"Autobiographies of great nations are written in three manuscripts – a book of deeds, a book of words, and a book of art. Of the three, I would choose the latter as truest testimony." - Sir Kenneth Smith, Great Civilisations

"I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine." - Leo Tolstoy

I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again. - John Updike

"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it." - J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations." - Lawrence Ferlinghetti


[Note - If any article requires updating or correction please notate this in the comment section. Thank you. - res]

Monday, September 19, 2022

T.S. Eliot - The Four Quartets: Biography & Background 2


A Note: I would like to verify my class notes in the previous post with Britannica's biography on Eliot below. This should help correlate the next several posts to come as I work through all four sections of Eliot's "Four Quartets". Thank you. - R.E. Slater




T.S. Eliot
American-English poet, playwright, and literary critic

Encyclopedia Britannica
https://www.britannica.com/biography/T-S-Eliot/Later-poetry-and-plays

Alternate titles: Thomas Stearns Eliot
By Allen Tate See All • Last Updated: Aug 29, 2022


Poet, Playwright, Literary Critic T.S. Eliot


T.S. Eliot

Where was T.S. Eliot educated?

T.S. Eliot attended Smith Academy, St. Louis, and Milton Academy, Massachusetts. He received a B.A. from Harvard in 1909. He spent the year 1910–11 in France at the Sorbonne and then returned to Harvard. By 1916 he had finished a dissertation, but he never took the final oral examination for the Ph.D. degree.

What is T.S. Eliot best known for?

T.S. Eliot was an American-English poet, playwright, literary critic, and editor. He is best known as a leader of the Modernist movement in poetry and as the author of such works as The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943).

How did T.S. Eliot influence the world?

T.S. Eliot exercised a strong influence on Anglo-American culture from the 1920s until late in the century. His experiments in diction, style, and versification revitalized English poetry, and in a series of critical essays he shattered old orthodoxies and erected new ones. 

Biography

T.S. Eliot, in full Thomas Stearns Eliot, (born September 26, 1888, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.—died January 4, 1965, London, England), American-English poet, playwright, literary critic, and editor, a leader of the Modernist movement in poetry in such works as The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943). Eliot exercised a strong influence on Anglo-American culture from the 1920s until late in the century. His experiments in diction, style, and versification revitalized English poetry, and in a series of critical essays he shattered old orthodoxies and erected new ones. The publication of Four Quartets led to his recognition as the greatest living English poet and man of letters, and in 1948 he was awarded both the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Early years

Eliot was descended from a distinguished New England family that had relocated to St. Louis, Missouri. His family allowed him the widest education available in his time, with no influence from his father to be “practical” and to go into business. From Smith Academy in St. Louis he went to Milton, in Massachusetts; from Milton he entered Harvard in 1906; he received a B.A. in 1909, after three instead of the usual four years. The men who influenced him at Harvard were George Santayana, the philosopher and poet, and the critic Irving Babbitt. From Babbitt he derived an anti-Romantic attitude that, amplified by his later reading of British philosophers F.H. Bradley and T.E. Hulme, lasted through his life. In the academic year 1909–10 he was an assistant in philosophy at Harvard.

He spent the year 1910–11 in France, attending Henri Bergson’s lectures in philosophy at the Sorbonne and reading poetry with Alain-Fournier. Eliot’s study of the poetry of Dante, of the English writers John Webster and John Donne, and of the French Symbolist Jules Laforgue helped him to find his own style. From 1911 to 1914 he was back at Harvard, reading Indian philosophy and studying Sanskrit. In 1913 he read Bradley’s Appearance and Reality; by 1916 he had finished, in Europe, a dissertation entitled “Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley.” But World War I had intervened, and he never returned to Harvard to take the final oral examination for the Ph.D. degree. In 1914 Eliot met and began a close association with the American poet Ezra Pound.

Early publications

Eliot was to pursue four careers: editor, dramatist, literary critic, and philosophical poet. He was probably the most erudite poet of his time in the English language. His undergraduate poems were “literary” and conventional. His first important publication, and the first masterpiece of Modernism in English, was “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915):

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table.…

Although Pound had printed privately a small book, A lume spento, as early as 1908, “Prufrock” was the first poem by either of these literary revolutionists to go beyond experiment to achieve perfection. It represented a break with the immediate past as radical as that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads (1798). From the appearance of Eliot’s first volume, Prufrock and Other Observations, in 1917, one may conveniently date the maturity of the 20th-century poetic revolution. The significance of the revolution is still disputed, but the striking similarity to the Romantic revolution of Coleridge and Wordsworth is obvious: Eliot and Pound, like their 18th-century counterparts, set about reforming poetic diction. Whereas Wordsworth thought he was going back to the “real language of men,” Eliot struggled to create new verse rhythms based on the rhythms of contemporary speech. He sought a poetic diction that might be spoken by an educated person, being “neither pedantic nor vulgar.”

For a year Eliot taught French and Latin at the Highgate School; in 1917 he began his brief career as a bank clerk in Lloyds Bank Ltd. Meanwhile, he was also a prolific reviewer and essayist in both literary criticism and technical philosophy. In 1919 he published Poems, which contained the poem “Gerontion,” a meditative interior monologue in blank verse; nothing like this poem had appeared in English.

T.S. Eliot

The Waste Land and criticism

With the publication in 1922 of his poem The Waste Land, Eliot won an international reputation. The Waste Land expresses with great power the disenchantment, disillusionment, and disgust of the period after World War I. In a series of vignettes, loosely linked by the legend of the search for the Grail, it portrays a sterile world of panicky fears and barren lusts, and of human beings waiting for some sign or promise of redemption. The poem’s style is highly complex, erudite, and allusive, and the poet provided notes and references to explain the work’s many quotations and allusions. This scholarly supplement distracted some readers and critics from perceiving the true originality of the poem, which lay rather in its rendering of the universal human predicament of man desiring salvation, and in its manipulation of language, than in its range of literary references. In his earlier poems Eliot had shown himself to be a master of the poetic phrase. The Waste Land showed him to be, in addition, a metrist of great virtuosity, capable of astonishing modulations ranging from the sublime to the conversational.

The Waste Land consists of five sections and proceeds on a principle of “rhetorical discontinuity” that reflects the fragmented experience of the 20th-century sensibility of the great modern cities of the West. Eliot expresses the hopelessness and confusion of purpose of life in the secularized city, the decay of urbs aeterna (the “eternal city”). This is the ultimate theme of The Waste Land, concretized by the poem’s constant rhetorical shifts and its juxtapositions of contrasting styles. But The Waste Land is not a simple contrast of the heroic past with the degraded present; it is, rather, a timeless simultaneous awareness of moral grandeur and moral evil. The poem’s original manuscript of about 800 lines was cut down to 433 at the suggestion of Ezra Pound. The Waste Land is not Eliot’s greatest poem, though it is his most famous.

