T.S.Eliot's Four Quartet.?

Question

I am supposed to present a paper on this poem but I dont know its general frame i.e. meaning or major theme, therefore I cant choose a topic. the deadline is looming ): Plz help.

Answer 1

Eliot considered the Four Quartets his masterpiece. I think it is the poetic masterpiece of the 20th century and, perhaps, of all Christian literature. But his understanding of Christianity is always tempered by his early fascination with the Nirvana of Buddhism and Hindu symbols and traditions. And, though he speaks to and for the 20th century, his voice always echoes with ancient and Renaissance metaphors and world views. Eliot has chosen to be an Anglican, and an Englishman, and his choice is nowhere embodied more precisely than in this work; yet its roots are clearly in his youth in the United States and his images reflect its topography, from "the strong brown god" of the Mississippi River (in St. Louis, where he was born) to the Dry Salvages of Cape Ann, Massachusetts (where his family spent time during his childhood).

To oversimplify, the theme of The Four Quartets is time, the passing of time into timelessness ("the still point of the turning world"). If I were to recommend a topic for your paper, I would suggest "beginnings and endings," for as I have grown old along with Eliot I have learned from experience, "What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning"; "Love is most nearly itself / When here and now cease to matter"; "We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity"; "in my end is my beginning."

The article in wikipedia is a brief but sensitive reading of the poems [1], a good place to begin. Then read and re-read the poems, choosing those passages that speak for and to you and asking yourself why. At this point (and only at this point), if you want to consult secondary sources, you might begin with 'Four quartets' rehearsed: A commentary on T.S. Eliot's cycle of poems (1947) by Raymond Preston, the first line-by-line critique of the poems, still a good non-controversial, common-sense approach.

You might supplement that with Dove Descending: A Journey into T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets [2006] by Thomas Howard, who was raised an Evangelical, and converted to Catholicism in 1985, when he was fifty years old. Here's what he said in a recent interview about his book:

"Eliot had a vast influence for several decades in the English-speaking world, during which he enjoyed an eminence that few writers achieve during their lifetime. But it gradually dawned on the academic world and the world of the arts that Eliot was extolling an unabashedly Christian vision of things, and he was virtually exiled from English departments. He said things that the 20th century did not at all like to hear, most notably that undiluted Christian orthodoxy judges the whole modern enterprise." [2]

Howard is unabashed in his placement of Four Quartets at the forefront of Christian art: "In my opinion, Four Quartets should take its place with other monuments that bespeak the Christian vision, e.g., Dante's work, Chartres cathedral, Bach's B-minor Mass, Mozart's Requiem, and van Eyck's painting of The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb. But there is no easy 'starting point' for one approaching Eliot's work. It is as difficult as scaling Everest–and at least as rewarding. But a new reader needs some help."

So good luck in your mountain climbing. In your first reading, you don't have to get to the top of Mt. Everest. Just experience the poem as poem: immerse yourself in Eliot's images. For example, in the following excerpt, contrast the experience of the saint, on the one hand, and "most of us," on the other. Make two columns listing phrases that best characterize the lifetime occupation of the saint and "unattended moment" of the rest of us. Note, too, the few concrete images Eliot uses in this passage; e.g., shaft of sunlight, wild thyme, winter lightning, waterfall (with all that alliteration, assonance, and consonance). Which list do they belong in? Why? And why do you think these phrases are so lush and so "poetic"? How do they relate to the yew-tree at the end?

But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint-
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, thought and action.
The hint half-guessed, the gift half-understood, is
Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled,
Where action were otherwise movement
Of that which is only moved
And has in it no source of movement -
Driven by daemonic, cthonic
Powers. And right action is freedom
From past and future also.
For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realised;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying;
We, content at the last
If our temporal reversion nourish
(Not too far from the yew-tree)
The life of the significant soil."

Don't worry about climbing any mountains the first time you read the poems; just dig around in that "significant soil." And listen to "the music / While the music lasts."