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.
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.