Eliot said that the poet-critic must write “programmatic criticism”—that is, criticism that expresses the poet’s own interests as a poet, quite different from historical scholarship, which stops at placing the poet in his background. Consciously intended or not, Eliot’s criticism created an atmosphere in which his own poetry could be better understood and appreciated than if it had to appear in a literary milieu dominated by the standards of the preceding age. In the essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” appearing in his first critical volume, The Sacred Wood (1920), Eliot asserts that tradition, as used by the poet, is not a mere repetition of the work of the immediate past (“novelty is better than repetition,” he said); rather, it comprises the whole of European literature, from Homer to the present. The poet writing in English may therefore make his own tradition by using materials from any past period, in any language. This point of view is “programmatic” in the sense that it disposes the reader to accept the revolutionary novelty of Eliot’s polyglot quotations and serious parodies of other poets’ styles in The Waste Land.

Also in The Sacred Wood, “Hamlet and His Problems” sets forth Eliot’s theory of the objective correlative:

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for that particular emotion; such that, when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

Eliot used the phrase “objective correlative” in the context of his own impersonal theory of poetry; it thus had an immense influence toward correcting the vagueness of late Victorian rhetoric by insisting on a correspondence of word and object. Two other essays, first published the year after The Sacred Wood, almost complete the Eliot critical canon: “The Metaphysical Poets” and “Andrew Marvell,” published in Selected Essays, 1917–32 (1932). In these essays he effects a new historical perspective on the hierarchy of English poetry, putting at the top Donne and other Metaphysical poets of the 17th century and lowering poets of the 18th and 19th centuries. Eliot’s second famous phrase appears here—“dissociation of sensibility,” invented to explain the change that came over English poetry after Donne and Andrew Marvell. This change seems to him to consist in a loss of the union of thought and feeling. The phrase has been attacked, yet the historical fact that gave rise to it cannot be denied, and with the poetry of Eliot and Pound it had a strong influence in reviving interest in certain 17th-century poets.

The first, or programmatic, phase of Eliot’s criticism ended with The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)—his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard. Shortly before this his interests had broadened into theology and sociology; three short books, or long essays, were the result: Thoughts After Lambeth (1931), The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948). These book-essays, along with his Dante (1929), an indubitable masterpiece, broadened the base of literature into theology and philosophy: whether a work is poetry must be decided by literary standards; whether it is great poetry must be decided by standards higher than the literary.

Eliot’s criticism and poetry are so interwoven that it is difficult to discuss them separately. The great essay on Dante appeared two years after Eliot was confirmed in the Church of England (1927); in that year he also became a British subject. The first long poem after his conversion was Ash Wednesday (1930), a religious meditation in a style entirely different from that of any of the earlier poems. Ash Wednesday expresses the pangs and the strain involved in the acceptance of religious belief and religious discipline. This and subsequent poems were written in a more relaxed, musical, and meditative style than his earlier works, in which the dramatic element had been stronger than the lyrical. Ash Wednesday was not well received in an era that held that poetry, though autonomous, is strictly secular in its outlook; it was misinterpreted by some critics as an expression of personal disillusion.

T.S. Eliot

Later poetry and plays of T.S. Eliot

Eliot’s masterpiece is Four Quartets, which was issued as a book in 1943, though each “quartet” is a complete poem. “Burnt Norton” was the first of the quartets; it had appeared in the Collected Poems of 1936. It is a subtle meditation on the nature of time and its relation to eternity. On the model of this, Eliot wrote three more poems—“East Coker” (1940), “The Dry Salvages” (1941), and “Little Gidding” (1942)—in which he explored through images of great beauty and haunting power his own past, the past of the human race, and the meaning of human history. Each of the poems was self-subsistent, but when published together they were seen to make up a single work, in which themes and images recurred and were developed in a musical manner and brought to a final resolution. This work made a deep impression on the reading public, and even those who were unable to accept the poems’ Christian beliefs recognized the intellectual integrity with which Eliot pursued his high theme, the originality of the form he had devised, and the technical mastery of his verse. This work led to the award to Eliot, in 1948, of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

An outstanding example of Eliot’s verse in Four Quartets is the passage in “Little Gidding” in which the poet meets a “compound ghost,” a figure composite of two of his masters: William Butler Yeats and Stéphane Mallarmé. The scene takes place at dawn in London after a night on duty at an air-raid post during an air attack; the master speaks in conclusion:

From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.
The day was breaking. In the disfigured street
He left me, with a kind of valediction,
And faded on the blowing of the horn.

The passage is 72 lines, in modified terza rima; the diction is as near to that of Dante as is possible in English; and it is a fine example of Eliot’s belief that a poet can be entirely original when he is closest to his models.

T.S. Eliot

Eliot’s plays, which begin with Sweeney Agonistes (published 1926; first performed in 1934) and end with The Elder Statesman (first performed 1958; published 1959), are, with the exception of Murder in the Cathedral (published and performed 1935), inferior to the lyric and meditative poetry. Eliot’s belief that even secular drama attracts people who unconsciously seek a religion led him to put drama above all other forms of poetry. All his plays are in a blank verse of his own invention, in which the metrical effect is not apprehended apart from the sense; thus he brought “poetic drama” back to the popular stage. The Family Reunion (1939) and Murder in the Cathedral are Christian tragedies—the former a tragedy of revenge, the latter of the sin of pride. Murder in the Cathedral is a modern miracle play on the martyrdom of Thomas Becket. The most striking feature of this, his most successful play, is the use of a chorus in the traditional Greek manner to make apprehensible to common humanity the meaning of the heroic action. The Family Reunion (1939) was less popular. It contains scenes of great poignancy and some of the finest dramatic verse since the Elizabethans, but the public found this translation of the story of Orestes into a modern domestic drama baffling and was uneasy at the mixture of psychological realism, mythical apparitions at a drawing-room window, and a comic chorus of uncles and aunts.

After World War II, Eliot returned to writing plays with The Cocktail Party in 1949, The Confidential Clerk in 1953, and The Elder Statesman in 1958. These plays are comedies in which the plots are derived from Greek drama. In them Eliot accepted current theatrical conventions at their most conventional, subduing his style to a conversational level and eschewing the lyrical passages that gave beauty to his earlier plays. Only The Cocktail Party, which is based upon the Alcestis of Euripides, achieved a popular success. In spite of their obvious theatrical defects and a failure to engage the sympathies of the audience for the characters, these plays succeed in handling moral and religious issues of some complexity while entertaining the audience with farcical plots and some shrewd social satire.

