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Summary: The Warrior and the God: T.S.Eliot and The Four Quartets
Review: There is a line in Section III of "The Dry Salvages" that has bothered people: "I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant--" as perhaps being too overdone, or even unnecessary to the poem...but, the dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna does give some insight into Eliot's comments on time and reality...when Arjuna is faced with the possibility of killing his own relatives in the opposing army, he can't handle it...Krishna then tells him that it doesn't matter....because of the immortal aspect of The Atman (man's inner spirit) which is not touched by our reality....no one really dies and so, only the doing is important:"Realize that pleasure and pain, gain and loss, victory and defeat, are all one and the same." And so, in relation to the poem, Time is looked at in much the same way...We have the illusion of leaving and arriving: "You are not the same people who left that station Or who will arrive at any Terminus"...it doesn't matter what you think or your regard for the fruits of your actions...the only important duty is to make the trip: "Not fare well,/but fare forward, voyagers." Being in the flow of time, living moment to moment, doing what is necessary is all....perhaps, at the quantum level, as another reviewer has suggested: normal perceptions are topsy-turvey, we're in the rabbit hole and if we can see that, then:"...the way up is the way down, the way forward is the/way back./You cannot face it steadlly, but this thing is sure,/That time is no healer:the patient is no longer here." When the insight is achieved, time disappears, all duality vanished and you are left with that still point of consciousness only seeming to act...so, what the hell?: "Fare forward." or as Krishna would put it: "That which is non-existent can never come into being and that which is can never cease to be."----Don Hildenbrand/Eugene, OR., USA
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Summary: Of all the books I've ever read, this is the one!
Review: A kind friend introduced me to this book 25 years ago. It is so full of real life, as it is. In grasping for words to describe what cannot be described by words, T.S.Eliot has written a masterpiece that will endure for as long as there are people to read books. Each reading takes you inside, yet out of time a space. If I could pick the most meaningful book I have ever encountered, this would be it... the one you take to that desert island; the one you take with you through your life. Don't analyze this book, let it reach out to you, allow it to become an old friend, and it will enrich your life.
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Summary: a Masterpiece
Review: All I can say is that "Burnt Norton" has had a very deep and profound effect on me "I can only say THERE I have been/I cannot say where" Exactly. This poem truly captures the essence of the meditative experience,expressing something that it seemed there were no words for.
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Summary: What's left when time has gone!
Review: By far the crowning of T.S. Eliot's poetry. The evanescent equilibrium point between a whole set of couples of antagons. The present is such a point, but demultiplied by a myriad of other couples. Past-Future, Has-been-Might-have-been, and this point is movement, constantly moving between those antagons. It gives you a vertigo, the vertigo we feel in front of the present that is a constantly moving equilibrium point. Fascinating. Men are no longer hollow but they are unstoppable motion. They are some light, fine and fuzzy moving line between all the antagons of human nature, of nature as for that. Then a long and rich metaphor of life with the sea, neverending movement that ignores past and future but is pure present and nothing else. Men and women can only worship this everlasting present motion, time and place that is no time, no place and no motion, just unstable energy burnt in its own existence.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
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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: T.S. Eliot for Sikhs
Review: I am a deeply religious Sikh living in America. The Four Quartets is to me a shining example of a man of deep understanding of God and reality. I have read this poem many times since I first read it back in college. It speaks directly to my soul. There is no passage, no phrase, which does not work for me.
I read some sections to my wife when we were first married, and she thought that it was an English translation of the Sikh holy texts.
"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time"
There is no better explanation of Eastern religion than this. I am eternally grateful for this work.
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Summary: Not "The Waste Land," but what is?
Review: T. S. Eliot's last significant poems -- completed more than 20 years before his death -- are exquisite philosophical musings on the nature of time and history. Though they have a firm religious underpinning, shameless heathens like me still find them immensely beautiful. Eliot's "timeless moments" -- those instants of blinding epiphany and heightened existence that make the rest of life seem pathetically tame -- are common to all humans, as is the lament for the rarity of such experiences: "Ridiculous the waste sad time / Stretching before and after." Be warned, however, that the Quartets are more uneven than most of Eliot's work. There are numerous passages of surprising blandness, as well as a few embarrassingly pompous lines ("I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant" -- yeah, me too; all the time). In addition, the religion in the poems becomes progressively more explicit, which may or may not bother you. "Burnt Norton," the first quartet, was originally written to stand alone; it is the most continuously interesting and least Jesusy of the lot, as well as the shortest. "Four Quartets" has sometimes been criticized for being more a product of reflection than emotion. While this is at least partly justified (I consider "The Waste Land" to be TSE's supreme masterpiece), 4Q remains a compelling, unforgettable poetic valediction by one of the greatest masters of the art.
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Summary: Must-Have
Review: The first two poems of this collection -- "Burnt Norton" and "East Coker" -- are among the greatest extended poems written in English in the 20th Century, or in any other century for that matter. The last two -- "The Dry Salvages" and "Little Gidding" -- contain, hands down, some of the worst episodes ever produced by any major poet, though these should by no means be included amongst the worst poems. The sins these later poems share in common are the related ones of flagging inspiration and patchiness, both of which can be seen as having their root in Eliot's attempt to take the 5-part prototype of "Burnt Norton," the first of the bunch to be written, and to will the others into being by using it as their model. If, however, this is failure, then we should all be so fortunate to be such failures. Anyway, despite obvious flaws, "Four Quartets" is one of the landmarks of modernist poetry. Basically, the poems are meditations on time and eternity and, most importantly, the excruciatingly difficult task of trying to attain a little "consciousness" therein. Those, however, who feel no great kinship with philosophical poetry -- who indeed feel that poetry should express "no ideas, except in things," are perhaps never going to warm up to this collection. For those, on the other hand, who believe that poetry is one of the primary tools for grappling with the verities, then what else can I say except pounce on this collection? Oh, it's going to take many readings, much time and a great deal of thinking to plummet the furthest recesses of this profoundly great art, but then again what more could you ask for from poetry? By the way, if you've never heard the recordings of Eliot reading these works, then you simply haven't lived.
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Summary: Making the 20th century speak with Dante's tongue
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.
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