In Our Time - Four Quartets

Episode Date: December 22, 2016

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Four Quartets, TS Eliot's last great work which he composed, against a background of imminent and actual world war, as meditations on the relationship between time and humanity. With David Moody Emeritus Professor of English and American Literature at the University of YorkFran Brearton Professor of Modern Poetry at Queen's University, BelfastAndMark Ford Professor of English and American Literature at University College LondonProducer: Simon TillotsonJeremy Irons will be reading TS Eliot's greatest poems, from Prufrock to The Waste Land to Four Quartets, across New Year's Day here on Radio 4.

Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programs. Hello, four quartets is TSA's last great poem, which he began in the years leading up to the Second World War and completed while London was still being bombed, and he was a fire warden watching at night for burning buildings.

He was writing for a wide audience in Britain and America and across four poems from Burnt Norton to East Coker, the Dry Salvegius, a little Gidding, he explored the relationship between life, death and time, and in particular the threats to his adopted England. Some 20 years later, after his earlier great work, the wasteland, Elliot here sought the universal truths of human experience and did that in a way that was intensely spiritual, even mystical,

and also personal, as well as public. With me to discuss four quartets are, David Moody, Emeritus Professor of English and American Literature of the University of York, Fran Breiton, Professor of Modern Poetry at Queen's University, Belfast, and Mark Ford, Professor of English and American Literature

at University College, London. Fran Brayton, let's look at T.S. Eliot's reputation as a poet by the 1930s. Can you just give us a few peaks of what is written by the mid-30s? I can, yes, and it's notable, really, how extraordinarily prominent Elliot is by the 1930s and how rapidly that's been achieved.

So from coming over to England at the start of the First World, World War. The really important first book in terms of modern poetry is Prefrock and Other Observations, which came out in 1917 and in which in the Love Song of J. Alfred Prefrock, although it's a pre-First World War poem, he's seen to capture something of that wartime and post-war sensibility. He follows that, of course, in 1922 with the wasteland, arguably the great long poem of the 20th century. And then we come through Ash Wednesday in 1930, Murder in the Cathedral, the play he writes, in 1935.

And by 1935, he's then published a collected poems from 1909 to that actually includes the first of the four quartets, Burnt Norton, and he has an extraordinary reputation as a poet at that point, both in Britain and America and across Europe, and is really seen as the elder statesman of English poetry by that time. Quite young to be in elder statesman,

slightly reinforced by his position that the great poetry has Faber and Faber in where he was regarded as well, the Pope of Russell Square, where the offices were situated or other titles were given to him, which were sort of rueful as well as complementary. Yes, in the end they called it. Too much power, people thought. Well, they did.

In the end, people called it the age of Eliot. So along with the growth of a poetic reputation, you also have the growth of Elliot's reputation as a critic, as an editor, and as you say, as a poetry publisher, all of which renders him or is perceived to render him extraordinarily powerful in the world of letters. So if we go back to 1919, the essay tradition in the individual talent, a text that is still being talked about in literary criticism today. He gave the Clark lectures before he was 40, I think, in 1926. And he takes on editorship of the criterion in 1922, and of course joins Faber in 1925.

So he's actually centrally involved in promoting poetry. And part of what he's doing there is also, I think, determining the climate of taste in which his own works will be read. Ordin once said about the poet as critic that really this could come down to, read me, don't read the other fellow. And there's a way of reading Elliot's criticism, which is a way of

understanding Elliot. Is it possible, it might not be so a movement if it isn't, is it possible to encapsulate, for people who might not know T.S. Eliot well, to encapsulate how distinctive and in what way his voice was distinctive? Yates called him

in 1936 the most revolutionary man in poetry to have appeared in my lifetime. Now that's not for me, it's necessarily a compliment, but he attributes that revolutionary sensibility to style and to subject matter, so that Elliot perceived to capture that post-war sensibility. We no longer believe necessarily in progress. There is disillusionment, ambitement, and Elliot, in the multiplicity of voices in that poem, in drawing from popular culture, music hall, as well as from trawling European literature, throwing in foreign quotation. That is a completely new style of writing. It's new in rhythmical and formal terms to moving in and out

of shifting patterns of rhythms and employing free verse in the way he does. And he captures very well, I think, in the wartime and post-war years, that sense of people almost being automated, victims of circumstance in a way as if they no longer have individual control over their actions. So Elliot in the 20s sounds rather different, I think, from the Elliot, who appears in 1930 with Ash Wednesday and develops through to the four quartets. But before you move on it, it is important to, how the wasteland, for instance, captured the imagination of so many young people,

young writer, readers all over the place, didn't it? It appears in other people's novels and so and so forth. Yes, so, you know, when the wasteland comes out in 1922, by the time you get to the beginning of what we call a 30s generation and people like Ordo and McNee Spender are coming along, the wasteland is the poem they're most profoundly influenced by and also the poem they need to try and overcome. in a sense to forge a new and distinctive voice in the 1930s.

