T. S. Eliot's Poetics of Self: Reopening "Four Quartets"

Abstract

This article discusses how T. S. Eliot's long poem, Four Quartets, employs thematics of time, self, and history in an autobiographical work of literature. The article approaches autobiography primarily as an intellectual concern, rather than as a factual account of author's life, in examining a work that is difficult to subsume under available interpretive paradigms. The first part of article emphasizes how Augustine's Confessions, when considered as a meditation on time and religious experience, illuminates hermeneutics of Four Quartets. The second and central part of article provides close readings of key passages in this poem, which inscribes Greek cosmology and medieval epic in a narrative of literary development and spiritual change. The third and concluding part of article explores how author's later poetry and criticism highlight major tendencies in twentieth-century literature and anticipate interpretation of history. ********** T. S. Eliot's contribution to a poetics of self is often difficult to appraise due to his daunting reputation as a modernist poet as well as his initiatory role in founding of New Criticism. As representative poet-critic of his age, Eliot emphasized impersonality and aesthetic formalism at expense of subjectivity and life-experience. His canonization as a literary icon has prevented his readers from considering his poetry as a record of personal change. In Four Quartets, however, Eliot explores his poetic development as an autobiographical concern that challenges way that his work has been persistently read in modern criticism. In this short essay, I indicate how Eliot addresses question of self in religious terms, just as allows us to resituate his life in a new conception of self in time. In conclusion, I contend that Eliot's Four Quartets could be called postmodern in suggesting new approaches to his poetry and criticism that engage reader in spiritual adventure itself. I Eliot's theological interests, as they emerge in Four Quartets from beginning to end, often frustrate attentive reader from considering literature apart from matter of personal belief. But poetry itself, rather than poet's own life as an independent source of value, can be read as a sign of increasing commitment and/or as a narrative that places those same commitments in temporal perspective. Criticism, properly considered, can suggest how poet's own words emerge in time, not necessarily as an obscure beginning that was later articulated theologically, but as a clear response to a contemporary situation. The mediation between language and world that occurs in Fours Quartets is a matter of discourse, which might be read as verbal effort to provide communal significance to self's journey through time. The self that emerges as theme of a discursive elaboration enables poet to return to past as both personal and historical. R. A. York suggests that Eliot may be the greatest master of discursiveness in modern poetry, but also that he practices discursiveness to show its limits; to hint at what is private, immediate, incommensurate with speech (144). In Eliot's case, discourse opens up rifts in being of language, showing us that poem as such is neither a timeless artifact nor simply result of impersonal reflection. Hence, if considered in terms of difference between a complete theology and a phenomenology of experience, Four Quartets calls attention to rifts in time which animate speaker's account of his own journey from doubt to religious certainty. Furthermore, this journey, which involves reader in an experience of disillusionment that prevents poem from becoming merely a retrospective survey, cannot be assessed unless movement from past to present can be appreciated as a temporal process. …