T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Chaired by Janet Cunliffe-Jones

Reading & discussion organised by John Bulman

BRLSI Member

23 February 2005

First, six volunteers, who had been given passages to prepare in advance, read from ‘Burnt Norton’ and ‘Little Gidding’, books 1 and 4 of Four Quartets.

The second part of the meeting was for audience participation, rather than questions and answers. Comments on the poem were made and discussed freely among the fairly small audience. This is difficult to convey without some bitty repetition.

Eliot’s sense of repression and guilt was thought to have stemmed from the Puritanism of his upbringing.

It was pointed out that references to fire in ‘Little Gidding’ were written during WWII, when Eliot travelled extensively, often during air raids, to give lectures.

Understanding this wartime reference can help the reader, yet the writing is sufficiently unspecific to suggest other kinds of danger and desolation.

A few lines further on, Eliot’s greeting of a ‘loitering and hurried’ stranger with the words, ‘What! Are you here?’ was believed to be an allusion to an encounter in Dante’s Inferno.

The darkness and elusiveness of Eliot’s verse was widely commented on. The convenor asked about the title, and the relationship of the poem to musical form. The use of recurring motifs is obvious, and one listener was able to make references to Beethoven and Bartok.

Eliot’s use of a variety of verse forms - long lines, short lines, rhymes, stanzas, etc. and experiments with such traditional forms as sestina were generally discussed. These contrasts of form, use of symbols, paradox etc, are all symptomatic of his attempts to express what is inexpressible.

John Bulman, in his short introduction, had used a quotation from The Art of T.S. Eliot by Helen Gardner, which seems worth repeating as the conclusion of this report: