
Order the following by the extent to which they glorify substance abuse:
- Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting
- Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
- Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
- Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
- notgettingenough, Review of "The Marijuana Papers"
September 28, 2020
'I do not know much about the gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognized as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable,
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and
waiting'
February 2, 2019
Regresso a um dos mestres maiores, tão completo nesta sua modernidade sem afectações.
April 15, 2020
“Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”
T S Eliot, in a six-year period, published a set of four poems: Burnt Norton (1936), East Coker (1940), The Dry Salvages (1941), Little Gidding (1942). These poems have 5 sections each.
This collection of connected poems addresses multiple thematics about Time and Humanity. Perceived and presented in an existential method, Eliot's poems present complex philosophical points; In a period of chaos and destruction (World War II), the author relies his poetry style on his Christian beliefs.
“Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened, into the rose garden.”
According to the author, society is something that should be preserved. For that reason, personal introspection, meditation, faith, and the sense of divine are essential to prevent wars.
The first poem starts to deal with the beauty of nature, and with the constant idea of time. In the meantime, the second poem presents metaphysical ideas about life and death. In a later part of the set, thematics about Humanity and eternity are addressed in a metaphorical point of view. Furthermore, the last poem discusses whether humanity is able to choose salvation through the divine path or not.
“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.”
Eliot depicts eternity as something beautiful and real. If one is stuck in time, it can be a huge struggle. According to him, Time is repeatable and life is cyclical.
Meanwhile, the theological aspects of the poems are somewhat questionable. It can be arguable that the Christian values defended by the author emphasize the author's message. On the other hand, the importance of this religious belief is not imposed, and it's presented as the way for salvation and personal faith. Therefore, this is probably the most arguable thematic on this set of poems.
This set of poems appeal to the reader's imagination. The title of the set, "Four Quartets", implies that there's some correlation about the four seasons of the year. If life is cyclical so it's the living earthly year. In contrast to the four seasons, the quartets propose a certain musicality within the poetic structure and the thematics linked to it. Each poem has five parts, just like the Beethoven's 9th symphony. Perhaps, the creative connection between those poems and music address Eliot's writing style, in a deep imaginative manner.
“Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.”
“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.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.”
Despite all the controversy regarding Eliot's religious beliefs, "Four Quartets" addresses transcendental and dogmatic issues; Complex, classy, sophisticated are mere words that define Eliot's poetic style, a writing style that brought an outstanding contribution to modern poetry.
Rating: 3,5/5 stars
Note: Poems read on a different edition
T S Eliot, in a six-year period, published a set of four poems: Burnt Norton (1936), East Coker (1940), The Dry Salvages (1941), Little Gidding (1942). These poems have 5 sections each.
This collection of connected poems addresses multiple thematics about Time and Humanity. Perceived and presented in an existential method, Eliot's poems present complex philosophical points; In a period of chaos and destruction (World War II), the author relies his poetry style on his Christian beliefs.
“Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened, into the rose garden.”
According to the author, society is something that should be preserved. For that reason, personal introspection, meditation, faith, and the sense of divine are essential to prevent wars.
The first poem starts to deal with the beauty of nature, and with the constant idea of time. In the meantime, the second poem presents metaphysical ideas about life and death. In a later part of the set, thematics about Humanity and eternity are addressed in a metaphorical point of view. Furthermore, the last poem discusses whether humanity is able to choose salvation through the divine path or not.
“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.”
Eliot depicts eternity as something beautiful and real. If one is stuck in time, it can be a huge struggle. According to him, Time is repeatable and life is cyclical.
Meanwhile, the theological aspects of the poems are somewhat questionable. It can be arguable that the Christian values defended by the author emphasize the author's message. On the other hand, the importance of this religious belief is not imposed, and it's presented as the way for salvation and personal faith. Therefore, this is probably the most arguable thematic on this set of poems.
