Classics and the Western Canon discussion
Discussion: T. S. Eliot's Poetry
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"Four Quartets": The poem as a whole
It does have a certain change in tone:"Love is most nearly itself.
When here and now cease to matter."
Laurel wrote: "Here is an explanation of the epigraphs to the poem:http://www.shmoop.com/four-quartets/e..."
I've looked at several translations of the first epigraph, τοῦ λόγου δ’ ἐόντος ξυνοῦ ζώουσιν οἱ πολλοὶ ὡς ἰδίαν ἔχοντες φρόνησιν, and so far I've seen "logos" translated as knowledge, wisdom, understanding, words, logic, reason and some just leave it untranslated.
I'm not sure what the best translation is -- probably none -- but it might be helpful to know that Eliot uses only a part of the fragment. There is one line before the one he quotes in the epigraph: "We should let ourselves be guided by what is common to all."
Thomas wrote: "Laurel wrote: "Here is an explanation of the epigraphs to the poem:http://www.shmoop.com/four-quartets/e..."
I've looked at several translations of the first epigraph, τοῦ λόγου..."
And so perhaps Eliot is applying the quote to a particular logos?
John 1:1
In the beginning was the Word (logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
All of the translations seem important to the poem, particularly word, Word, understanding, and wisdom (but not especially the wisdom of old men).
Laurel wrote: "Do I hear a sigh of relief?"From me, yes. I simply couldn't get my head into The Wasteland.
Though I do wonder a bit about calling the Four Quartets "a poem." They were written over a fairly long period of time and, if I'm correct, published separately. Will be interested to see how integrated they really seem to be (though the excerpt from Frye's essay definitely suggests yes.)
Edit to above: but then the Guardian article on 4Q and Beethoven talks about them, at least at one point, as separate poems in a series: "The first poem in the series...". Not sure it really matters, but then doesn't everything matter in Eliot?
Thomas wrote: "I've looked at several translations of the first epigraph, τοῦ λόγου..."Liddell and Scott, which is pretty much the OED of classical Greek, gives logos almost six full columns (of an OED sized page) plus additional comments in the supplement. I won't even try to summarize them, but suffice it to say that it's a complicated word with many aspects. Which one(s) Eliot, Heraclitus, and the Bible were each separately or similarly focused on is beyond my understanding.
Everyman wrote: "Thomas wrote: "I've looked at several translations of the first epigraph, τοῦ λόγου..."Liddell and Scott, which is pretty much the OED of classical Greek, gives logos almost six full columns (of..."
My comment was a reaction to the Shmoop commentary which says that logos means "knowledge," which it does not, though that may convey the general meaning in English if one is not too picky about what "knowledge" means. But Eliot was so careful about language that I have to think he would want us to read it for what it says: the word, or the message, or language. Maybe even pattern. in the sense of a rational way of understanding something. Eliot mentions patterns in this poem, so perhaps that is also a possibility.
Everyman wrote: "Though I do wonder a bit about calling the Four Quartets "a poem." They were written over a fairly long period of time and, if I'm correct, published separately. Will be interested to see how integrated they really seem to be (though the excerpt from Frye's essay definitely suggests yes.) ..."
According to Helen Gardner (The Composition of Four Quartets) there was "no such scheme in Eliot's mind when he wrote Burnt Norton, nor when he wrote East Coker" (28). It wasn't until a later section (3 or 4... I forget which... that he wrote with the idea of "a whole.")
I found this interesting, too.
"In the Collected Poems 1909-1962, they [the epigraphs] reverted to being epigraphs to Burnt Norton alone. Mrs. Valerie Eliot tells me that Eliot had thought of prefixing as epigraph to the volume as a whole an observation by an modern philosopher, Mr. Roker of the Fleet prison: 'What a rum thing time is, ain't it, Neddy?'"(28).
The Composition of Four Quartets
According to Helen Gardner (The Composition of Four Quartets) there was "no such scheme in Eliot's mind when he wrote Burnt Norton, nor when he wrote East Coker" (28). It wasn't until a later section (3 or 4... I forget which... that he wrote with the idea of "a whole.")
I found this interesting, too.
"In the Collected Poems 1909-1962, they [the epigraphs] reverted to being epigraphs to Burnt Norton alone. Mrs. Valerie Eliot tells me that Eliot had thought of prefixing as epigraph to the volume as a whole an observation by an modern philosopher, Mr. Roker of the Fleet prison: 'What a rum thing time is, ain't it, Neddy?'"(28).
The Composition of Four Quartets
Do you have Gardner's "Composition," Adelle? I'm jealous!
