The four quartets
For our own past is covered by the currents of action, But the torment of others remains an experience Unqualified, unworn by subsequent attrition. Eliot's Four Quartets has not lost its status as a strikingly 'modern' poem; its evolving meditations, however, merely play complex variations upon the design and motifs of Romantic representation of the poets educational progress.
The present is capable of always reminding one of the past. Fare forward.
Four quartets shmoop
Leavis and emphasised how Eliot captured Christian experience in general and how it relates to literature. With this call to attend to the form of the poems in mind, let us consider the structure of each of the Four Quartets. They are at once an attempt at making a final general statement about the spiritual life and an intense last flowering of the poetry of a very specific person. The present is capable of always reminding one of the past. 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. Eliot might have hoped for more, but that's something. God's love allows mankind to redeem themselves and escape the living hell through purgation by fire; he drew the affirmative coda "All shall be well" from medieval mystic Julian of Norwich. The whole work is, in fact, the most authentic example I know in modern poetry of a satisfying religio-poetic meditation. The achievement is of a high order, but the best qualities of Four Quartets are inevitably different from those of The Waste Land. John Fletcher felt that Eliot's understanding of salvation could not help the real world whereas Louis Untermeyer believed that not everyone would understand the poems.Christians have been so glad of having such a great poet as a recruit that they have sometimes not noticed his less-than-entire orthodoxy. Or would Britain be conquered by the enemy? I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god —sullen, untamed and intractable, Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier; Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce; Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The completed set received divided reviews in the United States while it was received overall favourably by the British. Eliot almost entirely abandoned poetry after Little Gidding and turned, for good and ill, to the theatre; I don't propose to consider his plays in this series. It seems not unseemly to suppose that Eliot's imagination and is this not a theology? They echo and re-echo each other, and one sequence in each poem, as it were, echoes its companion sequence in the next poem. II You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure, That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here. Leavis , in Scrutiny Summer , analysed the first three poems and discussed how the verse "makes its explorations into the concrete realities of experience below the conceptual currency" instead of their Christian themes. If we believe that the making of art is one of the highest justifications of human life, it is possible to be consoled and moved and perhaps ennobled by these poems. In my beginning is my end.I There is, it seems to us, At best, only a limited value In the knowledge derived from experience. From past and future also.
