[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.In terms both personal and public history can often, like theof the second, no matter from what point vari- musical structures the poetry is meant to mimic,ous courses of inquiry begin, assuming that they all overlap in the Four Quartets in ways whereby thearrive at the only satisfactory conclusion, it will beginning of one motif or train of thought is lostbe pretty much the same conclusion.The thrill, momentarily or is completely blurred by anotheras always, is in the chase, not the capture.And is just ending, giving the endless impression that thethere any prey more elusive than the meaning, the poetry is nothing but a series of false starts followedpurpose, of life itself? by dead ends.In fact, however, it is these persis-Heracleitus s are practical insights once their tent over- and undertones of rhythms of thoughtessential wisdom is grasped, and they are the same and feeling that, on subsequent rereadings, give theinsights at which the speaker of the Four Quar- poetry an overarching coherence.Modulated liketets finally arrives.However, Eliot s speaker had pitches between major and minor keys, the poetry sto earn his way to those conclusions, not simply playing back and forth between reflections on time,accept them on the basis of the word of another.history, and eternity, all against a backdrop of sym-To imagine that Heracleitus is correct without test- bols drawn from a basic and unadorned naturaling his premises in experience would be to miss his landscape, gradually take on an internal harmony,whole point, which is that experience not logic or particularly when they are presented within thedoctrine or even belief, especially when that belief narrative framework of the poet s own cataloguingis based only on someone else s testimony alone of significant places.matters.And that is why any reader must first As its pace slackens and quickens, with a pur-experience a poem as rich as the Four Quartets posiveness that continuously grows in confidencebefore feeling secure enough to begin to try not so as the poem progresses through each of the suc-much to understand as to grasp, like Heracleitus s, ceeding quartets, those feelings and thoughts thatFour Quartets 229were first expressed with a hesitant philosophical of good practical wisdom based on commonplacecertainty begin to take on themselves the sem- observations.blance not of abstract speculations but of practi- The problem, as Eliot himself was aware at leastcal conclusions drawn from a relatively long life s since the 1920s and his essays on Shakespeare andreflections on real experience.The resulting assur- Dante, is that poetry is neither philosophy norance with which the great imponderables are not so belief, although it may seem to emerge from bothmuch resolved as they are successfully categorized in no certain way and to no certain purpose.Thebecomes infectious, and the reader should com- result, especially in Eliot s later poetry, beginningplete the poem not convinced but confirmed, for by with  Ash-Wednesday, is often a critical confu-virtue of all these varied techniques, the poetry has sion whereby, depending on the individual com-managed the unmanageable but always imaginable mentator s biases, Eliot is either praised or blamed,possibilities that the very idea of eternity holds out and his poetry is either commended or excoriated,to us poor creatures of time.As a result, Four Quar- according to the degree to which it appears to betets itself succeeds in making coherent the normally advancing some species of religious faith.incoherent and giving powerfully memorable shape The British essayist and novelist George Orwell,to the vague but necessary dream that there is, in whose classic political satire Animal Farm wouldthe words of W.B.Yeats, a purpose set before the later be published by Faber & Faber on the basis ofmind, the profane perfection of mankind.Eliot s editorial recommendation, provides a caseWhat is holiness, the poem asks again and again in point when he reviewed  The Dry Salvages forin a wide variety of ways, if it is only for the holy? Poetry in its October November issue for 1942 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]