LIDIA VIANU

T.S. Eliot - An Author for All Seasons

ELIOT MIS à NU (THE SOOTHING QUARTETS)

Soothing is the first attribute that comes to mind in connection with Eliot's FOUR QUARTETS. Written between 1935 and 1942, they mark the end of Eliot's major poetic achievement, in 1942, when he must have been no more than 54 years old. Books of literary criticism, books of essays on culture and other topics, as well as theatre plays followed, but no more remarkable poem was to issue from his hand. The same as Shakespeare's Tempest, these Quartets look like a farewell to poetry. As far back as his youth, when Prufrock was published, Eliot was haunted by the fear that soon he would no longer be able to feel and write poetry. The ‘sad ghost’ of Coleridge often beckoned to him from afar. As a poet, Eliot was by no means prolific. So much greater his merit of creating, in quite a few great poems, an imaginary world which has haunted poetry ever since. If he has not got whole shelves of books to boast of, he is, in exchange, a consummate master of concentration and ambiguity.

We have seen Eliot sternly hiding behind various masks, in his previous poems. Strange, however, to think that he accepted the French translation of his Waste Land to be entitled La Terre Mise à Nu. We have seen him as an innovator, as a difficult poet, a magician of the understatement. The Four Quartets are his last feat of magic. It takes a mature, an experienced and also somewhat tired sensibility to really enjoy them. There is a certain fatigue in these lines. Eliot no longer strives to strive. He no longer devises masks of friends or wizards for himself. This time he is the wizard, the wizard of obvious words, and he is at peace with his fate. This must be the reason why the quartets seem soothing: in them, a tired imagination is ‘mise à nu’. There is a poem by Yeats (The Circus Animals' Desertion) which describes a poetic mind, whose waterfall of imagined faces has tarried. ‘All ladders’, Yeats concludes there, ‘go down to the rag and bone shop of the heart’. This is precisely what happens to Eliot in his Quartets. The effect is bewildering. On first reading Eliot, a young reader can hardly see the point of them. If, advancing in age, he ever goes back to Eliot and his Quartets again, he cannot fail to perceive their essential, their astonishing directness, so much in contrast with Eliot's previous indirect poems. A soothing directness, by means of which, for the second time in his career, Eliot taught following generations an innovating lesson of poetry.

BURNT NORTON

EAST COKER

THE DRY SALVAGES

LITTLE GIDDING