This set of poems appeal to the reader's imagination. The title of the set, "Four Quartets", implies that there's some correlation about the four seasons of the year. If life is cyclical so it's the living earthly year. In contrast to the four seasons, the quartets propose a certain musicality within the poetic structure and the thematics linked to it. Each poem has five parts, just like the Beethoven's 9th symphony. Perhaps, the creative connection between those poems and music address Eliot's writing style, in a deep imaginative manner.
“Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.”
“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.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.”
Despite all the controversy regarding Eliot's religious beliefs, "Four Quartets" addresses transcendental and dogmatic issues; Complex, classy, sophisticated are mere words that define Eliot's poetic style, a writing style that brought an outstanding contribution to modern poetry.
Rating: 3,5/5 stars
Note: Poems read on a different edition
June 2, 2020
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.
Eliot appears to be brooding on the elusive nature of time. This meditation doesn't shirk the inviolability of biological time but rather impales itself as an aesthetic act in the ouroboros of our conscious entanglement.
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Eliot appears to be brooding on the elusive nature of time. This meditation doesn't shirk the inviolability of biological time but rather impales itself as an aesthetic act in the ouroboros of our conscious entanglement.
May 12, 2024
In my beginning is my end
Hay libros que te pueden cambiar la vida, libros cuya lectura resulta de una intensidad tal que tu manera de ver y de experimentar las cosas, el entorno, el mundo, deja de ser la misma que antes; libros, en definitiva, que te tocan en lo más hondo del alma y logran, silenciosamente, cambiar tu percepción en cuanto a todo lo que te rodea. Uno termina de leerlos y queda sumido entre la plenitud y la felicidad más placenteras, con el único deseo de poder cobijarse y reposar de nuevo entre sus líneas, de vivir de sus palabras y beber de su lenguaje una vez más, y cuando se vuelven a leer —esta es la prueba de fuego definitiva— es como si nunca se hubiesen leído: ante el lector se extiende un horizonte completamente nuevo, augurando un redescubrimiento que sugiere y promete aún más que el anterior.
Cuatro cuartetos, de T. S. Eliot, es uno de esos libros. No tendría yo más de diecisiete años cuando un profesor del colegio, que ya antes me había prestado un ejemplar de 1942 de La tierra baldía en versión original y con las páginas amarillentas, me lo recomendó encarecidamente como si de una valiosísima joya se tratase. Claro que, por entonces, la poesía suponía para mí —al igual que, desgraciadamente, para la mayoría de los mortales— un mundo absolutamente extraño y desconocido; mi empeño por comprenderla solía ser en vano por muy buenas que fueran mis intenciones. Poco recuerdo de esa torpe e inexperta primera lectura, aunque la sensación generalizada fue de una gran impresión, como si me encontrase ante un monumento, imponente y lleno de significado, al que me esforzaba por entender. Pero, si bien era imposible no sentirse perdido, como un ciego buscando el interruptor a tientas, en ocasiones se me antojaba que no hacía falta entenderlo todo ni mucho menos; con simplemente leer las palabras impresas en la página, al margen de elucubraciones e interpretaciones, era suficiente para darme cuenta de su envergadura poética y humana. Provisto, esta vez sí, de cierta madurez —tanto vital como literaria— volví al libro por segunda vez hace no mucho, como quien se reencuentra con un viejo amigo al que nota cambiado; y, sobre todo, con ojos distintos. Dicha relectura, claro está, supuso una experiencia nueva, tan rompedora como reveladora.