David Moody, it appears that we might be able to say that Elliot no longer consented himself to be principally a poet in the 1930s. He'd taken to writing plays and some of them being successful. So how did he, why did he veer back, as it were, to four quartets? Yes, an interesting question. Just a remark about what Fran has just said so illuminatingly. Elliot did say about the wasteland and its popularity that had given people the illusion of being disillusioned.

He wasn't altogether impressed by the reception of it. And this had to do with his own ambitions as a poet. Up to Marina and before writing the rock, he had been writing poetry essentially for himself. It was personal poetry out of his own needs and drives. He was commissioned to write the rock, early in the 1930s and then to write Murder in the Cathedral for the Canterbury Festival in 1935.

And that moved him towards a theatre. He was able to deploy his sense of different voices in poetry and he thought he would go on writing for the theatre. But there was material left over from murder and the cathedral. A few speeches, particularly the one that begins, or the passage that begins, burnt north of. about time, and that he saw as possible germ of a poem. And that's how he came to write Bert Norton.

And Burt Norton, he thought... Can you remind us what those lines were? Time present and time past are both perhaps present and time future, and time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable. What might have been is an answer. abstraction, remaining a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been point to one end which is always present.

And that's a theme which he takes up through what he develops and unfolds. It's a philosophical theme, basically. So that's where his thinking is going. But that almost sounds like the end of something, doesn't it, David? He's got the murder in the cathedral, he's got this leftover, let's use a course term. I mean, more to write about being an eminent poet. But he puts it in his collected poems. This is the last one, and this is almost like the full stop.

But it germinates the other three, doesn't it? It does in time, yes. Yes. He, as I say, he thought he would go on writing to the theatre, and the reason for that was he wanted to address a different audience and a larger audience. The poetry was addressed, as I say, it was coming out of himself, personally, but it was addressed to poetry readers.

and he wanted a larger audience of those he didn't necessarily read poetry, and who went to the theatre, partly for entertainment. He recognised in the theatre by the time he was writing after the commissioned murder in the theatre. He recognised the theatre as a place of entertainment, almost for comedy, but he wanted to use that to bring in more serious concerns and to move the mind from the ordinary level up to a different level of spiritual perception. And when it came to the war time and at the beginning of the war, as he said, we were thrown in on ourselves. And that's when he began to write East Coker, which was a poem he had had in mind for some time, he said.

And out of East Coker developed dry savages and eventually little eating. So it's very organic. When we look at what he writes, it's nearly always been Germany for a long time, hasn't it? He's got this, I suppose this is not uncommon, but still he very clearly admits this has been, or we know that for many, many years he's been thinking about it, and he wouldn't let it go, even though he announced the end of his political grip,

but there was this other thing to do. Now to you, Mark, how, let's just for a moment talk about Elliot's personal life. I'm not being prurient here, but it does matter, especially that first, well, he's breakdown, but that's in the past of our discussion now and the wasteland and then the marriage to Vivian which proved to be very unhappy

and she as she as we know was institutionalised a certain stage and so how was this playing into his thinking and writing at this stage when say the late 30s when he's moving up to the next three quartets yes Elliot eventually left Vivian in

1932 he went to America and he gave the Charles Elliot Norton lectures at Harvard and he took that opportunity to leave a letter for Vivian saying and I'm not coming back and this was unbelievably distressing for Vivian and she tried to put a letter in the Times asking him to come back she showed up at an event he was giving in 1935 wearing black shirt kind of fascist uniform

and said will you come back to me Tom and he sort of hurried off the stage and the kind of... She went around the offices in favour? Yes, she would go around the office. He had a special door to get out of. Yes, the secretary would telephone up and he would disappear through a special door.

So Elliot felt very, very guilty about this. It sounds terribly sad, doesn't it? It is sad. I mean, she was a difficult woman to live with. I don't think that that can be denied, but the actual events of the 30s, her experiences in the 30s were quite terrible. And Elliot had also taken up with a woman called Emily Hale,

whom he'd met in Boston back in 1912. and in the trip to America in 1932, he went all the way over to California to visit Emily Hale. And it was Emily Hale whom he was, he visited Burnt Norton with in September of 1934. So this kind of visual, this revelation that he has in the garden of Burnt Norton

was one shared with Emily Hale, who was American. And by this time, he'd become Anglo-Catholic. He was a church warden of his local church, attended there every Sunday, took the collection. and he was a British citizen by then? Yes, in 1927 he was received into the English church and also took British citizenship.

