T.S. Elliot: "Four Quartets"

This post will seek to analyze the major philosophical and religious themes in T.S. Elliot’s “Four Quartets”. Although most regard “The Wasteland” as his greatest work (and indeed it is one of the greatest of the 20th century), Elliot himself believed that “Four Quartets” perhaps surpassed it. Printed in its entirety in 1943, the poem is written mainly in free verse and ties in themes of the nature of time and the divine through metaphor and repetition. It is divided into four sections- Burnt Norton, East Coker, the Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding. What Elliot attempts to convey in the poem is a theory of the true nature of reality as eternal. Ultimately, this reveals a Christian and Platonic ontology which reflects Elliot’s own Anglican faith and is illustrated in the poem through religious imagery. He opens, “Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future/ And time future contained in time past. / If all time is eternally present/ All time is unredeemable.” Time is closely connected with the divine as it serves to represent the concept of the everlasting. Perhaps most well known is the line “In my beginning is my end” which begins East Coker, and culminating with “In my end is my beginning.” He also later states that the “End and Beginning were always there.” This seeks to reinforce the theme of perpetuity and a changeless state. And this is once again repeated throughout many other portions, such as Dry Salvages: “There is no end, but addition: the trailing/Consequence of further days and hours.”

The nature of reality is also gestured towards with the concept of logos, which was used by ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. Heraclitus writes: “The cosmos, the same for all, none of the gods nor of humans has made, but it was always and is and shall be: an ever-living fire being kindled in measures and being extinguished in measures…Changing, it rests.” The world itself is a constant flux as symbolized by fire. Fire is always in movement but remains the same substance. Likewise, the world of experience is one of change but it is the divine which is permanent and immutable. This moves towards the ontology of Parmenides, who posited change to be only apparent. This is illustrated with the line in Burnt Norton: “At the still point of the turning world./ Neither flesh nor fleshless;/ Neither from nor towards;/ at the still point, there the dance is.” This describes a world in perpetual change due to one unmoved mover, or God. Morris Weitz states of this line, “In God is the source of movement and the temporal. Not that God is movement; rather from Him emanates movement, to utilize a neo-Platonic idea. There is the temporal, the flux; but without God, the Timeless, there would be no temporal.”

This is also seen in the fragments of Heraclitus’ work which argue that the universe was governed by a single divine law, or logos, which was common to all but recognized by only few. That being said, logos also translates as “the Word”, meaning the truth and divine. Heraclitus’ writes, ““A fool is excited by every word”. This indicates that many fail to come to realize the truth although it is evident. They become attached to numerous false dogmas or ‘words’ but never come to know God who is ‘The Word’. Elliot also mirrors this in certain portions of “Four Quartets” in the lines which states: “Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind/ Cannot bear very much reality.” The bird is used here as a messenger of the Truth, which is not recognized by most in the realm of experience. To use Plato’s allegory of the cave, when the prisoner first is released from his chains, he looks into the light of the fire and is blinded. He then would sooner doubt the reality of the fire than the previous shadows which he believed to constitute all of reality. Experience fundamentally is set out to mislead because it distracts one’s attention from the realm outside of the cave, which is the form of the good or God. Elliot writes, “We must start with the temporal, the ever-changing experience; and come to see its dependence upon the Timeless (God)”

The form of the good itself is symbolized by the sun, which like God, gives rise to all the other representations in the sensible realm. But this form of the good is ultimately indescribable and ineffable to the cave dweller, who cannot recognize it as the source of his experiences. It is only the philosopher king who is able to leave the cave who sees that his experience does “Point to one end, which is always present.” Thus, Elliot rejects the virtue of a posteriori synthetic knowledge derived through empiricism. In short: our eyes deceive us. Elliot writes, “We had the experience but missed the meaning” and in East Coker, “There is, it seems to us/At best, only a limited value/In the knowledge derived from experience./The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies.” This amounts to a rejection of the ability for scientific empirical discovery to properly discover the nature of reality. Rather, for Elliot we must submit to faith: it is only by recognizing the Word that we may find redemption.