Cuatro cuartetos es la obra cumbre de Eliot y una de las piedras angulares de la poesía moderna. Escritos por separado a lo largo de ocho años, los poemas se publicaron conjuntamente en 1943, en Nueva York (gracias a la editorial Harcourt, Brace & Co.), y un año después en Londres, en Faber & Faber. El volumen final, glorioso broche final a su gran carrera de poeta, quedó así compuesto por los poemas «Burnt Norton» (1936), «East Coker» (1940), «The Dry Salvages» (1941) y «Little Gidding» (1942), todos los cuales hilvanan un minucioso análisis poético de los vínculos del hombre con el tiempo y la eternidad, la inmortalidad y lo divino, temas sobre los que Eliot medita, tal y como apunta Helen Gardner en La composición de cuatro cuartetos, tomando sus propias experiencias como fuente principal. Fue la última colección de poemas que publicó Eliot, logrando así despedirse —al contrario de como acaba su poema «Los hombres huecos» (1925), con sus célebres versos finales— con un bang en lugar de un gemido. Citando a un poeta contemporáneo, la poesía de Eliot es como un martillo al lado de la ventana de emergencia; Cuatro cuartetos se presenta así como un libro de cabecera al que acudir en casos de auxilio o penuria intelectual, un perfecto manual de autoayuda en verso.
La poesía de Eliot, considerado el mejor poeta en lengua inglesa del siglo XX y uno de los privilegiado pater familias del modernismo literario anglosajón (sin olvidarnos de Joyce, Woolf, etc.), siempre fue descrita como una poesía de ideas. Que su poesía resulta impecable desde el punto de vista de la forma es del todo indudable, y es en parte gracias a esto que Eliot logra transmitir una sensación de trascendencia de principio a fin; se trata de pura poesía metafísica, anclada en lo terrenal y comprometida, a su vez, con una constante búsqueda de las inquietudes, espirituales o no, que separan al hombre de lo animal. Cuatro cuartetos, que él mismo consideraba su obra maestra y razón principal por la que recibió el Premio Nobel de Literatura en 1948, conforma la tesis definitiva acerca de sus preocupaciones poéticas. Pero no nos dejemos abrumar por estas observaciones: a pesar de la temática del poemario —manifiestamente densa— el lenguaje empleado es tan lúcido como sencillo.
Durante su juventud el precoz Eliot ya apuntaba maneras; basta con leer «La canción de amor de J. Alfred Prufrock» («Let us go then, you and I…»), para darse cuenta de ello. Con este intrincado monólogo de stream of consciousness, a través de las contemplaciones de un narrador que se asoma a la vejez y, por ende, a la muerte, el escritor de St. Louis logró poner el mundo poético patas arriba: escribió la mayoría del poema con tan solo veintidós años y, en 1915, lo publicó en la revista Poetry gracias a la intervención de Ezra Pound, con quien mantuvo una potente amistad que duraría toda una vida. Al margen de sus evidentes cualidades literarias y sorprendente madurez, el poema asombra por la habilidad con que se adentra en lo profundo a raíz de imágenes cotidianas (restaurantes con serrín, atardeceres, cucharillas de café, mujeres que conversan sobre Miguel Ángel, etc.), dando lugar a reflexiones que marcaron el inicio del afán poético de Eliot por todo aquello que nos transciende, aquello que se halla fuera del tiempo y del espacio.
Unos años después, en 1922, se publicó La tierra baldía y el panorama poético, como es bien sabido, quedó alterado para siempre. En parte debido a su influencia, su naturaleza esquiva y a las continuadas reinterpretaciones en torno a ella, no resulta extraño que permanezca como la obra más conocida del autor hoy en día. Sin embargo, quizá sea Cuatro cuartetos su visión más madura y cohesiva, puesto que mientras La tierra baldía se muestra en ocasiones forzosamente complicada y escurridiza, cual código impenetrable, Cuatro cuartetos aboga por la claridad, no solo en cuanto a la forma, sino también y sobre todo como finalidad última: claridad es, de hecho, lo que Eliot persigue a través de estos cuatro poemas. Claridad como fin; claridad como meta vital. Fue precisamente en su discurso de aceptación del Nobel donde Eliot recalcó que, si bien el lenguaje constituye una barrera, la poesía misma nos proporciona un motivo para tratar de superar dicha barrera. De esta forma, con Cuatro cuartetos Eliot consigue expresar mediante palabras lo que estas a duras penas dan a entender por sí solas, sobreponiéndose así a sus limitaciones intrínsecas y revelando lo que se esconde tras ellas con pasmosa destreza, si bien, como confiesa de manera contrita en East Coker, solo ha aprendido a dominar las palabras para decir lo que ya no tiene que decir.
