Eliot's "Four Quartets"

Paper Summary:

The paper examines T.S. Eliot's use of voice and speech in the "Four Quartets" in the light of both his conception of the movement of words over time and the conception of language as an index of social change offered by the Bakhtinian circle. The paper discusses the way these concepts arise in 'Burnt Norton' before moving onto slightly briefer discussions of each of the other "Four Quartets." The paper concludes that Eliot's hierarchical presentation of voices throughout the "Four Quartets" effectively illustrates the inadequacy of any attempt to understand the world in purely intellectual, political, capitalistic or religious terms alone. Rather, the "Four Quartets" show, by means of their form and content, the necessity for taking on board and assimilating each of these separate discourses into one's own interior monologue, for it is only in relation to each other that each other that each of these discourses is meaningful.

From the Paper:

"Eliot thus, in this single statement, emphatically declares both the importance of vocalised speech to his poetry and, perhaps more significantly, a marked disinterest in the communication of any precise meaning to his readership. Eliot, here, seems to conceive of words, the very material of his poetry, not as a connection between poet and reader or, indeed, a means of conveying thoughts from the mind of one man to the mind of another. Rather, he presents words as 'autonomous' objects which, 'might function with no clear connection' or meaning imbued by their 'human source'."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Anderson, Bernard, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983)
• Bakhtin, Mikhail, 'Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel' in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981) pp.
• Bakhtin, Mikhail, 'Discourse in the Novel' in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981) pp.
• Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984)
• Booth, Allyson, Postcards From the Trenches: Negotiating the Space Between Modernism and the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)

More papers on Eliot's "Four Quartets":

• Analytical Essay # 7373 : "T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets"
• Analytical Essay # 6340 : "The Four Quartets"
• Analytical Essay # 59915 : "Eliot and the Language of Difficulty"

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