And another, I think, important thing was 1933. He took a vow of chastity and the extent to which the erotic is sublimated in four quartets, I think relates to this notion that desire is somehow... Not in a self-desirable? Yes, correct. Yes. Right, he came from Missouri in the United States.

but he was very determined to be a British citizen and became a British citizen. And the England that he saw was one that he embraced very tightly and held to and wrote out of. What was that England? It was the England of somebody who was arriving in England and attempting to make sense of England. Virginia Woolf famously mocked him for wearing a four-piece suit that he was trying to be more English than the English. But Elliot himself had kind of, though he became a British citizen in 1927, later in life, said, I'm probably more an American poet than an English poet. Yeah, but let's see to where we are

in the theatres, right. And four quartets does have a journey to America made by his ancestor. It refers to that in East Coker, and Dry Salvasia's it set in America. But this is informed by Anglo Catholicism, this thing. It's informed by an idea of Englishness, particularly as the

last three quartets are around and about the beginning of in the middle, the Second World War where England as he saw it, well, everybody saw it, was attacked, and London as he saw it, and he literally saw it because he was a fire warden and top of a roof was being burnt. So we're talking about that now. Yes. He identified with the English in the battle against Nazi Germany, but very strongly history is now in England. And East Coker was tremendously seen as a

patriotic poem. It sold 12,000 copies quite quickly, which is pretty good going for a poetry pamphlet. So Elliot was being seen as a national treasure in some ways, and his Englishness was seen as part of the, not only part of the war effort, but he was a connection to America and might help get America into the war. But it's, one I'm trying to get to, and probably, let's just do it quickly and get it over it.

It's a very particular sort of Englishness, and people could call it a sliver of Englishness. There's a great dissenting tradition. There's the Methodist tradition. There's Judaism here. There's all sorts of, and there's a growth of atheism and so on. He takes a sliver, the Anglo-Cathlete, a very important sliver and so-and-so-and-he's also a royalist.

So he's out of the world. So it's out of this that he's writing, and out of this that he forms his Englishness. Yes, and he loved the aristocracy, the upper classes, and he used to hang out with them, and he was very proud of his connections to the aristocracy. Fran, Fran Brayton. Yes, I was just going to say that idea of Englishness in Elliot.

It's really pick the strands that you like, the Anglo-Catholicism, because it has the validity going back, and that idea of what is valid, which comes back in four quartets, associated with his concern with the martyrdom of Charles I. It is very much that royalist and quite conservative view of English history, which appealed at a particular moment in time,

it might not more generally appeal to a number of readers. Can I just, before I move to David, can I just ask you to, can you encapsulate what the overreaching themes are in four quartets, if they can be described as such? Well, themes could work in two ways in four quartets. If we take its musical motif and the musical structure, It has themes in the way music has themes, recurring themes, we might call those fire, the rose, water, things that are stitched all the way through the poem in the kind of exposition, recapitulation development, sort of idea of musical structure. Its main themes in terms of, I suppose, its preoccupations, what is it about? I would say, first of all, time and its relation to what is timeless.

and within that you can encompass how history relates to religion, how the individual relates to the past and the future. The intersection between time and timelessness? Yes, and the point of that intersection, he then says is the incarnation, so vertical axis and horizontal axis and that meeting point between them,

and where do you find timeless moments through time that actually bring you to that revelation. The second theme that I would say is throughout the poem is to do with words and language, and the struggle with words, the struggle with words that is designed to take you to the word with a capital W. But the struggle with language as a poet as well, his own battle. And it's a poem that reflects a great deal on the process of composition, that it's quite laboured in some ways in thinking about that and in thinking about how language can or can't reflect the world around us.

And also several instances of him saying or almost saying, what I want to say is beyond words. Yes. It cannot be said. What I want to say cannot be said. And that is the true meaning. Is that what you cannot be said? David said many years ago

that there's a paradox of the poem that reaches towards silence that struggles to reach towards silence beyond language. David, would you like David Woodie? Yes. One thing about his Englishness and the Englishness in the war,

particularly in addition to what has been said already, it's a very peculiar engagement with the war because very little of the war actually gets into it. apart from the dead patrol of the fire watch walking the streets after the firebombing, apart from that, the war is hardly recognized. And one of the key things, there's a mention of battle when he invokes in dry salvages, Arjuna, what Krishna says to Arjuna on the field of battle.