Las palabras de Eliot bullen en todo momento con ansiedad por encontrar algo superior a lo meramente humano. En «Burnt Norton» parte de la premisa de que «la Humanidad no puede soportar mucha realidad» y por ello se esfuerza, a lo largo de las cuatro composiciones que siguen, en elevar a la persona, imperfecta en todo su ser, a la perfección anhelada. Eso sí: consciente de lo mundano y de lo terrenal, y sin perder de vista todo aquello —tanto sus limitaciones como sus aspiraciones ulteriores— que hacen del individuo, de la persona, algo tan particular. En su día dicha obra fue criticada por ser abiertamente cristiana, lo cual resulta un tanto desconcertante; si Cuatro cuartetos es «cristiana» se debe en esencia a que es poesía humana, y no al contrario. Entre algunos de los más críticos con esto se encontraba el gran George Orwell (en un artículo publicado en Poetry London, número octubre-noviembre 1942) que renegó de los poemas con el descriptivo «deprimidos y deprimentes». En todo caso, insinuar que el anhelo por la inmortalidad o la eternidad —o su mero concepto siquiera— es algo que pertenece en exclusiva a los devotos es un craso error, más aún teniendo en cuenta que lo que dota a estos poemas de muchos de sus rasgos cualitativos es su descarada universalidad. No nos encontramos ante un mero panfleto teológico, sino ante una obra poética de gran profundidad.
Pero esta claridad que tan trabajosamente persigue Eliot, ¿dónde se encuentra? La problemática del tiempo y su relación con el hombre es el tema que más peso ocupa en los poemas. Las reflexiones de Eliot sobre aquel, concebido como irredimible e irreversible en su constante movimiento, destacan por su belleza y sensibilidad: «Only through time time is conquered», pero el tiempo no fue ni será, simplemente es («And all is always now»), moviéndose perpetua e inexorablemente: «If all time is eternally present / All time is unredeemable». Eliot nos recuerda que poco podemos hacer al respecto, con lo que únicamente nos queda vivir con ello en el momento actual («What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present»), a la espera del momento que Eliot aguarda esperanzadamente: la eternidad, ese presente sin futuro. Muchos han sido los poetas de tradición anglosajona que describieron, si no condenaron, al tiempo y su irreparable flujo como un asesino sin escrúpulos: Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, Yeats, Dylan Thomas, y un largo etcétera. De ahí que la eternidad, momento anhelado durante toda una vida, suponga por tanto la muerte del asesino, ese asesino de agujas que matan lenta y despiadadamente; y, por ende, la victoria del hombre sobre lo que, paradójicamente, le hace hombre. Parafraseando a William Blake, aquel quien besa la joya cuando esta cruza su camino vive en el amanecer de la eternidad. Es esa joya la que, sin fatiga y con ilusión, busca Eliot.
Atento a todo lo imperfecto que le rodea y ávido, a su vez, por alcanzar la perfección inalcanzable, Eliot cree que la humildad —y no la soberbia—, el reconocimiento de nuestra naturaleza fallida, probablemente sea la vía idónea para seguir dicho camino: «The only wisdom we can hope to acquire / Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless». Así, la verdadera virtud yace en el intento honesto y no tanto en el resultado final, momento que, por mucho que nos duela, no depende de nosotros: solo nos queda intentarlo, aunque sea una y otra vez y a rastras («For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business»). No obstante, Eliot no desiste en ningún momento, consciente de que lo eterno está ahí, en alguna parte, animándonos a ello. Tal y como escribe, no cesaremos en la exploración y el fin de todas nuestras búsquedas será llegar adonde comenzamos, conocer el lugar por vez primera. En último término, su poesía es un reflejo perfecto de dicha pretensión y, ante todo, un bellísimo canto a lo contradictorio e incomprensible de la vida y la muerte, de lo humano y lo divino, del tiempo pasado, tiempo presente y tiempo futuro.