Eliot’s career as editor was ancillary to his main interests, but his quarterly review, The Criterion (1922–39), was the most distinguished international critical journal of the period. He was a “director,” or working editor, of the publishing firm of Faber & Faber Ltd. from the early 1920s until his death and as such was a generous and discriminating patron of young poets.

Eliot rigorously kept his private life in the background. In 1915 he married Vivien Haigh-Wood. After 1933 she was mentally ill, and they lived apart; she died in 1947. In January 1957 he married Valerie Fletcher, with whom he lived happily until his death and who became his literary executor. She was responsible for releasing a range of editions of Eliot’s work and letters, and she also approved Andrew Lloyd Webber’s adaptation of Eliot’s light verse from Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) into the musical Cats (1981).



T.S. Eliot

From the 1920s onward, Eliot’s influence as a poet and as a critic—in both Great Britain and the United States—was immense, not least among those establishing the study of English literature as an autonomous academic discipline. He also had his detractors, ranging from avant-garde American poets who believed that he had abandoned the attempt to write about contemporary America to traditional English poets who maintained that he had broken the links between poetry and a large popular audience. During his lifetime, however, his work was the subject of much sympathetic exegesis. Since his death (and coinciding with a wider challenge to the academic study of English literature that his critical precepts did much to establish), interpreters have been markedly more critical, focusing on his complex relationship to his American origins, his elitist cultural and social views, and his exclusivist notions of tradition and of race. Nevertheless, Eliot was unequaled by any other 20th-century poet in the ways in which he commanded the attention of his audience.


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Friday, September 16, 2022

T.S. Eliot - The Four Quartets: Biography & Background 1



T.S. ELIOT - THE FOUR QUARTETS

R.E. Slater, My Class Notes;
with due thanks to English Professor Michael Stevens

Please Note - These are my class notes. I am in the process of reading Eliot with  the help of a quarter-term quasi-college community class. These notes might not be correct as I have written them. Please utilize the additional resources I will list here and in other parts of this poetry website as I refer to them. Thanks! - re slater

STAGES of T.S. ELIOT'S LIFE
[as TSE would describe it]


1 - Pagan. No belief in God. No dedication to Christianity

2 - A Time of Spiritual Crisis

3 - His Conversion to Christ Experience

4 - Working Out His Past and Present Into a Workable Kind of Faith





click to enlarge


Introduction

For Eliot, 1927 was a momentous time in his life:
  • Became a British Citizen
  • Eliot was a classicist in literature who became a skeptical high Modernist Poet
  • Eliot converted to the Anglican Church
  • Began to support the British Royalist Party

Previous Poems:
  • Purfock
  • Wastelands - a very bleak poem
  • The Hollowmen - the bleakest of all his poems

Eliot's Ariel Poems - spoke to his Christian conversion marked by the ambiquity of his faith as he explored his commitment and the world about him.

Personal History

Eliot married a stage performer by the name of Vivien whom he stayed married to all his life until her early death at 47 years. He soon discovered their incompatibility and left V after only three weeks. She quickly became a "train wreck" in his life as his guilt and sensitivity to being unhelpful in her diminishing mental health became apparent. From this time forward, once leaving England for America, Eliot saw very little of Vivien.

However, it was due to Vivien's influence on his life that Eliot's poetry grew in statue and outreach. She had set in him a tone of sobriety and weariness even as he began to take on an ascetic life of self-denials in measure to his deep need for a personal closeness to someone.


A 1932 photo shows Eliot standing next to his close friend Virginia Wolff while his wife Vivien stands separated from the both of them. Sadly, Ms. Wolff despised her (which shows in the photo) while Vivien's metal illness shows her as a glum, girlish woman hidden away in her mind.


Eliot's Next Phase of Life

By shipping overseas Eliot begins to move away from his great despair of life into a new life phase which is attracted to the many new possibilities a hopeful life might entertain:
  • Eliot goes to America
  • Has several visiting lectureships, primarily at Harvard
  • At Harvard Eliot begins "College Electoral Subjects" moving away from the stodgy curricula which the British Schools insisted students adhere too
  • Produces an anchor volume
  • Participates in the John Hopkins Lectures
Unfortunately, Eliot's production of "After Strange Gods" tells of an anti-semiticism which has crept into his thoughts. Perceiving his great error he requests the publisher remove all copies from the general public and burn them. This is done to the effect that only the rare very copy now survives. His Christian belief required a better outlook on the Jewish people than his previous British racism had allowed.



Historically, only rarely have some poets brought philosophy into their poetry. Usually this is not done. Not so with Eliot as he struggled to express himself in the British modernist era he had grown up in. Poets like Dante, but none of the Romantics, a few French decadent poets, and Eliot believed himself to be part of a group of philosophizing poets over the centuries. As an aside, today's Whiteheadian process philosophical movement is producing a number of process and "theo-" poets.

In 1932 Eliot by then had produced three books for the public (four, not counting the one removed). Eliot is fast becoming the "Grand Man of Poetry".

---

His next stage sees Eliot traveling to California having met a young 19 year old stage performer in Boston. She later became a drama professor at Scripps College, California. At 19 himself, the couple fell quickly in love with one another. She, his forbidden fruit, and he, all that he ever wanted in life as personal friend and close companion. As it were, Vivien had some 28 years of life in her yet, Eliot as a churchman, steadfastly refused to divorce her, and so he and Emily Hale endured a platonic kind of close friendship.

Over the next 35 years they exchanged letters with one another. Eliot kept none and instructed Emily to do the same. Emily, for her part, kept all of her missives refusing to rid herself of her love so that at Eliot's death we only know of their companionship through her estate.



At 47 years of age, Vivien dies in a British Assylum (known by the name Burnt Norton). The property was the former palatial manse of a wealth British noble who led a debauched and adulterous life. In a drunken rage he burns the manse down in 1741 which is later rebuilt with the same owner's name "Norton". However, once rebuilt the locals referred to it as "Burnt Norton". Thus it's name and history which later was donated to the community to house the mentally ill (which even in those days were sad places for residents who endured inhuman mental health treatments even until recently).

Apparently, Julian Fellowes of Downton Abbey fame, wrote a fictionalize novel of the wealthy baron of Norton. Here is the link but no title was mentioned to help sort out which titled autograph this was.



