Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Four Quartets
Book Review: Confused and befuddled
Summary: 5 Stars
I'm not a poetry person, at all. So when my teacher assigned this book, I was skeptical to say the least. I picked it up and became so engrossed that I finished it in one sitting (which was easy to do because it was not very long). There were so many parts of the book that I simply couldn't quite understand. I had an inkling of what it meant but I felt that there were so many points left be discovered. However, this did not bother me in the least. Even though I felt slightly confused and befuddled, I still loved it. The more I read, discussed and studied certain parts, the more I loved it.
What is the book about? It is about time, love, the ever-changing world, and a God who is the still point.
My favorite part is the end, "We shall never cease from exploration..."
Book Review: Eliot's Four Quartets
Summary: 5 Stars
The Four Quartets by TS Eliot is a classic and should not be missed. It is of the type of poetry that evokes meanings from their hidden places in us through the use of word trails that are only partially logical. Our own emotions connect things, so when it is read, don't approach it with the usual straining to decipher the meaning. The ring of a gong lingers after it is struck, something of a parallel to how the poem works. Fascinating, too, is its approach to understanding the elusive sense of time, but it is couched more in the sensibilities of the East than the West.Book Review: Eliot's Quartets
Summary: 5 Stars
T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets give us his most mature and profound poetic work. Deeply influenced by the theology of St. John of the Cross, his quartets provide us a probing of the human predicament along with an openness to God's radical solution to it. In "Burnt Norton," we're invited to explore the mysteries of time and history, of memory and experience, to delve deeply into the inner realms of solitude, to discover the inability of words to capture the reality of existence. Then in "East Coker" we discern something of the meaning of history; we discover the reality of spiritual rebirth. Here, Eliot says: "The only wisdom we can hope to acquire / Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless."
In humility, in submission, we encounter the One who gives us spiritual life, who delivers us from sin's bondage and grants us goodness. The following lines, dealing with Christ's atoning work, are some of the finest I've ever read:
"The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.
Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.
The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.
The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the
smoke is briars.
The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood--
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good."
The third quartet, "The Dry Salvages," continues Eliot's quest for insight into history, for understanding of the salvation story. Much evades us, much we fail to understand,
"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."
The fourth quartet, "Little Gidding," repeats and deepens themes earlier treated. Living with the mysteries of time and history, of sin and sanctity, we're called to a contemplative, prayerful response, to a paradoxical attachment and detachment, a taking hold and letting go, all of which perfect, by cleansing, our will. Here the reality of Pentecost shines forth, for:
"The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre--
To be redeemed from fire by fire.
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."
What's required of us to experience such fire? to know such cleansing? In Eliot's re-echoing of St John of the Cross's Living Flame of Love, what's required is simply this:
"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 flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one."
Book Review: Eliot's greatest and final poetic acheivement
Summary: 5 Stars
FOUR QUARTETS marks T.S. Eliot's crowning acheivement as a poet. It is the last substantial poetry he wrote before turning to drama and consists of four poems each with a five-part structure. The work as a whole is concerned with the perception of time, linked with the importance of poetic art and the place of Christianity in deciphering the meaning of one's lifetime.After two quotations from Heraclitus, "Burnt Norton" opens the collection. Here Eliot muses on the idea that all possible outcomes of any event are secretly around us, unseen and unperceived. An empty pool is, in some other reality, filled with water and a blooming lotus. Eliot's metaphysical insight here is reminiscent of quantum theory that was then beginning to become the rage in physics circles. These speculations are tricky and difficult to get one's head around, and even more difficult to plainly put into words, but Eliot manages to succeed.
"East Coker", named after the town in England from where Eliot's Puritan ancestor emigrated to America, deals with the cyclical nature of time. Here the poet surveys the tendency for all earthly things to rise and ultimately fall. Christianity with its emphasis on eternal life, asserts Eliot, promises a way to change one's end to one's beginning and escape the fall into oblivion that dooms everything.
"The Dry Salvages", in reference to a place on the New England shore which Eliot visited as a youth, is the weak point of the collection. A rumination with a nautical theme, the poem suffers from meandering phrasing and peculiar wording. Its Marian devotion is inconsistent with the Puritan/Anglican tradition of the rest of FOUR QUARTETS. Most would attack "The Dry Salvages" for its oft-maligned line "I sometimes wonder if this is what Krishna meant", seen by some as overly haugty intellectualism. I think this is unfair, and in fact the section which that line begins is the one bit that redeems the poem. Eliot's Harvard education, where he first became familiar with Eastern thought, was 30 years in the past, but the subject still preoccupied him in this poem.
"Little Gidding" superbly ends FOUR QUARTETS. It was written in the height of the Blitz, a time of fear and doubt in England, but it counters Hitler's madness with a note of hope and spiritual triumph. Eliot calls back to an earlier conflict, England's Civil War, and seeks any lesson it might teach his generation. "The communication of the dead," he writes, "is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living." As the poem ends, he has acheived inner peace in a time of pandemonium, through the realisation that the pain of the present is escapable by reaching to the past - what poets have done before - and the future - what is still left to be written.
FOUR QUARTETS is a complicated and vast work. While not as full of obvious quotations as his earlier, more popular work "The Waste Land", it does work in inspiration and material from Christian thinkers such as St. John of the Cross and Julian of Norwich, and contains many illusions to 17th century England. As a result, the work is incredibly deep and one can find something new with each reading. But FOUR QUARTETS is also an entertaining work for the casual reader. A combination of smooth and engaging sound with the great themes of all time is a remarkable combination. Eliot's greatest work, I'd wholeheartedly recommend it.
Book Review: Four Quartets
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a tiny book, more like a pamphlet, only 58 pages long with large print and some blank pages as part of the design. But it is mighty in its impact. These "four quartets" are four of T. S. Eliot's poems meditating (among other things) on the nature of time - time past, time present, time future...If you are of my generation and have read the poems before, you might love carrying this little book around just to dip into it for a line or two, and maybe understand something you never understood before. (T. S. Eliot is not always an easy read.) If you have never read them before, I envy you!