Así las cosas, es fácil imaginarse a Eliot colocando de vuelta la pluma sobre el escritorio al terminar de escribir tras esos ocho largos años y, pudiendo por fin convertir en suyas las palabras de Rimbaud, declamando triunfalmente:
¡La hemos vuelto a hallar!
¿Qué?, la Eternidad.
https://www.jotdown.es/2014/05/in-my-...
Hay libros que te pueden cambiar la vida, libros cuya lectura resulta de una intensidad tal que tu manera de ver y de experimentar las cosas, el entorno, el mundo, deja de ser la misma que antes; libros, en definitiva, que te tocan en lo más hondo del alma y logran, silenciosamente, cambiar tu percepción en cuanto a todo lo que te rodea. Uno termina de leerlos y queda sumido entre la plenitud y la felicidad más placenteras, con el único deseo de poder cobijarse y reposar de nuevo entre sus líneas, de vivir de sus palabras y beber de su lenguaje una vez más, y cuando se vuelven a leer —esta es la prueba de fuego definitiva— es como si nunca se hubiesen leído: ante el lector se extiende un horizonte completamente nuevo, augurando un redescubrimiento que sugiere y promete aún más que el anterior.
Cuatro cuartetos, de T. S. Eliot, es uno de esos libros. No tendría yo más de diecisiete años cuando un profesor del colegio, que ya antes me había prestado un ejemplar de 1942 de La tierra baldía en versión original y con las páginas amarillentas, me lo recomendó encarecidamente como si de una valiosísima joya se tratase. Claro que, por entonces, la poesía suponía para mí —al igual que, desgraciadamente, para la mayoría de los mortales— un mundo absolutamente extraño y desconocido; mi empeño por comprenderla solía ser en vano por muy buenas que fueran mis intenciones. Poco recuerdo de esa torpe e inexperta primera lectura, aunque la sensación generalizada fue de una gran impresión, como si me encontrase ante un monumento, imponente y lleno de significado, al que me esforzaba por entender. Pero, si bien era imposible no sentirse perdido, como un ciego buscando el interruptor a tientas, en ocasiones se me antojaba que no hacía falta entenderlo todo ni mucho menos; con simplemente leer las palabras impresas en la página, al margen de elucubraciones e interpretaciones, era suficiente para darme cuenta de su envergadura poética y humana. Provisto, esta vez sí, de cierta madurez —tanto vital como literaria— volví al libro por segunda vez hace no mucho, como quien se reencuentra con un viejo amigo al que nota cambiado; y, sobre todo, con ojos distintos. Dicha relectura, claro está, supuso una experiencia nueva, tan rompedora como reveladora.
Cuatro cuartetos es la obra cumbre de Eliot y una de las piedras angulares de la poesía moderna. Escritos por separado a lo largo de ocho años, los poemas se publicaron conjuntamente en 1943, en Nueva York (gracias a la editorial Harcourt, Brace & Co.), y un año después en Londres, en Faber & Faber. El volumen final, glorioso broche final a su gran carrera de poeta, quedó así compuesto por los poemas «Burnt Norton» (1936), «East Coker» (1940), «The Dry Salvages» (1941) y «Little Gidding» (1942), todos los cuales hilvanan un minucioso análisis poético de los vínculos del hombre con el tiempo y la eternidad, la inmortalidad y lo divino, temas sobre los que Eliot medita, tal y como apunta Helen Gardner en La composición de cuatro cuartetos, tomando sus propias experiencias como fuente principal. Fue la última colección de poemas que publicó Eliot, logrando así despedirse —al contrario de como acaba su poema «Los hombres huecos» (1925), con sus célebres versos finales— con un bang en lugar de un gemido. Citando a un poeta contemporáneo, la poesía de Eliot es como un martillo al lado de la ventana de emergencia; Cuatro cuartetos se presenta así como un libro de cabecera al que acudir en casos de auxilio o penuria intelectual, un perfecto manual de autoayuda en verso.