During the years of 1934-35 Eliot begins producing urban religious choral-plays known as Choruses to help a local urban church establish church "plants" or "congregations" around London. The contemporary gospel name of "The Rock" was somehow used in these performances drawing interested passerbys into the church folds within their areas of livelihood and residence. Apparently, several new churches were established because of this effort.


Lastly, Eliot revived the usage of blank verse for the 20th Century in his title, "Murder in the Catholic Church" which dramatized a Christian faith lived in a secular world and drawing upon the then understanding of evangelical Christianity as it was growing and developing. It was written in response to his "pagan" poem, The Wastelands (as he deemed it), in which he presented his then vision of the world in a painful tension of goodness and evil.
As an aside, I have developed over the past ten years what a post-evangelic Christian faith would look like using as its basis not my previously militant Baptist faith but a form of it having removed many of its ideas of a so-called "biblical" God.
Like Eliot, it has pained me to watch my good faith in Jesus become institutionalized to a point of death in its 1980-90s movement away from "secularity" by becoming ensnared by the same into what I might call a Trumpian form of Christianity.
My own very simple view of faith in Jesus (even as I would think towards all non-Christian religions), is that faith's only hallmark must be that of love. And where the Christian Jesus is concerned, the idea of what Jesus' atonement and redemption means for those who might live a new life in Christian love rather than in Christian militancy.
I do caution, once begun, such a faith will but enhance an Eliot kind-of-despair of living-in-a-world which does not love its fellow human beings nor the nature around itself. For more on Process Christianity go to Relevancy22. Thank you. - R.E. Slater






T. S. Eliot bibliography


[Bibliography is listed in chronological order]
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T. S. Eliot
bibliography
Thomas Stearns Eliot by Lady Ottoline Morrell (1934).jpg
Poetry↙26
Plays↙9
Fiction↙1
Non-fiction↙45
Letters↙4
References and footnotes

The T. S. Eliot bibliography contains a list of works by T. S. Eliot.[1]

Poetry

The following is a list of books of poetry by T. S. Eliot arranged chronologically by first edition.[Note 1] Some of Eliot's poems were first published in booklet or pamphlet format (such as his Ariel poems.)

Plays

The following is a list of plays by T. S. Eliot arranged chronologically by first edition.[1]

Fiction

  • "Eeldrop and Appleplex", I. Little Review, Chicago, IL, IV. 1 (May 1917) pp. 7–11
  • "Eeldrop and Appleplex", II. Little Review, Chicago, IL, IV. 5 (Sept 1917) pp. 16–19
  • "Eeldrop and Appleplex", both parts, The Foundling Press, Tunbridge Wells (1992) limited edition of 500 copies

Non-fiction

The following is a list of non-fiction books by T. S. Eliot arranged chronologically by first edition.[1]

  • Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry. New York: Knopf. 1918.
  • The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Methuen. 1920.
  • Homage to John Dryden: Three Essays on Poetry of the Seventeenth Century. London: The Hogarth Press. 1924.
  • Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca. London: Oxford University Press. 1927.
  • For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order. London: Faber & Gwyer. 1928.
  • Dante. London: Faber. 1929.
  • Thoughts After Lambeth. London: Faber. 1931.
  • Charles Whibley: A Memoir. London: Oxford University Press. 1931.
  • Selected Essays, 1917–1932. London: Faber. 1932.
  • John Dryden: The Poet, the Dramatist, the Critic. New York: Terence & Elsa Holliday. 1932.
  • The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England. London: Faber. 1933.
  • After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy. London: Faber. 1934.
  • Elizabethan Essays. London: Faber. 1934.[Note 8]
  • Essays Ancient & Modern. London: Faber. 1936.
  • The Idea of a Christian Society. London: Faber. 1939.
  • John Haywood, ed. (1941). Points of View. London: Faber.
  • The Classics and the Man of Letters. London: Oxford University Press. 1942.
  • Introducing James Joyce - a selection of Joyce's prose. London: Faber. 1942.
  • The Music of Poetry. Glasgow: Jackson, Son, Publishers to the University. 1942.
  • Reunion by Destruction. London: Pax House. 1943.
  • What Is a Classic?. London: Faber. 1945.
  • On Poetry. Concord: Concord Academy. 1947.
  • Milton. London: Geoffrey Cumberlege. 1947.
  • A Sermon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1948.
  • Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. London: Faber. 1948.
  • From Poe to Valéry. New York: Harcourt, Brace. 1948.
  • The Aims of Poetic Drama. London: Poets' Theatre Guild. 1949.
  • Poetry and Drama. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1951.
  • An Address to Members of the London Library. London: London Library. 1952.
  • The Value and Use of Cathedrals in England Today. Chichester: Friends of Chichester Cathedral. 1952.
  • American Literature and the American Language. St. Louis: Washington University. 1953.
  • The Three Voices of Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1953.
  • Religious Drama: Mediaeval and Modern. New York: House of Books. 1954.
  • The Literature of Politics. London: Conservative Political Centre. 1955.
  • The Frontiers of Criticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1956.
  • On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber. 1957.
  • Geoffrey Faber 1889–1961. London: Faber. 1961.
  • George Herbert. London: Longmans. 1962.
  • Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley. London: Faber. 1964.
  • To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings. London: Faber. 1965.
  • Frank Kermode, ed. (1975). Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot. London: Faber.
  • Ronald Schuchard, ed. (1993). The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry: The Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1926, and the Turnbull Lectures at the Johns Hopkins University, 1933. London: Faber.

Letters

The following is a list of books of letters by T. S. Eliot arranged chronologically by first edition.[1]

  • Valerie Eliot, ed. (1988). The Letters of T. S. Eliot. Vol. 1, 1898–1922. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0571235094.
  • Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton, ed. (2009). The Letters of T. S. Eliot. Vol. 2, 1923–1925. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0571140817.
  • Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, ed. (2012). The Letters of T. S. Eliot. Vol. 3, 1926–1927. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0300187236.
  • Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, ed. (2013). The Letters of T. S. Eliot. Vol. 4, 1928–1929. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0571290925.
  • Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, ed. (2014). The Letters of T. S. Eliot. Vol. 5, 1930–1931. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0571316328.
  • Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, ed. (2016). The Letters of T. S. Eliot. Vol. 6, 1932–1933. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0571316342.
  • Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, ed. (2017). The Letters of T. S. Eliot. Vol. 7, 1934–1935. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0571316366.
  • Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, ed. (2019). The Letters of T. S. Eliot. Vol. 8, 1936–1938. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0571316380.