I do....lol...because ths library didn't have Dove Descending. ..so I got Gardner ' s instead.
Not terribly far in yet, but it seems to have wonderful bits about what Eliot was doing or who he was with or bits from letters.
I'm liking it.
Not terribly far in yet, but it seems to have wonderful bits about what Eliot was doing or who he was with or bits from letters.
I'm liking it.
I'm amazed and awed by Eliot's mastery of the English language, how he is able to condense into a few clear and concise lines a whole school of philosophical, religious thought. His essays must be fun to read as well.
Nemo wrote: "I'm amazed and awed by Eliot's mastery of the English language, how he is able to condense into a few clear and concise lines a whole school of philosophical, religious thought. His essays must ..."
The essays I have read are really good.
Thomas wrote: "Everyman wrote: "Thomas wrote: "I've looked at several translations of the first epigraph, τοῦ λόγου..."Liddell and Scott, which is pretty much the OED of classical Greek, gives logos almost six..."
I have two things written in the margins of my book. Who knows by now from which source they arrived, but they may be useful thoughts in guiding our reading.
"Though the law of things is universal in scope, the average man makes up the rules for himself" and "Though the Word governs everything, most people trust in their own scope"
Ashley wrote: "I have two things written in the margins of my book."Though the law of things is universal in scope, the average man makes up the rules for himself" and "Though the Word governs everything, most people trust in their own scope" "
Those are pretty loose translations, but the first one translates logos as "the law of things," which I think is pretty good. I actually like the first clause in the first translation, and the second in the second one. Combining and tweaking them a bit, I would render "Though the law of things is universal, most people judge for themselves."
Everyman wrote: "Laurel wrote: "Do I hear a sigh of relief?"From me, yes. I simply couldn't get my head into The Wasteland.
Though I do wonder a bit about calling the Four Quartets "a poem." They were writte..."
When we finish "Little Gidding" we can discuss again whether we are reading one poem or four (or twenty).
May have some bearing:
From an essay Eliot wrote in 1933, a little before he began work on Burnt Norton:
“Very few people, indeed, want to be better than they are; or, to put it in more consecrated terms, hunger and thirst after righteousness. And what we happen to like as individuals outside of the main current which is the Catholic tradition is apt to be what our own sort of people within a narrow limit of place and time have been happening to like. We’re likely to assume as eternal truths things that in fact have only been taken for granted by a small body of people or for a very short period of time. … And human wisdom … cannot be separated from divine wisdom without tending to become merely worldly wisdom, as vain as folly itself” (A Reading of..., 20).
From an essay Eliot wrote in 1933, a little before he began work on Burnt Norton:
“Very few people, indeed, want to be better than they are; or, to put it in more consecrated terms, hunger and thirst after righteousness. And what we happen to like as individuals outside of the main current which is the Catholic tradition is apt to be what our own sort of people within a narrow limit of place and time have been happening to like. We’re likely to assume as eternal truths things that in fact have only been taken for granted by a small body of people or for a very short period of time. … And human wisdom … cannot be separated from divine wisdom without tending to become merely worldly wisdom, as vain as folly itself” (A Reading of..., 20).
Adelle wrote: "May have some bearing:From an essay Eliot wrote in 1933, a little before he began work on Burnt Norton:
“Very few people, indeed, want to be better than they are; or, to put it in more consecr..."
The sense I am getting across Eliot's work thus far is that modern life is rubbish (unerringly boring and inane), modern people are vain and stupid; the only possible redemption is in trusting in a Christian God (with a bit of Eastern mythology thrown in). He obviously puts it a lot better than me!
Helen Gardner said that 'The Four Quartets' is Eliot's height and the easiest to read without the difficult allusions that previous works have... are people finding this to be the case?
I find it more difficult than TWL.
Lots of re-reading...
And wondering...
Lots of re-reading...
And wondering...
Clari wrote: "Helen Gardner said that 'The Four Quartets' is Eliot's height and the easiest to read without the difficult allusions that previous works have... are people finding this to be the case?"That's a great question, Clari—to be answered now and when we finish!
Laurel wrote: "That's a great question, Clari—to be answered now and when we finish! "Personally I found 'The Waste Land' so draining to read, I'm finding it hard to turn my concentration to another dense poem. Even though I think there is a sense of peace and redemption in 'The Four Quartets'.
Clari,I felt much the same when I began this poem. I'm only slowly beginning to engage with it.
Clari wrote: "Helen Gardner said that 'The Four Quartets' is Eliot's height and the easiest to read without the difficult allusions that previous works have... are people finding this to be the case?"I find it easier to read as a poem, to read it and let it happen to me, as opposed to the TWL, which I find difficult not to read as a puzzle. At the same time, I have less to say about the Quartets.