La poesía de Eliot, considerado el mejor poeta en lengua inglesa del siglo XX y uno de los privilegiado pater familias del modernismo literario anglosajón (sin olvidarnos de Joyce, Woolf, etc.), siempre fue descrita como una poesía de ideas. Que su poesía resulta impecable desde el punto de vista de la forma es del todo indudable, y es en parte gracias a esto que Eliot logra transmitir una sensación de trascendencia de principio a fin; se trata de pura poesía metafísica, anclada en lo terrenal y comprometida, a su vez, con una constante búsqueda de las inquietudes, espirituales o no, que separan al hombre de lo animal. Cuatro cuartetos, que él mismo consideraba su obra maestra y razón principal por la que recibió el Premio Nobel de Literatura en 1948, conforma la tesis definitiva acerca de sus preocupaciones poéticas. Pero no nos dejemos abrumar por estas observaciones: a pesar de la temática del poemario —manifiestamente densa— el lenguaje empleado es tan lúcido como sencillo.
Durante su juventud el precoz Eliot ya apuntaba maneras; basta con leer «La canción de amor de J. Alfred Prufrock» («Let us go then, you and I…»), para darse cuenta de ello. Con este intrincado monólogo de stream of consciousness, a través de las contemplaciones de un narrador que se asoma a la vejez y, por ende, a la muerte, el escritor de St. Louis logró poner el mundo poético patas arriba: escribió la mayoría del poema con tan solo veintidós años y, en 1915, lo publicó en la revista Poetry gracias a la intervención de Ezra Pound, con quien mantuvo una potente amistad que duraría toda una vida. Al margen de sus evidentes cualidades literarias y sorprendente madurez, el poema asombra por la habilidad con que se adentra en lo profundo a raíz de imágenes cotidianas (restaurantes con serrín, atardeceres, cucharillas de café, mujeres que conversan sobre Miguel Ángel, etc.), dando lugar a reflexiones que marcaron el inicio del afán poético de Eliot por todo aquello que nos transciende, aquello que se halla fuera del tiempo y del espacio.
Unos años después, en 1922, se publicó La tierra baldía y el panorama poético, como es bien sabido, quedó alterado para siempre. En parte debido a su influencia, su naturaleza esquiva y a las continuadas reinterpretaciones en torno a ella, no resulta extraño que permanezca como la obra más conocida del autor hoy en día. Sin embargo, quizá sea Cuatro cuartetos su visión más madura y cohesiva, puesto que mientras La tierra baldía se muestra en ocasiones forzosamente complicada y escurridiza, cual código impenetrable, Cuatro cuartetos aboga por la claridad, no solo en cuanto a la forma, sino también y sobre todo como finalidad última: claridad es, de hecho, lo que Eliot persigue a través de estos cuatro poemas. Claridad como fin; claridad como meta vital. Fue precisamente en su discurso de aceptación del Nobel donde Eliot recalcó que, si bien el lenguaje constituye una barrera, la poesía misma nos proporciona un motivo para tratar de superar dicha barrera. De esta forma, con Cuatro cuartetos Eliot consigue expresar mediante palabras lo que estas a duras penas dan a entender por sí solas, sobreponiéndose así a sus limitaciones intrínsecas y revelando lo que se esconde tras ellas con pasmosa destreza, si bien, como confiesa de manera contrita en East Coker, solo ha aprendido a dominar las palabras para decir lo que ya no tiene que decir.
