Literary Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot

[Bookworm_Girl]

I've read Burnt Norton so far. It's a little warmer than -34C here so I enjoyed a lovely afternoon in the backyard with a pot of warm English tea and some Beethoven while I read.

Thanks for all of the background information and links. Understanding poetry is always a challenge to me. When I finish reading the poems, then I intend to listen to the videos. What a great idea!

I found this article in the Wall Street Journal that I liked.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014...52?autologin=y

[Bookpossum]

That sounds like a good combination, Bookworm_Girl. Thanks for the link.

[Rizla]

Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?

The greatest poem by the greatest poet of the 20th century.

[Bookpossum]

I have just read "Burnt Norton" for the first time in many years, and was so glad to find it as rich and beautiful as I had remembered it to be. I need to let it all soak in a bit before I write about it. In a way I feel totally inadequate to write anything at all!

[HomeInMyShoes]

^Which is fair.

I read all of them and will re-read them over the next week or so. I have to say that I enjoyed them immensely. East Coker might be my favourite.

[Bookpossum]

This has been a rereading after many years for me. The poems are just as beautiful and as mesmerising as I remember them. For me they are collectively a meditation on the human condition, and our need to feel that there is a purpose and a meaning to our lives.

While Eliot was informed by his Anglo-Catholicism, for me the poems have something to say to anyone who wishes to be still and to contemplate time and eternity.

And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now.
(Burnt Norton, Part V.)

The section in Burnt Norton Part II which begins “At the still point of the turning world” seems to me to show the similarities that can be found in all the great religions and philosophies of how to live one’s life.

Joseph Campbell in Myths to Live By quoted this passage when writing of the Buddha arriving “at last at the Bodhi-tree, the tree (so called) of enlightenment at the midpoint of the universe – that centre of his own deepest silence …”

I really feel inadequate trying to write about these poems, They affect me in the same way that great music (whether religious or secular) affects me – a feeling of awe, a need to be quiet and to experience something profound.

[Rizla]

I think Eliot's poems express his search for religious enlightenment. It's all about seeking the still point of the whirling world. I find a lot of them quite Buddhist, but the symbolisms are eclectic, and predominately Christian.

Did you ever him hear speak? It sounds upper-class British English.

[Bookpossum]

Yes, I have heard recordings of him reading his own poetry. I suppose living in England over a long period made him sound more English. After living in England for a year or more, I was surprised to find that people didn't realise I was an Australian - I had blended in without particularly trying to do so.

[Bookworm_Girl]

I have read two of the four poems and am enjoying them. This obituary in the New York Times provides an excellent biography and insight into his personality.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/04/2...liot-obit.html

He had a strong dislike for most teaching of poetry, and he once recalled that he had been turned against Shakespeare in his youth by didactical instructors.

"I took a dislike to 'Julius Caesar' which lasted, I am sorry to say, until I saw the film of Marlon Brando and John Gielgud, and a dislike to 'The Merchant of Venice' which persists to this day.

"It may be that a few plays and poems must be sacrificed [in school] in order that we learn that English literature exists and that an ordinary acquaintance with it is desirable."

Eliot believed, moreover, that "unless a teacher is a person who reads poetry for enjoyment he or she cannot stimulate pupils to enjoy it."

Pursuing this theme, he once described how teachers of literature should go about it:

"My Ideal Teacher will teach the prescribed classics of literature as history, as part of history which every educated person should know something about, whether he likes it or not; and then should lead some of the pupils to enjoyment, and the rest at least to the point of recognizing that there are other persons who do enjoy it. And he will introduce the pupils to contemporary poetry by exciting enjoyment; enjoyment first and understanding second."

Eliot, however, was not one to minimize the difficulties of understanding poetic complexities or achieving empathy with its mood and feeling. "The reader of a poem," he admonished, "should take at least as much trouble as a barrister reading a decision on a complicated case."

[desertblues]

In the first place: thanks all for the useful links. I have studied them, listened and feel myself enlightened on the subject of T.S.Eliot.
I also read Four Quartets a second time.
In all honesty I must say this isn't my cup of tea at all. It all is a matter of taste and I just cannot warm myself towards this poet. Well, I didn't vote for him......
I will look forward to learning something from your discussion.

[Lin2412]

Every word that's sputtered seemed like a turmoil and calm and turmoil yet again. I like it. I like all the sequence of T.S. Elliot's words dance around my mind and project what he's trying to say. (I also like how he draws his conclusions) (Hello btw everyone)

[Bookpossum]

Sorry you didn't warm to Eliot, desertblues. As you say, it is very much a matter of taste, and I think that's probably more true with poetry than with other forms of literature.

Hello Lin and welcome to the Literary Book Club!

[HomeInMyShoes]

Completely agree with the enjoyment first. I am in Eliot's camp in having grown a hatred of Shakespeare through school.

[BelleZora]

Welcome to the MR Literary Book Club, Lin.

Somehow I had missed ever reading these poems, so I'm grateful for the motivation to read them now and for all the information and audio available.

[fantasyfan]

I find these poems engrossing. The discussion of the centre of quietness and timelessness that Eliot feels is the spiritual core within ourselves reminds me of the approach of Teresa of Avila who also had an awareness of this through her mystical experiences.

I've located one more interesting source to share. If you type in "T S Eliot The four quartets notes" into google the fourth item given is:

jbburnett.com | ts eliot: four quartets | notes".

This gives access to some very interesting elaboration (in fact, possibly an over-elaboration) of the significance of many of Eliot's poetic images. One that I found interesting is the gloss by Eliot himself on "Erhebung" which occurs in Part 2 of "Burnt Norton": i.e.:

"Erhebung is an important term in German philosophy. Kant (Critique of Judgment, 228-9), for instance, speaks of the beautiful as the “symbol of the morally good”, and discusses how the harmonizing of voices which takes place in aesthetic perception, as opposed to the dissonance of contradiction, brings about an ennobling elevation (Erhebung) beyond the senses in the direction of the intelligible. This ennobling elevation places the aesthetic in a mediating role, defining it as that which points beyond itself toward the supersensible domain of the ethical. Kant wishes to grant to the aesthetic both a final and a mediating function, where horizontal and vertical planes join each other."

Hello Lin2412! We look forward to your posts!