Works on T. S. Eliot

The following is a list of works about T. S. Eliot and his works.[1]



* * * * * * * *

THE  FOUR  QUARTETS (collection of poems)

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Four Quartets
FourQuartets.jpg
First US edition published by Harcourt
AuthorT. S. Eliot
LanguageEnglish
GenrePoetry
PublisherHarcourt (US)
Publication date
1943
Media typePrint
Pages40

Four Quartets is a set of four poems written by T. S. Eliot that were published over a six-year period. The first poem, Burnt Norton, was published with a collection of his early works (1936's Collected Poems 1909–1935). After a few years, Eliot composed the other three poems, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding, which were written during World War II and the air-raids on Great Britain. They were first published as a series by Faber and Faber in Great Britain between 1940 and 1942 towards the end of Eliot's poetic career (East Coker in September 1940, Burnt Norton in February 1941, The Dry Salvages in September 1941 and Little Gidding in 1942). The poems were not collected [as one piece] until Eliot's New York publisher printed them together in 1943.

Four Quartets are four interlinked meditations with the common theme being man's relationship with time, the universe, and the divine. In describing his understanding of the divine within the poems, Eliot blends his Anglo-Catholicism with mystical, philosophical and poetic works from both Eastern and Western religious and cultural traditions, with references to the Bhagavad-Gita and the Pre-Socratics as well as St. John of the Cross and Julian of Norwich.

Although many critics find the Four Quartets to be Eliot's last great work, some of Eliot's contemporary critics, including George Orwell, were dissatisfied with Eliot's overt religiosity. Orwell believed this was not a worthy topic to write about and a failing compared to his earlier work. [1] Later critics disagreed with Orwell's claims about the poems and argued instead that the religious themes made the poem stronger. Overall, reviews of the poem within Great Britain were favourable while reviews in the United States were split between those who liked Eliot's later style and others who felt he had abandoned positive aspects of his earlier poetry.

Background

While working on his play Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot came up with the idea for a poem that was structured similarly to The Waste Land.[2] The resulting poem, Burnt Norton, named after a manor house, was published in Eliot's 1936 edition of Collected Poems 1909–1935.[3] Eliot decided to create another poem similar to Burnt Norton but with a different location in mind. This second poem, East Coker, was finished and published by Easter 1940.[4] (Eliot visited East Coker in Somerset in 1937, and his ashes now repose there at St Michael and All Angels' Church.)[4]

As Eliot was finishing his second poem, World War II began to disrupt his life and he spent more time lecturing across Great Britain and helping out during the war when he could. It was during this time that Eliot began working on The Dry Salvages, the third poem, which was put together near the end of 1940.[5] This poem was published in February 1941 and Eliot immediately began to plot out his fourth poem, Little Gidding. Eliot's health declined and he stayed in Shamley Green to recuperate. His illness and the war disrupted his ability to write and he became dissatisfied with each draft. He believed that the problem with the poem was with himself and that he had started the poem too soon and written it too quickly. By September 1941, he stopped writing and focused on his lecturing. It was not until September 1942 that Eliot finished the last poem and it was finally published.[6]

While writing East Coker Eliot thought of creating a "quartet" of poems that would reflect the idea of the four elements and, loosely, the four seasons.[7] As the first four parts of The Waste Land have each been associated with one of the four classical elements so has each of the constituent poems of Four Quartets: air (BN), earth (EC), water (DS), and fire (LG). However, there is little support for the poems matching with individual seasons.[8] Eliot described what he meant by "quartet" in a 3 September 1942 letter to John Hayward:

... these poems are all in a particular set form which I have elaborated, and the word "quartet" does seem to me to start people on the right track for understanding them ("sonata" in any case is too musical). It suggests to me the notion of making a poem by weaving in together three or four superficially unrelated themes: the "poem" being the degree of success in making a new whole out of them.[9]

The four poems comprising Four Quartets were first published together as a collection in New York in 1943 and then London in 1944.[10] The original title was supposed to be the Kensington Quartets after his time in Kensington.[11] The poems were kept as a separate entity in the United States until they were collected in 1952 as Eliot's Complete Poems and Plays, and in the United Kingdom until 1963 as part of Eliot's Complete Poems 1909–62. The delay in collecting the Four Quartets with the rest of Eliot's poetry separated them from his other work, even though they were the result of a development from his earlier poems.[12]

World War II

The outbreak of World War II, in 1939, pushed Eliot further into the belief that there was something worth defending in society and that Germany had to be stopped. There is little mention of the war in Eliot's writing except in a few pieces, like "Defence of the Islands". The war became central to Little Gidding as Eliot added in aspects of his own experience while serving as a watchman at the Faber building during the London blitz. The Four Quartets were favoured as giving hope during the war and also for a later religious revival movement.[13] By Little Gidding, WWII is not just the present time but connected also to the English Civil War.[14]

Poems

Each poem has five sections. The later poems connect to the earlier sections, with Little Gidding synthesising the themes of the earlier poems within its sections.[15] Within Eliot's own poetry, the five sections connect to The Waste Land. This allowed Eliot to structure his larger poems, which he had difficulty with.[16]

According to C.K. Stead, the structure is based on:[17]

  1. The movement of time, in which brief moments of eternity are caught.
  2. Worldly experience, leading to dissatisfaction.
  3. Purgation in the world, divesting the soul of the love of created things.
  4. A lyric prayer for, or affirmation of the need of, intercession.
  5. The problem of attaining artistic wholeness, which becomes an analogue for and merges into the problem of achieving spiritual health.

These points can be applied to the structure of The Waste Land, though there is not necessarily a fulfilment of these but merely a longing or discussion of them.[18]

Burnt Norton

Main article: Burnt Norton

The poem begins with two epigraphs taken from the fragments of Heraclitus:

τοῦ λόγου δὲ ἐόντος ξυνοῦ ζώουσιν οἱ πολλοί
ὡς ἰδίαν ἔχοντες φρόνησιν

— I. p. 77. Fr. 2.

 The first may be translated, "Though wisdom is common, the many live as if they have wisdom of their own";

--- 

ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή

— I. p. 89 Fr. 60.

the second, "the way upward and the way downward is one and the same".[19]

The concept and origin of Burnt Norton is connected to Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral.[20] The poem discusses the idea of time and the concept that only the present moment really matters because the past cannot be changed and the future is unknown.[21]

  • In Part I, this meditative poem begins with the narrator trying to focus on the present moment while walking through a garden, focusing on images and sounds like the bird, the roses, clouds, and an empty pool.
  • In Part II, the narrator's meditation leads him to reach "the still point" in which he doesn't try to get anywhere or to experience place and/or time, instead experiencing "a grace of sense." 
  • In Part III, the meditation experience becomes darker as night comes on, and
  • by Part IV, it is night and "Time and the bell have buried the day."
  • In Part V, the narrator reaches a contemplative end to his/her meditation, initially contemplating the arts ("Words" and "music") as they relate to time.