Las palabras de Eliot bullen en todo momento con ansiedad por encontrar algo superior a lo meramente humano. En «Burnt Norton» parte de la premisa de que «la Humanidad no puede soportar mucha realidad» y por ello se esfuerza, a lo largo de las cuatro composiciones que siguen, en elevar a la persona, imperfecta en todo su ser, a la perfección anhelada. Eso sí: consciente de lo mundano y de lo terrenal, y sin perder de vista todo aquello —tanto sus limitaciones como sus aspiraciones ulteriores— que hacen del individuo, de la persona, algo tan particular. En su día dicha obra fue criticada por ser abiertamente cristiana, lo cual resulta un tanto desconcertante; si Cuatro cuartetos es «cristiana» se debe en esencia a que es poesía humana, y no al contrario. Entre algunos de los más críticos con esto se encontraba el gran George Orwell (en un artículo publicado en Poetry London, número octubre-noviembre 1942) que renegó de los poemas con el descriptivo «deprimidos y deprimentes». En todo caso, insinuar que el anhelo por la inmortalidad o la eternidad —o su mero concepto siquiera— es algo que pertenece en exclusiva a los devotos es un craso error, más aún teniendo en cuenta que lo que dota a estos poemas de muchos de sus rasgos cualitativos es su descarada universalidad. No nos encontramos ante un mero panfleto teológico, sino ante una obra poética de gran profundidad.
Pero esta claridad que tan trabajosamente persigue Eliot, ¿dónde se encuentra? La problemática del tiempo y su relación con el hombre es el tema que más peso ocupa en los poemas. Las reflexiones de Eliot sobre aquel, concebido como irredimible e irreversible en su constante movimiento, destacan por su belleza y sensibilidad: «Only through time time is conquered», pero el tiempo no fue ni será, simplemente es («And all is always now»), moviéndose perpetua e inexorablemente: «If all time is eternally present / All time is unredeemable». Eliot nos recuerda que poco podemos hacer al respecto, con lo que únicamente nos queda vivir con ello en el momento actual («What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present»), a la espera del momento que Eliot aguarda esperanzadamente: la eternidad, ese presente sin futuro. Muchos han sido los poetas de tradición anglosajona que describieron, si no condenaron, al tiempo y su irreparable flujo como un asesino sin escrúpulos: Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, Yeats, Dylan Thomas, y un largo etcétera. De ahí que la eternidad, momento anhelado durante toda una vida, suponga por tanto la muerte del asesino, ese asesino de agujas que matan lenta y despiadadamente; y, por ende, la victoria del hombre sobre lo que, paradójicamente, le hace hombre. Parafraseando a William Blake, aquel quien besa la joya cuando esta cruza su camino vive en el amanecer de la eternidad. Es esa joya la que, sin fatiga y con ilusión, busca Eliot.
Atento a todo lo imperfecto que le rodea y ávido, a su vez, por alcanzar la perfección inalcanzable, Eliot cree que la humildad —y no la soberbia—, el reconocimiento de nuestra naturaleza fallida, probablemente sea la vía idónea para seguir dicho camino: «The only wisdom we can hope to acquire / Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless». Así, la verdadera virtud yace en el intento honesto y no tanto en el resultado final, momento que, por mucho que nos duela, no depende de nosotros: solo nos queda intentarlo, aunque sea una y otra vez y a rastras («For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business»). No obstante, Eliot no desiste en ningún momento, consciente de que lo eterno está ahí, en alguna parte, animándonos a ello. Tal y como escribe, no cesaremos en la exploración y el fin de todas nuestras búsquedas será llegar adonde comenzamos, conocer el lugar por vez primera. En último término, su poesía es un reflejo perfecto de dicha pretensión y, ante todo, un bellísimo canto a lo contradictorio e incomprensible de la vida y la muerte, de lo humano y lo divino, del tiempo pasado, tiempo presente y tiempo futuro.
