Canon Cancrizans and the Four Quartets

Abstract

N T. S. ELIOT'S poetry, prose, and plays there is a gradually developed understanding and application of the principle that an inseparable relationship exists between form and material in a work of art. From the time of the early poems, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), Eliot combined the technique and poetic concepts which later became prime factors in the formal structure of his poems and plays.1 In his critical studies, he frequently discussed the problem of artistic form. Fundamental in his technique is an understanding of the pastness and the presence of the past, the poet's place in time, and the co-existence of the timeless and the temporal as both separate and integrated entities.2 It is this developed historical sense which enabled Eliot to manipulate the opposed tensions inherent in the juxtaposition of the changeless and the changing as a basis for the form of a poem. In this study I am concerned with the relationship of form and material and the technical application of this principle as a basic factor in the formal structure of the Four Quartets.3 In addition, I shall consider an historical model of the principle.