Liberal Arts Blog — TS Eliot (1888–1965) Part Two — The Four Quartets (“Burnt Norton,” “East Coker,” “The Dry Salvages,” “Little Gidding”)
Liberal Arts Blog — Tuesday is the Joy of Literature, Language, Religion, and Culture Day
Today’s Topic: TS Eliot (1888–1965) Part Two — The Four Quartets (“Burnt Norton,” “East Coker,” “The Dry Salvages,” “Little Gidding”)
Last time, in Part One, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1914) and “The Waste Land” (1921). Today, in Part Two, four poems written between 1936 and 1942 and first published separately by Faber and Faber in Great Britain during the Second World War (between the Blitz of 1940–1941 and the V-1 and V-2 attacks of 1944–1945). “Eliot regarded Four Quartets as his masterpiece, and it is the work that most of all led him to being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (in 1948). Do you have a favorite line? Was he right about humility? Was he right about the fire and the rose? and how about the river being a “strong brown god”?
Who is your favorite winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature? Why?
Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
BURNT NORTON (1936) — the title is the name of a cottage in the Cotswolds — below the opening lines
1. “Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future and time future contained in time past. What might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present.”
2. “Footfalls echo in the memory, Down the passage which we did not take, towards the door we never opened into the rose garden. My words echo thus in your mind.”
3. “But to what purpose disturbing the dust on a blow of rose-leaves, I do not know.”
NB: “Go, said the bird, for the leaves, were full of children, hidden excitedly, containing laughter. Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind cannot bear very much reality. Time past and time future, What might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present.”
EAST COKER (1940) — the title is the name of “a village in Somerset that was connected to his Eliot family ancestry and where Eliot’s ashes were placed in St. Michael and All Angels’ Church, East Coker.” Excerpts below.
1. “The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.”
2. “You say I am repeating something I have said before, I shall say it again. Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there, to arrive where you are, to get to where you are not, you must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy. In order to arrive at what you do not know, you must go by a way which is the way of ignorance. In order to possess what you do not possess, You must go by the way of dispossession. In order to arrive at what you are not, You must go through the way in which you are not. And what you do not know is the only thing you know and what you own is what you do not own and where you are is where you are not.”
3. ‘The dripping blood only drink, the bloody flesh our only food: in spite of which we like to think that we are sound, substantial flesh and blood — again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.”
NB: “Trying to use words, and every attempt is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure because one has only learned to get the better of words for the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which one is no longer disposed to say it…..And so each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating in the general mess of imprecision of feeling, undisciplined squads of emotion.”
THE DRY SALVAGES (1941) “The title comes from the name of a marine rock formation off the coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts, where he spent time at as a child” The river references are probably to the Mississippi — he grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. Excerpts below.
1. “I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river is a strong brown god — sullen, untamed and intractable, patient to some degree, at first recognized as a frontier, useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce; then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.”
2. “The river is within us, the sea is all about us…it tosses up our losses, the torn seine, the shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar and the gear of foreign dead men…the sea has many voices. Many gods and many voices.”
3. “Right action is freedom past and future also. For most of us, this is the aim, Never to be realized; who are only undefeated because we have gone on trying; we are content at the last if our temporal reversion nourishes (not too far from the yew-tree) the life of significant soil.”
LITTLE GIDDING (1942) — “The title refers to a small Anglican community in Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire, established by Nicholar Ferrar in the 17th century and scattered during the English Civil War (1642–1651).” Excerpts below.
1. “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.”
2. “Through the unknown, remembered gate, when the last of earth left to discover is that which was the beginning: at the source of the longest river, the voice of the hidden waterfall and the children in the apple tree not known, because not looked for but heard, half-heard, in the stillness between two waves of the sea.”
3. “Quick no, here, now, always — a condition of complete simplicity (costing not less than everything) and all shall be well when the tongues of flames are in-folded into the crowned knot of fire and the fire and the rose are one.”
FOOTNOTE — Biographical Tidbits
1. ”Born in St. Louis, Missouri to a prominent Boston Brahmin family, he moved to England in 1914 at age 25 and went on to settle, work, and marry there.”
2. “He became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39 and renounced his American citizenship.”
3. He graduated from Harvard College in 1909 and received a Master’s in English Literature in 1910. He later studied for a year at Merton College, Oxford.
NB: He converted from Unitarianism to Anglicanism in 1927. He was married twice.
No children. Worked as an editor at Faber and Faber from 1925 until his death in 1965. Perhaps the greatest couplet from his verse drama, “Murder in the Cathedral” (about the assassination of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, on the orders of Henry II in 1170) is: “The last temptation is the greatest treason, to do the right deed for the wrong reason.”
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2886568-four-quartets
Little Gidding (poem) — Wikipedia
Murder in the Cathedral — Wikipedia
QUOTE OF THE MONTH
“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
My spin — then periodically review, re-rank, and exchange your list with those you love. I call this the “Orion Exchange” because seven is about as many as any human can digest at a time. Game?
ATTACHMENTS BELOW:
#1 A graphic guide to justice (9 metaphors on one page).
#2 “39 Songs, Prayers, and Poems: the Keys to the Hearts of Seven Billion People” — Adams House Senior Common Room Presentation, (11/17/20)
NB: Palestine Orion (Decision) — let’s exchange Orions, let’s find Rumi’s field (“Beyond all ideas of right and wrong, there is a field. Meet me there” Rumi, 13 century Persian Sufi mystic)
THE LAST FOUR YEARS OF POSTS ORGANIZED THEMATICALLY INTO FOURTEEN BOOK-LENGTH PDFS:
PDF with headlines — Google Drive
Please share the coolest thing you learned this week related to words, language, literature, religion, culture.
Or, even better, the coolest or most important thing you learned in your life related to Words, Language, Literature (eg. quotes, poetry, vocabulary) that you have not yet shared.
This is your chance to make someone else’s day. Or to cement in your own mind something that you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply than otherwise about something dear to your heart. Continuity is key to depth of thought.
