Myth-Making in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets

Abstract

The author's English summary from the article:

Key words: modernism, Eliot, Four Quartets, Dante.

Comprehensive artistic and analytical treatment of myth in the 20s and onwards influenced all literary endeavors that shaped the aesthetics of Modernism and ended with the publication of Four Quartets in 1944. This general attitude shaped the poetics of the best works of Modernism not only inspiring the literary process of the 1920-40s, but essentially influencing the 20th century poetic mind on the whole. It was due to the reversion to myth that as Joseph Frank put it, “... time was no longer felt as an objective, causal progression with clearly marked-out differences between periods; it had become a continuum in which distinctions between past and present were wiped out”.

Past and present were apprehended spatially, locked in a modernist timeless unity of the literary universe, and this formed the basic peculiarity of the “mythical method” of High Modernism. Four Quartets represents an exceptionally complex aesthetic whole, based on universal mythical patterns, which poetically model the world in terms of time, space and number. The poem is also based on complex intercultural symbolism, comprising Western (primarily Catholic) theology and Oriental (Hindu, Tibetan and Zen Buddhist) religious experience. The patterns of ‘fourness’ or a quaternity, a point, a circle, a square, and straight lines forming a cross constitute the basis for the poetic universe of the poem.

These general patterns are loaded with innumerable literary and cultural allusions, references, puns, and subtexts, and their relevant apprehension presupposes a well-educated reader. The very poetic diction of the poem is simple on the surface but extremely complex and ambivalent in its substance and multiple implications, which naturally produce the possibility of a variety of interpretations. However, for a scholarly perception the rich allusiveness of the poem often points to specific sources, and these are Dante’s La Divina Commedia and La Vita Nuova in the first place. The concepts of time and space in the quartets are mostly based on the Pythagorean idea of Four Elements, Plato’s Timaeus, and St Augustine’s Confessions, as well as The Bhagavad Gita and the symbolism of Kalachakra Mandala, or the Wheel of Time (the Great Wheel of Death and Rebirth), which is common to both Hindu and Buddhist religious teachings.

Nevertheless, the associative sources of the poem can in fact be described as endless in number, from Aristotle’s idea of the ‘unmoved mover’ (Metaphysics) and his concept of now to C. G. Jung’s analytical psychology and his archetype of Self (Das Selbst). In the article it is demonstrated that the whole poetical world of Four Quartets is based on the pattern of a rotating circle with a still point in the center, and on the corresponding numerical designation of the process of circulation and recurrence, the all- important number of four. The cyclical time of Four Quartets suggests not only the ‘rotation’ of the entire poetic structure of the poem as of “a single cycle that begins and ends at the same point” (Northrop Frye).

It also determines the poetic realization of the effect of stillness in the center, the very nunc stans that was defined by Eliot in poetry, and Thomas Mann in prose fiction, as the essence of the ‘musical’ composition of a work of art as a whole.

Published in the journal Sjani, vol. 15 (2014), pp. 29–47. Open the paper