Four Quartets: A Poem

This is a tiny book, more like a pamphlet, only 58 pages long with large print and some blank pages as part of the design. But it is mighty in its impact. These "four quartets" are four of T. S. Eliot's poems meditating (among other things) on the nature of time - time past, time present, time future...If you are of my generation and have read the poems before, you might love carrying this little book around just to dip into it for a line or two, and maybe understand something you never understood before. (T. S. Eliot is not always an easy read.) If you have never read them before, I envy you!

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.

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 Julia

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.

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.