For those who may be in Oxford a couple weeks from now: There will be a reading of the Four Quartets and members of the Oxford Philomusica will perform Beethoven's Spring Quartet opus no 132.
A glass of wine, included in the ticket price, will be available at the interval
Running Time: 2 hours including an interval
Thu, 09 Jul 8:00 PMBook Tickets Prices: £20
http://www.oxford.anglican.org/wp-con...
Adelle wrote: "I find it more difficult than TWL. Lots of re-reading...
And wondering..."
I had the chance to spend an hour in the library at Seattle Pacific University, and while there browsed in a few books on Eliot and the Four Quartets (as a Christian university they had a fairly extensive section on Eliot; I could easily have spent a few weeks there and not read all they had). Didn't have time to absorb much, but was struck by this passage from Dove Descending by Thomas Howard: [emphasis in original]
"Eliot maintained that modern poetry has to be "difficult," since traditional poetic language has, alas, slipped almost wholly into cliche, and the poets have got to fight their way out of the morass."
Another comment from Dove Descending that I found worth thinking about is that a Quartet, of course, is for four voices, and the suggesting was made that the four voices in 4Q are the 4 basic elements -- earth, air, fire, and water, one per quartet. Not sure I see it all that clearly yet, but perhaps others might see it more clearly than I do.
A final comment from Dove Descending: Time past, time present, and time future are all present in the Mass. Time past in the physical presence of Jesus in the transformation of the bread and wine; time present in the ceremony of the Mass as it is taking place; time future in the hope of resurrection to come and the live eternal in Heaven.
Howard doesn't explicitly say (at least if he did I missed it in my fairly rapid scanning of the first chapters) that this is what Eliot had in mind, but the implication is there, particularly given that Eliot would have been, at the time of the writing of 4Q, a regular participant in the Mass.
Thanks for the quotes, Everyman. I've got the distinct impression that Laurel has been appreciating Dove Descending. I picked up a couple of books at the Denver Library. LOL, yes.... there was quite an assortment. Nice comment on the mass.
Everyman wrote: "Another comment from Dove Descending that I found worth thinking about is that a Quartet, of course, is for four voices, and the suggesting was made that the four voices in 4Q are the 4 basic eleme..."When we get to Little Gidding we'll see these four elements spelled out.
It's interesting, though, that it's one per quartet? So there aren't really four "voices" in each individual quartet.
Kathy wrote: "It's interesting, though, that it's one per quartet? So there aren't really four "voices" in each individual quartet."Here's what Howard says:
"Eliot is composing four quartets, which means that all four instruments (Air, Earth, Water, and Fire) play ensemble throughout. Naturally there are solo parts. But it is not as though Air has the score all to itself for the whole of “Burnt Norton”, and so forth. As I have pointed out earlier, I am reluctant to insist on too rigorous an identifying of the four sections of the Quartets with the Four Elements, one apiece. That would be four solos. On the other hand, we cannot deny that one or another of these Elements seems to have the ascendancy in a given section."
—Thomas Howard, Dove Descending: A Journey into T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets.
Everyman wrote: ""Eliot maintained that modern poetry has to be "difficult," since traditional poetic language has, alas, slipped almost wholly into cliche, and the poets have got to fight their way out of the morass." There is the argument that the modernists were being deliberately obscure to ensure that the intelligentsia remained separate from the increasingly educated and literate masses. (sorry if you discussed this when you did Ulysses! I haven't had time to read back through all the comments)
These two newspaper articles discuss John Carey's anti-modernist stance and mainly disagree with it:
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-ent...
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2001...
It is an interesting debate about the accessibility of art, I am not sure if there's any definitive answer.
But Helen Gardner writing on Eliot implies that he wrote his early poems almost for himself with very involved allusions, but with his later work he did want to get a wider audience, and 'The Four Quartets' specifically was designed to share his joy in Christianity with an audience who weren't Bible and church literate.
Out of interest, Eliot seems to be concerned with declining Christianity, I thought that early twentieth century Britain would still have been a widely Christian country and things started to crack with the social revolutions of the 1960s, does anyone know anything about 20th century church attendance?
C.S. Lewis, writing about the same era, observed that the college chapels were now almost empty. (He also observed that it was not a decline but a collapse -- as soon as chapel ceased to be mandatory unless you got up early to put yourself on the roll first -- which meant it merely revealed a pre-existing decline.)