The narrator focuses particularly on the poet's art of manipulating "Words [which] strain,/Crack and sometimes break, under the burden [of time], under the tension, slip, slide, perish, decay with imprecision, [and] will not stay in place, /Will not stay still." By comparison, the narrator concludes that "Love is itself unmoving,/Only the cause and end of movement,/Timeless, and undesiring." For this reason, this spiritual experience of "Love" is the form of consciousness that most interests the narrator (presumably more than the creative act of writing poetry).

East Coker

Main article: East Coker (poem)

Eliot started writing East Coker in 1939, and modelled the poem after Burnt Norton as a way to focus his thoughts. The poem served as a sort of opposite to the popular idea that The Waste Land served as an expression of disillusionment after World War I, though Eliot never accepted this interpretation.[4]

The poem focuses on life, death, and continuity between the two. Humans are seen as disorderly and science is viewed as unable to save mankind from its flaws:

Instead, science and reason lead mankind to warfare, and humanity needs to become humble in order to escape the cycle of destruction. To be saved, people must recognize Christ as their saviour as well as their need for redemption.[22]

The Dry Salvages

Main article: The Dry Salvages

Eliot began writing The Dry Salvages at the end of 1940 during air-raids on London, and managed to finish the poem quickly. The poem included many personal images connecting to Eliot's childhood, and emphasised the image of water and sailing as a metaphor for humanity.[7] According to the poem, there is a connection to all of mankind within each man. If we just accept drifting upon the sea, then we will end up broken upon rocks. We are restrained by time, but the Annunciation [a pattern of nature - re slater] gave mankind hope that it will be able to escape. This hope is not part of the present. What we must do is understand the patterns found within the past [and within creation itself - re slater] in order to see that there is meaning to be found. This meaning allows one to experience eternity through moments of revelation.[23]

Little Gidding

Main article: Little Gidding (poem)

Little Gidding was started after The Dry Salvages but was delayed because of Eliot's declining health and his dissatisfaction with early drafts of the poem. Eliot was unable to finish the poem until September 1942.[24] Like the three previous poems of the Four Quartets, the central theme is time and humanity's place within it. Each generation is seemingly united and the poem describes a unification within Western civilisation. When discussing World War II, the poem states that humanity is given a choice between the bombing of London or the Holy Spirit. God's love allows humankind to redeem itself and escape the living hell through purgation by fire; he drew the affirmative coda "All shall be well" from medieval mystic Julian of Norwich. The end of the poem describes how Eliot has attempted to help the world as a poet, and he parallels his work in language with working on the soul or working on society.[25]

Motifs

Eliot believed that even if a poem can mean different things to each reader, the "absolute" meaning of the poem needs to be discovered. The central meaning of the Four Quartets is to connect to European literary tradition in addition to its Christian themes.[26] It also seeks to unite with European literature to form a unity, especially in Eliot's creation of a "familiar compound ghost" who is supposed to connect to those like Stéphane Mallarmé, Edgar Allan Poe, Jonathan Swift, and William Butler Yeats.[26]

Time

Time is viewed as unredeemable and problematic, whereas eternity is beautiful and true. Living under time's influence is a problem. Within Burnt Norton section 3, people trapped in time are similar to those stuck in between life and death in Dante's Inferno Canto Three.[27]

When Eliot deals with the past in The Dry Salvages, he emphasises its importance to combat the influence of evolution as encouraging people to forget the past and care only about the present and the future. The present is capable of always reminding one of the past. These moments also rely on the idea of Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita that death can come at any moment, and that the divine will is more important than considering the future.[28]

The Jesuit critic William F. Lynch, who believed that salvation happens within time and not outside of it, explained what Eliot was attempting to do in the Four Quartets when he wrote:

"it is hard to say no to the impression, if I may use a mixture of my own symbols and his, that the Christian imagination is finally limited to the element of fire, to the day of Pentecost, to the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the disciples. The revelation of eternity and time is of an intersection ... It seems not unseemly to suppose that Eliot's imagination (and is this not a theology?) is alive with points of intersection and of descent."[29]

He continued with a focus on how time operated within the poem:

"He seems to place our faith, our hope, and our love, not in the flux of time but in the points of time. I am sure his mind is interested in the line and time of Christ, whose Spirit is his total flux. But I am not so sure about his imagination. Is it, or is it not, an imagination which is saved from time's nausea or terror by points of intersection? ...

"There seems little doubt that Eliot is attracted above all by the image and the goal of immobility, and that in everything he seeks for approximations to this goal in the human order."

Lynch went on to point out that this understanding of time includes Asian influences.[30]

Throughout the poems, the end becomes the beginning and things constantly repeat.[31] This use of circular time is similar to the way Dante uses time in his Divine Comedy – Little Gidding ends with a rose garden image that is the same as the garden beginning Burnt Norton. The repetition of time affects memory and how one can travel through their own past to find permanency and the divine. Memory within the poem is similar to how St. Augustine discussed it, in that memory allows one to understand words and life. The only way to discover eternity is through memory, understanding the past, and transcending beyond time. Likewise, in the Augustinian view that Eliot shares, timeless words are connected to Christ as the Logos and how Christ calls upon mankind to join him in salvation.[32]

Music

The title Four Quartets connects to music, which appears also in Eliot's poems "Preludes", "Rhapsody on a Windy Night", and "A Song for Simeon" along with a 1942 lecture called "The Music of Poetry". Some critics have suggested that there were various classical works that Eliot focused on while writing the pieces.[16] In particular, within literary criticism there is an emphasis on Beethoven serving as a model. Some have disputed this claim.[8] However, Lyndall Gordon's biography of T.S. Eliot establishes that Eliot had Beethoven in mind while writing them.[33] The purpose of the quartet was to have multiple themes that intertwined with each other. Each section, as in the musical image, would be distinct even though they share the same performance. East Coker and The Dry Salvages are written in such a way as to make the poems continuous and create a "double-quartet".[34]

Eliot focused on sounds or "auditory imagination", as he called it. He doesn't always keep to this device, especially when he is more concerned with thematic development. He did fix many of these passages in revision.[35]

Dante and Christianity

Critics have compared Eliot to Yeats. Yeats believed that we live in a cyclical world, saying, "If it be true that God is a circle whose centre is everywhere, the saint goes to the centre, the poet and the artist to the ring where everything comes round again."[36] Eliot believed that such a [circular] system is stuck within time. Eliot was influenced by Yeats's reading of Dante. This appears in Eliot's Ash Wednesday by changing Yeats's "desire for absolution" away from a humanistic approach.[37] When Eliot wrote about personal topics, he tended to use Dante as a reference point. He also relied on Dante's imagery: the idea of the "refining fire" in the Four Quartets and in The Waste Land comes from Purgatorio, and the celestial rose and fire imagery of Paradiso makes its way into the series.[38]

If The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Gerontion, The Waste Land, and The Hollow Men are Eliot's Inferno, Ash Wednesday seems to be Purgatorio, and the Four Quartets seems to be Paradiso[original research?].
The Four Quartets abandons time, as per Dante's conception of the Empyrean, and allows for opposites to co-exist together. As such, people are able to experience God directly as long as they know that they cannot fully understand or comprehend him.

