The Voices of Silence Quotes

“he claims that prior to the differentiation of various religious paths, there is a universal substratum called Word (logos) of which religions are concretions.”
― J.C. Woods, The Voices of Silence: Meditations on T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets

“Confession describes the soul’s journey to God, using the self as paradigm.”
― J.C. Woods, The Voices of Silence: Meditations on T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets

“The poem is about self-transformation: the Eliot who ends the poem is not the Eliot who began it.”
― J.C. Woods, The Voices of Silence: Meditations on T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets

“Philosophy and poetry differ categorically as philosophy orders and directs the mental manipulation of symbols, while poetry attempts, through manipulating symbols, to change the behavior of bodies in space.”
― J.C. Woods, The Voices of Silence: Meditations on T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets

“(Eliot’s letters to her will continue sealed until 2019, and we have reason to believe he destroyed hers to him”
― J.C. Woods, The Voices of Silence: Meditations on T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets

“The Four Quartets both is and is not a religious poem. It is religious in the sense of religare (Latin, the restoring of bonds): it attempts to restore the bond joining “God, man and world” to a unity. It is not religious in the sense of espousing a collection of doctrines about God’s relation to humanity. Thus Eliot feels no compunction in alluding to Bhagavad Gita in one section of the poem (DS III) and Dante’s Paradiso in the next (DS IV). He neither asserts the rightness nor wrongness of one set of doctrines in relation to the other; nor does he try to reconcile them. Instead, he claims that prior to the differentiation of various religious paths, there is a universal substratum called Word (logos) of which religions are concretions.”
― J.C. Woods, The Voices of Silence: Meditations on T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets