quartet has five parts, of which the first establishes a personal theme and the fourth
is short and lyrical;The Waste Land had this shape.Four Quartets is apparently less
intense, meditatively repeating and varying themes in quietly self-communing
voices, lyrical, meditative or self-mocking yet seriously didactic. In ‘Little Gidding’,
Eliot takes farewell of his poetic gift and meditates the value of his life.
‘Let me reveal the gifts reserved for age,
And set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort.
First the cold friction of expiring sense ...’
So speaks a ‘ghost’ whose speech echoes Dante, Shakespeare, Yeats and Swift, and the
poet’s own family ghosts.
Eliot’s family were Unitarians – believing that there was ‘at most, one God’ – but
he made a radical and complete conversion to a Christianity which was incarna-
tional, sacrificial, immanent, mystical. His marriage had made romantic disappoint-
ment and ‘detachment ... from persons’ a painful reality; he cast this in the terms of
the Buddhist and Brahmin philosophy he had studied for two years at Harvard.
Detachment does not grab every reader. Nor does a return to the England of
Shakespeare and Milton, of the execution of Mary Queen of Scots and of Charles I.
Yet each Quartet opens with a directly personal experience at a named place, and the
thinking is consecutive, turning on the relation of timeless moments with the
process of time, and the presence of the divine in experience and in history. The
mode is intimate: ‘My words echo / Thus in your mind’ (‘Burnt Norton’). The
language is ascetic, returning always to the perfection and limits of poetic language:
‘As the Chinese jar still / Turns perpetually in its stillness.’
As in The Waste Land, Eliot achieved what he found in Dante, a depth of language
yielding levels of meaning. An example is a meditation in ‘Little Gidding III’ on the
deaths of ‘ three men and more’: the men are Charles I, his supporters and his enemy
the blind John Milton; but also Jesus, the thieves, the apostles and St John the Divine.
Eliot’s allegory is usually less referential. History and experience are open to a realm
where language stops but meaning continues, a realm to which language can only
point.Less striking than The Waste Land,Four Quartets is an even more ambitious
poem. As the subject is more difficult, the presentation is more restrained.Eliot’s criticism
Eliot’s early criticism of Renaissance drama and the Metaphysicals is highly intelligent,
provocative, incisive, elegant. Although learned, it is pre-academic and more personal
than its manner suggests. It is also strategic, creating the taste by which his own poetry
would be appreciated. What Eliot later called ‘effrontery’ worked a velvet revolution,
winning him an authority comparable to that of Matthew Arnold. With age, his liter-
ary criticism became more general, less sharp. He also wrote social criticism in
support of a restored Christian society in England, a hope outlived in Four Quartets.
Eliot’s critical dominance has faded, but his poetry still echoes. When Lawrence
died in 1930, high modernism was over, its practitioners dispersed or absorbed in
projects marginal to English audiences.Apes of God, Wyndham Lewis’s 1930 attack
on ‘Bloomsbury’ and the cult of youth, is a retrospect. Modernism had conquered
the peaks, but at the high cost of excluding middlebrows from a minority culture
and alienating non-modernist writers. The poet Robert Graves attacked Pound and
Eliot in his essay ‘These be your gods, O Israel!’ Eliot was indeed a god for some of
the new English generation of Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966), George Orwell354 13 · FROM POST-WAR TO POST-WAR: 1920–55