T. S. Eliot Reading 'Four Quartets' (Cassette)

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Summary: Eliot's greatest and final poetic acheivement
Review: 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.

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Summary: A rare, profound poem
Review: FQ can be argued to be one of the finest English poems of the 20th Century. Whether it is the timelessness of its words, its vivid imagery, the narrator's contemplative tone, or the fact that this is Eliot at his finest, FQ is a rare, profound poem, modest in some respects, epic in others.

FQ is a poem to be read and reread over a lifetime, as its meanings grow with you and you return to it with a new understanding of familiar lines, along with fresh wonder. Few poets attain what Eliot achieved with FQ: a spiritually and philosophically-charged work deftly delivered with a subtle passion, a yearning, an awareness of all points of time and place and eternity, and the calming closure to follow the end of one's beginning and the beginning of one's end.

Until you have read FQ, your literary understanding of Eliot will be incomplete and deprived of a lyricism, balance and flow little found elsewhere in his other works, including Waste Land. Buy FQ, read it, reread it and share it with all those near and dear to you.

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Summary: Trying to capture the REAL in a net of words and images
Review: This, Eliot's last work, is by far his finest. In it he explores the nature of reality (where do we come from, where are we, where do we go) in an ever opening play of language that rewards numerous re-readings (I have carried this book EVERYWHERE in the nine years I've owned it. Not a week goes by that I don't read, quote or pawn it off upon someone). Like a rose it opens and, like truth, it's impossible to pin down or draw into some box that is easily describable; able to be shown as parts that construct some whole.

The "Bhagavad Gita" heavily influenced Eliot at this time, and you can see references both to the players (Arjuna and Krishna) and ideas of that text in each of the poems contained in "Four Quartets" (in much the same way as "The Golden Bough" informed "The Waste Lands"). Indeed, the entire book feels decidely Eastern (with every statement being balanced somewhere by it's complimentary didatic-opposite), or at least of the Classical, if any, Western period (the cyclical nature of both the ideas and the structure of the poems feels like a Zoraster or Golden Dawn, see Yeats' "Second Coming" or "Sailing To Byzantium", manuscript).

All of this is just to say, these poems cover a lot of mythical and actual ground. They may not appear as lush and vibrant on first reading as, say, "The Waste Lands"- but this is only due to thier precision and conciseness ("The Waste Lands", although a wonderful piece, being more of a sculpture than a poem, with whole segments being dropped, moved, added, rewritten, tweaked and recalibrated numerous times by two people other than Eliot over a span of decades). These meditations are firmly planted in place (each pieces name coming from a place) and time ("And yet, they call this Good Friday" [paraphrasing]); and, with his life drawing to a close, they are focused, as well, upon death.

Buy these poems and plant them in your breast. You'll be amazed at the tree that grows there.