Eliot speaks of the Four Quartets as among his highest achievements, and readers interested in spiritual exploration will respond to the poems.īut Eliot speaks of the Four Quartets as among his highest achievements, and readers interested in spiritual exploration will respond to the poems. It is dense and allusive and assumes the reader knows exactly what is happening. Still, it raises a question many readers have these days: If the personality of the writer himself is something I object to, should I enjoy the work? Four Quartets sometimes does not help-it employs many abstractions, something teachers of creative writing often discourage. We should not ban them but we must not abandon ourselves to them.” He saw no evidence of such prejudice in any of Eliot’s poems after 1922. As he said in 2003, promoting a new edition, “We ought not to seek to outlaw Eliot’s poems, but neither can we submit to them. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form in 1995, noting anti-Semitic themes in Eliot’s early poetry. Readers also feel qualms now about Eliot’s character. He has a reputation for being an elitist, including specific allusions and quotes in foreign languages without translation-assuming, perhaps, that the reader has the same breadth of knowledge.

I also saw how divided contemporary poets are about Eliot’s legacy. In 1927, he converted to the Anglican Church, an experience that affected much of his later work, including the long poem “Ash Wednesday” and Four Quartets, which he started writing in 1935. I knew that he’d left for Harvard in 1906 and virtually never came back, though he writes about the Mississippi River to open “The Dry Salvages”: “I do not know much about gods but I think that the river/ Is a strong brown god-sullen, untamed and intractable.”Įliot moved even farther away, to England, in 1914, and worked as a bank clerk as he wrote now-famous modernist masterpieces like “The Love Song of J. Louis, with extended family deeply connected to the Unitarian Church and Washington University.

I also learned that Eliot was born in my native St. The sequence itself returns repeatedly to the same ideas, for example, these in “Burnt Norton”: “Or say that the end precedes the beginning,/ And the end and the beginning were always there/ Before the beginning and after the end./ And all is always now.” The poems circle endlessly in and out of philosophies about time and memory, repeating themes and images. The fourth section of each, for example, is a brief lyric interlude that connects to prayer, Mary or the Trinity. As a student, I learned that each of the four poems-“Burnt Norton,” “East Coker,” “The Dry Salvages” and “Little Gidding”-has five sections that mirror each other.

East coker eliot