Eliot tries to create a new system, according to Denis Donoghue, in which he is able to describe a Christianity that is not restricted by previous views that have fallen out of favour in modern society or contradicted by science. Eliot reasoned that he is not supposed to preach a theological system as a poet, but expose the reader to the ideas of religion. As Eliot stated in 1947: "if we learn to read poetry properly, the poet never persuades us to believe anything" and "What we learn from Dante, or the Bhagavad-Gita, or any other religious poetry is what it feels like to believe that religion."[39]

*According to Russell Kirk, "Nor is it possible to appreciate Eliot—whether or not one agrees with him—if one comes to Four Quartets with ideological blinders. Ideology, it must be remembered, is the attempt to supplant religious dogmas by political and scientistic dogmas. If one's first premise is that religion must be a snare and a delusion, for instance, then it follows that Eliot becomes an enemy to be assaulted, rather than a pilgrim whose journal one may admire-even if one does not believe in the goal of that quest."[40]

Krishna

Eliot's poetry is filled with religious images beyond those common to Christianity: the Four Quartets brings in Hindu stories with a particular emphasis on the Bhagavad-Gita of the Mahabharata.[41] Eliot went so far as to mark where he alludes to Hindu stories in his editions of the Mahabharata by including a page added which compared battle scenes with The Dry Salvages.[42]

Critical responses

Miguel Angel Montezanti El nudo coronado. Estudio de Cuatro cuartetos; 1994

Reviews were favourable for each poem. The completed set received divided reviews in the United States while it was received overall favourably by the British. The American critics liked the poetry but many did not appreciate the religious content of the work or that Eliot abandoned philosophical aspects of his earlier poetry. The British response was connected to Eliot's nationalistic spirit, and the work was received as a series of poems intended to help the nation during difficult times.[43] Santwana Haldar went so far as to assert that the "Four Quartets has been universally appreciated as the crown of Eliot's achievement in religious poetry, one that appeals to all including those who do not share Orthodox Christian creed."[44]

George Orwell believed just the opposite. He argued: "It is clear that something has departed, some kind of current has been switched off, the later verse does not contain the earlier, even if it is claimed as an improvement upon it [...] He does not really feel his faith, but merely assents to it for complex reasons. It does not in itself give him any fresh literary impulse."[45] Years later, Russell Kirk wrote, "I cannot agree with Orwell that Eliot gave no more than a melancholy assent to doctrines now quite unbelievable. Over the past quarter of a century, most serious critics—whether or not they find Christian faith impossible—have found in the Quartets the greatest twentieth-century achievements in the poetry of philosophy and religion."[46] Like Orwell, Stead also noticed a difference between the Four Quartets and Eliot's earlier poetry, but he disagreed with Orwell's conclusion: "Four Quartets is an attempt to bring into a more exact balance the will and the creative imagination; it attempts to harness the creative imagination which in all Eliot's earlier poetry ran its own course, edited but not consciously directed. The achievement is of a high order, but the best qualities of Four Quartets are inevitably different from those of The Waste Land.[47]

Early American reviewers were divided on discussing the theological aspects of the Four Quartets. F. R. Leavis, in Scrutiny (Summer 1942), analysed the first three poems and discussed how the verse "makes its explorations into the concrete realities of experience below the conceptual currency" instead of their Christian themes.[48] Muriel Bradbrook, in Theology (March 1943), did the opposite of F. R. Leavis and emphasised how Eliot captured Christian experience in general and how it relates to literature. D. W. Harding, in the Spring 1943 issue of Scrutiny, discussed the Pentecostal image but would not discuss how it would relate to Eliot's Christianity. Although he appreciated Eliot's work, Paul Goodman believed that the despair found within the poem meant that Eliot could not be a Christian poet. John Fletcher felt that Eliot's understanding of salvation could not help the real world whereas Louis Untermeyer believed that not everyone would understand the poems.[49]

Many critics have emphasised the importance of the religious themes in the poem. Vincent Buckley stated that the Four Quartets "presuppose certain values as necessary for their very structure as poems yet devote that structure to questioning their meaning and relevance. The whole work is, in fact, the most authentic example I know in modern poetry of a satisfying religio-poetic meditation. We sense throughout it is not merely a building-up of an intricate poetic form on the foundation of experiences already over and done with, but a constant energy, an ever-present activity, of thinking and feeling."[50] In his analysis of approaches regarding apocalypse and religious in British poetry, M. H. Abrams claimed, "Even after a quarter-century, T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets has not lost its status as a strikingly 'modern' poem; its evolving meditations, however, merely play complex variations upon the design and motifs of Romantic representation of the poets educational progress."[51]

Late 20th century and early 21st century critics continued the religious emphasis. Craig Raine pointed out: "Undeniably, Four Quartets has its faults—for instance, the elementary tautology of 'anxious worried women' in section I of The Dry Salvages. But the passages documenting in undeniable detail 'the moment in and out of time' are the most successful attempts at the mystical in poetry since Wordsworth's spots of time in The Prelude—themselves a refiguration of the mystical."[52] Michael Bell argued for the universality within the poems' religious dimension and claimed that the poems "were genuinely of their time in that, while speaking of religious faith, they did not assume it in the reader."[53] John Cooper, in regard to the poem's place within the historical context of World War II, described the aspects of the series appeal: "Four Quartets spoke about the spirit in the midst of this new crisis and, not surprisingly, there were many readers who would not only allow the poem to carry them with it, but who also hungered for it."[54]

In a more secular appreciation, one of Eliot's biographers, the critic Peter Ackroyd, has stated that "the most striking characteristic of The Four Quartets is the way in which these sequences are very carefully structured. They echo and re-echo each other, and one sequence in each poem, as it were, echoes its companion sequence in the next poem. . . The Four Quartets are poems about a nation and about a culture which is very severely under threat, and in a sense, you could describe The Four Quartets as a poem of memory, but not the memory of one individual but the memory of a whole civilization."[55]

