As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
[…] In my end is my beginning (Eliot, East Coker)
In November 1922, one month after the poem’s first publication, T S Eliot remarked “As for The Waste Land, that is a thing of the past […] I am now feeling my way toward a new form and style”. This would eventually have its fullest issue in Four Quartets, the most monumental poem of all Eliot’s works, and the literary culmination of his spiritual autobiography. The course will study the four inter-related poems, placing them in the context of Eliot’s broader career and inner journey.
Written across 1935 to 1942, the four poems that comprise Eliot’s Four Quartets (‘Burnt Norton’, ‘East Coker’, ‘The Dry Salvages’, and ‘Little Gidding’) are the product of almost a lifetime’s searching for transcendent meaning on Eliot’s part. Commencing with an introduction tracing Eliot’s background and influences, along with his poetic and personal evolution, from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, through The Waste Land, The Hollow Men and Ash Wednesday, we will consider each of the poems of the Four Quartets in turn and in relation to one another, with a view to making sense of the constant recycling and re-examining of the significant connections which define the work. Concerned essentially with time and experience, Four Quartets both tells us about something immanent and revelatory, and attempts to enact it at the same time; through time, through memory, through history, and through particular experiences at particular times, the poem is understood as an autobiography in which we see the poet both exploring immediacy and returning to his roots.
Our focus will be on Four Quartets as something of a spiritual autobiography, a poetic work of art which becomes an experience and a revelation to its audience, and this understanding will be augmented by broader reference to Eliot’s wider oeuvre, his plays, critical essays, and other poems.