Clari wrote: "Everyman wrote: ""Eliot maintained that modern poetry has to be "difficult," since traditional poetic language has, alas, slipped almost wholly into cliche, and the poets have got to fight their wa..."Especially withFour Quartets, I think, Eliot wanted his readers not to be lulled to sleep by the familiar da-DA-da-DA-da-DA-da-DA, but to wake up and pay attention and understand.
I read somewhere that modernism began with Prufrock and was put to an end by Four Quartets.
Clari wrote: "Out of interest, Eliot seems to be concerned with declining Christianity, I thought that early twentieth century Britain would still have been a widely Christian country and things started to crack..."Many of the churches in the nineteenth century believed that the world was getting better and better and the Church would soon usher in the Millennium. The Great War put an end to that idea, and the churches with that view of eschatology declined.
Laurel wrote: "Kathy wrote: "It's interesting, though, that it's one per quartet? So there aren't really four "voices" in each individual quartet."Here's what Howard says:
"Eliot is composing four quartets, wh..."
From The Voices of Silence: Meditations on T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets by The Rev. J.C. Woods
Burnt Norton relates oddly to the other poems: it is the only one among them published without a thought to its relation to the others. . . The plan for poems each representing an element was conceived only after its publication. It could, luckily, be "shoe-horned" to fit by transposing its central image of light into the key of air.
Having just finished Little Gidding, I definitely feel like the 4Q are just 4 poems that work together but don't necessarily need to be together. Each quartet can stand on it's own; however, after reading all four (regardless of the order) a reader can make the connections between them and the meanings wouldn't be lost for having been read out of order.And with the issue of time being so prevalent in these poems, I almost wonder if Eliot was challenging us to read them out of order... the end is the beginning, etc. And if we did read them out of order would that have changed our perspective of the poems? As stated above I think not, but perhaps others think differently...
Interesting idea! I wonder how he decided the order in which to place them? Today they might be offered digitally so as to resist the requirement of being ordered in any particular way.
I think Little Gidding ties the poem together beautifully.
Such an interesting question, Tiffany. I do think there is some progression in the order of the quartets, but for me, they make more of an impact individually, maybe because I don't know them well enough to hold "the big picture" in mind when I'm reading them.
The "elemental" theme of each of the quartets lets each one stand alone, I think, but at the same time they reference each other in a way that isn't necessarily linear. Which comes first: air, earth, water or fire? In what order does one follow the other? Hard to say, I think. But last quartet has a kind of finality for me. It is the kind of finality that signals a new beginning, like a forest fire that clears the way for new growth, but it does seem to me like a conclusion.
Laurel, Did I thank you already? I can't recall. If I haven't, let me say "THANK YOU." If I have, "thank you."
Classics and the Western Canon
Books mentioned in this topic
The Rock (other topics)The Composition of Four Quartets (other topics)
1. Read the poem from beginning to end:
http://www.davidgorman.com/4Quartets/...
2. Listen to T. S. Eliot read the poem:
http://youtu.be/Ga8tQrG4ZSw
Or let Jeremy Irons read it to you:
http://jeremyirons.net/tag/four-quart...
3. Read a short introduction by James Zinsmeister, "Where Time and the Timeless Intersect":
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1000142...
4. Sit in on a lecture by Thomas Howard, author of "Dove Descending":
http://youtu.be/fnTqmpti6So
5. Sometime in the next four weeks, try out this diagram:
'Although many critics have commented on the cyclical nature of the Four Quartets,Frye has actually diagrammed these poems. "Draw a horizontal line on a page," he says, "then a vertical line of the same length cutting it in two and forming a cross, then a circle of which these lines are diameters, then a smaller circle inside with the same centre. The horizontal line is clock time, the Heraclitean flux, the river into which no one steps twice. The vertical line is the presence of God descending into time, and crossing it at the Incarnation, forming the 'still point of the turning world.' The top and bottom of the vertical line represent the goals of the way up and the way down, though we cannot show that they are the same point in two dimensions. The top and bottom halves of the larger circle are the visions of plenitude and of vacancy respectively; the top and bottom halves of the smaller circle are the world of the rose-garden and (not unnaturally for an inner circle) of the subway, innocence and experience.... What lies below experience is ascesis or dark night. There is thus no hell in Four Quartets, which belong entirely to the purgatorial vision." "The archetype of this cycle is the Bible," he continues, "which begins with the story of man in a garden." So in Eliot we begin and end at the same point, "with the Word as the circumference of reality, containing within itself time, space, and poetry viewed in the light of the conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written." '
6. Read the essay from which the above paragraph is taken.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/t...
7. Experience an artistic response to "Four Quartets"
Briefly: http://fujimurainstitute.org/projects...
Entirely: http://youtu.be/qBD_OWu9UA8 (begins about 15 mins. in)