Así las cosas, es fácil imaginarse a Eliot colocando de vuelta la pluma sobre el escritorio al terminar de escribir tras esos ocho largos años y, pudiendo por fin convertir en suyas las palabras de Rimbaud, declamando triunfalmente:
¡La hemos vuelto a hallar!
¿Qué?, la Eternidad.
https://www.jotdown.es/2014/05/in-my-...
January 22, 2011
T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets is a masterpiece. I don't know how I missed it before this year. How can you not love a poem that says things like:
There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been....
Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
or
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been....
Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
or
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
May 6, 2022
Just beautiful! Eliot’s multifaceted set of poems deserves many readings.
April 21, 2018
In my beginning is my end
La parola che mi viene in mente per questa opera è prodigio : non immaginavo che temi così astratti, così ineffabili e metafisici potessero divenire materiale poetico e con quali splendidi risultati estetici, visionari e musicali! Non ho le competenze per una disanima critica di questo libro meraviglioso, vera pietra miliare della letteratura moderna: e impossibile mi è anche scegliere tra The Waste Land e questi Four Quartets.
Posso solo dire che ho adorato la capacità di Eliot di cambiare tono, di arrivare a versi perfetti esteticamente per poi passare ad una scrittura totalmente intelligibile, ma sempre evocativa e visionaria. Anche se lo stesso poeta dubita delle possibilità di rendere a parole idee tanto immense:
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings.
E poi percepire come tutto sia parte di una struttura perfetta che allaccia il proprio inizio e la propria fine, dimostrazione meta-letteraria di ciò che Eliot asserisce in quelle stesse righe. Non ho potuto che pensare a Borges e alla sua capacità di rendere letteraria la metafisica.
Dopo questa lettura credo che la poesia non abbia limiti, nè confini - anzi, forse può raggiungere territori superiori a qualunque prosa.
La parola che mi viene in mente per questa opera è prodigio : non immaginavo che temi così astratti, così ineffabili e metafisici potessero divenire materiale poetico e con quali splendidi risultati estetici, visionari e musicali! Non ho le competenze per una disanima critica di questo libro meraviglioso, vera pietra miliare della letteratura moderna: e impossibile mi è anche scegliere tra The Waste Land e questi Four Quartets.
Posso solo dire che ho adorato la capacità di Eliot di cambiare tono, di arrivare a versi perfetti esteticamente per poi passare ad una scrittura totalmente intelligibile, ma sempre evocativa e visionaria. Anche se lo stesso poeta dubita delle possibilità di rendere a parole idee tanto immense:
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings.
E poi percepire come tutto sia parte di una struttura perfetta che allaccia il proprio inizio e la propria fine, dimostrazione meta-letteraria di ciò che Eliot asserisce in quelle stesse righe. Non ho potuto che pensare a Borges e alla sua capacità di rendere letteraria la metafisica.
Dopo questa lettura credo che la poesia non abbia limiti, nè confini - anzi, forse può raggiungere territori superiori a qualunque prosa.
June 2, 2020
No puedo expresar con precisión todo lo enunciado por Eliot en este volumen, hacerlo, de cualquier modo -pienso-, es una necedad. Solo él supo a cabalidad. Encuentro cálidas, afables, serenas e insondables sus palabras; nutridas, evidentemente, por una formidable fuerza oriental, de este modo, supe desde el primer poema -Burnt Norton- que este trabajo era una obra maestra. Volveré, supongo, asaz a sus lineas vigorizantes.
October 3, 2023
4/5 Stars
Actually enjoyed this! I read The Waste Land and Other Poems and did not have a good time. I'm glad I gave Eliot another go because this is definitely more my cup of tea!
Actually enjoyed this! I read The Waste Land and Other Poems and did not have a good time. I'm glad I gave Eliot another go because this is definitely more my cup of tea!
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