In a 2019 interview, conservative philosopher Roger Scruton stated that "...(T. S. Eliot influenced) my vision of culture. And that’s from school days: I came across Four Quartets aged 16 and that made sense of everything for the first time."[56] American author Ross Douthat writes of the poem: "This is a poetic counterpart to Chesterton's prose. Eliot's verse makes no argument, but distills the religious impulse and his own Christian hope to eloquent perfection."[57]

See also

References

Endnotes
  1. ^ Orwell, George, 1903-1950. (2008). All art is propaganda : critical essays. Packer, George, 1960- (1st ed.). Orlando: Harcourt. ISBN 9780151013555. OCLC 214322739.
  2. ^ Ackroyd 1984 p. 228
  3. ^ Grant 1997 p. 37
  4. ^ Jump up to:a b c Ackroyd 1984 pp. 254–255
  5. ^ Pinion 1986 p. 48
  6. ^ Ackroyd 1984 pp. 262–266
  7. ^ Jump up to:a b Ackroyd 1984 p. 262
  8. ^ Jump up to:a b Pinion 1986 p. 219.
  9. ^ Gardner 1978 qtd. p. 26
  10. ^ Kirk 2008 p. 239
  11. ^ Kirk 2008 p. 266
  12. ^ Moody 2006 p. 143
  13. ^ Bergonzi 1972 pp. 150–154
  14. ^ Bergonzi 1972 pp. 172
  15. ^ Ackroyd 1984 p. 270
  16. ^ Jump up to:a b Bergonzi 1972 p. 164
  17. ^ Stead 1969 p. 171
  18. ^ Bergonzi 1972 p. 165
  19. ^ Diels, Hermann; Burnet, John Translator. "Heraclitus 139 Fragments" (PDF) (in Greek and English). {{cite web}}: |author2= has generic name (help)
  20. ^ Ackroyd 1984 pp. 228–230
  21. ^ Kirk 2008 pp. 246–247
  22. ^ Kirk 2008 pp. 250–252
  23. ^ Kirk 2008 pp. 254–255
  24. ^ Ackroyd 1984 pp. 263–266
  25. ^ Kirk 2008 pp. 260–263
  26. ^ Jump up to:a b Ackroyd 1984 p. 271
  27. ^ Bergonzi 1972 pp. 166–7
  28. ^ Pinion 1986 p. 227
  29. ^ Bergonzi 1972 qtd. p. 168
  30. ^ Bergonzi qtd. 1972 pp. 168–169
  31. ^ Gordon 2000 p. 341
  32. ^ Manganiello 1989 pp. 115–119
  33. ^ Gordon, Lyndall (1 November 2000). T.S Eliot: An Imperfect Life. W.W. Norton and company. p. 369. ISBN 978-0-393-32093-0.
  34. ^ Moody 2006 pp. 143–144
  35. ^ Ackroyd 1984 pp. 265–266
  36. ^ Manganiello 1989 p. 150
  37. ^ Manganiello 1989 pp. 150–152
  38. ^ Bergonzi 1972 pp. 171–173
  39. ^ Kirk 2008 qtd. pp. 241–243
  40. ^ Kirk 2008 p. 244
  41. ^ Pinion 1986 pp. 226–227
  42. ^ Gordon 2000 p. 85
  43. ^ Ackroyd 1984 pp. 262–269
  44. ^ Haldar 2005 p. 94
  45. ^ Kirk 2008 qtd p. 240
  46. ^ Kirk 2008 p. 240
  47. ^ Stead 1969 p. 176
  48. ^ Grant 1997 qtd. p. 44
  49. ^ Grant 1997 pp. 44–46
  50. ^ Kirk 2008 qtd. pp. 240–241
  51. ^ Abrams 1973 p. 319
  52. ^ Raine 2006 p. 113
  53. ^ Bell 1997 p. 124
  54. ^ Cooper 2008 p. 23
  55. ^ T.S. Eliot. Voices and Visions Series. New York Center of Visual History: PBS, 1988.[1]
  56. ^ "The Roger Scruton interview: the full transcript". New Statesman. 26 April 2019. Retrieved 9 April 2021.
  57. ^ Douthat, Ross (15 April 2018). "Ross Douthat's 6 favorite books on religion". The Week. Retrieved 9 April 2021.
Bibliography
  • Abrams, Meyer Howard. Natural Supernaturalism: Traditional Revolution in Romantic Literature. W.W Norton and Company, 1973. ISBN 0-393-00609-3
  • Ackroyd, Peter. T. S. Eliot: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984. ISBN 0-671-53043-7
  • Bell, Michael. Literature, Modernism, and Myth Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ISBN 0-585-00052-2
  • Bergonzi, Bernard. T. S. Eliot. New York: Macmillan Company, 1972. OCLC 262820
  • Cooper, John. T. S. Eliot and the ideology of Four Quartets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-521-06091-2
  • Gallup, Donald. T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography (A Revised and Extended Edition). New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969. OCLC 98808
  • Gardner, Helen. The Composition of "Four Quartets". New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. ISBN 0-19-519989-8
  • Gordon, Lyndall. T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000. ISBN 0-393-04728-8
  • Grant, Michael, T. S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage. New York: Routledge, 1997. ISBN 0-7100-9224-5
  • Haldar, Santwana. T. S. Eliot : A Twenty-first Century View. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers & Distributors, 2005. ISBN 81-269-0414-3
  • Howard, Thomas. Dove Descending: A Journey Into T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. Ignatius Press, 2006. ISBN 1-58617-040-6
  • Kirk, Russell. Eliot and His Age: T.S. Eliot's Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century. Wilmington: ISI Books, 2008. OCLC 80106144
  • Manganiello, Dominic. T. S. Eliot and Dante. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989. ISBN 0-312-02104-6
  • Moody, A. David. "Four Quartets: Music, Word, Meaning and Value" in The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot, ed. A. David Moody, 142–157. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. ISBN 0-521-42080-6
  • Newman, Barbara. "Eliot's Affirmative Way: Julian of Norwich, Charles Williams, and Little Gidding." Modern Philology 108 (2011): 427–61. doi:10.1086/658355 JSTOR 10.1086/658355
  • Oser, Lee. "Coming to Terms with Four Quartets." Blackwell Companion to T. S. Eliot. Ed. David Chinitz. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009: 216-227. doi:10.1002/9781444315738
  • Pinion, F. B. A T. S. Eliot Companion. London: MacMillan, 1986. OCLC 246986356
  • Raine, Craig. T. S. Eliot. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
  • Stead, Christian. The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot. Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1969. OCLC 312358328


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