But Krishna doesn't say anything about the war, about battling. What he says is, upon whatever sphere of being, the mind of a man may be intent at moment of death, and the moment of death is every moment. It's a matter of the consciousness that matters, not the actual participation in the war. And there's an extraordinary detachment, I think, in the poem, in those three later quartets,

which, as you say, are patriotic poems. They are patriotic, but not the ordinary sense of patriotism. His patria is not of this world. He says it's England and nowhere. and the nowhere is very important. So that detachment is an essential part of the Englishness, detachment from what England is at the same time as he is in England, and that's the chosen place.

You asked me, you asked me... Well, I'm so interested in your answer, I think I've got what I asked you. Could I just add, in terms of the overall themes, the extent to which the poem is a spiritual autobiography, that it's Elliot's attempt to present his... spiritual state and you can connect that to his concept from Dante of an early period of the inferno, Fran was talking about the early poetry being, which was so popular, attacking secular society, then the middle period, the purgatorio bit, the wasteland in which he sets his own lands

in order and you can look at four quartets as fulfilling this dantscan three-part structure of the spiritual autobiography and this is where he gets his glimpse of paradise. David, yes. Coming back to the unsayable, the reaching silence. I was going to say, could you tell me about the unsayable? Yes. No, no, no, no, obvious why I forgot it, yes. Yes, well, the unsayable is precisely what it's about.

And he was trained as a philosopher, a sceptical philosopher, and he's concerned with the criticism of experience, experience in the criticism of experience, and his criticism of experience leads him towards a sense that the absolute, the ultimate of experience is something beyond what can be said. Particularly when he reaches towards the divine, he cannot, as a poet, talk about God,

that is to say, he cannot bring God into the poem because it is inconceivable. And much of the poem is concerned with trying to make us conceive the inconceivable, trying to say, it's not this and it's not that, leaving us to, with a space, an empty space. And behind this, there's the first of the first. but the divine love being caught in the form of limitation between unbeing and being. And that's how he conceives of life, a form of limitation between unbeing and being, and the being is the

ultimate being. And I think what the poem is concerned about is to rise out of one's ordinary being, one's ordinary self in the world, into the state of being itself, which can only be known by absenting yourself from your ordinary self. Is this Mark Ford, do you think why he makes such use of paradoxes? For instance, what you do not know is the only thing you know, what you own is what you do not own, and so on. To go forward, to go up, you must go down. The way up is the way down and that sort of thing.

Is he using that, would that link in with what David just said? And the way forward is the way back. It's full of these riddles or... paradoxes which you can't really make sense of in any particularly direct way. We all think that, don't we? I mean, we all think we all think we have to pull the past, because the past has always got any solid way. We pull that in in order to go forward.

So that's, it's well put, but I don't think it's a, brilliant, not a riddle. I think he considers these like aids to spiritual meditation in some ways, that they're like exercises which generate in the reader a sense of the ineffable, the beyond the things that can't be grasped. So it's full of these general paradoxes, which lead to a sort of, yes, are quite mystical. It's also interesting, though, that all four titles have quite personal significance for Elliot,

burnt Norton a place that he visited with Emily Hale, East Coker, where his ancestors came from, and where he was buried, dry salvagers, these rocks, which he'd sail around off the coast of Mass he sailed around in his youth, where he was a great sailor, and these are very important formative years. And Little Gidding, the chapel near Cambridge, he visited in 1936. It's less directly personal, but he makes of Little Gidding a kind of vision of the ideal British church. Because of the association of the 17th century.

Nicholas Farrar founded it in 1626, and King Charles visited in 1646 after the Battle of Naisby. And the poem, as Fran was saying, it's a very royalist poem. It's odd. And it is still fighting the English Civil War and on the side of Charles I in this poem. Fran, Brian, Brody. It's really to pick up the point about paradox there that Mark was making, and I'm thinking about the beginning of East Coker

and how that pulls a few threads together. In My Beginning is My End, and the reversal of the normal expectation of that phrase. And it's working on the way forward being the way back in that broad a sense of, in my beginning, my childhood. It's unto Dosty Will return, of course, but it's also about his ancestry. In that poem, as you say, it's about his ancestor setting off to America and him returning to the place from which there was that original departure and that sense of things coming full

circle in that poem. But I'm interested in East Koker's appeal in that sense to a public at a particular time, Mark made the point that it sold 12,000 copies. Now for a poetry pamphlet, that's absolutely extraordinary. So what is it about that poem that is speaking to in England on the verge of the Second World War, really it's written through the phony war and about to experience that. And some of those paradoxes offer a way of meditation or of thought for people,

which I think is not closed down to a particular spiritual experience, but is about anyone, any individual coming to terms with past and future. For some of those people in my beginning is my end, they're looking back to these people who've lived through one global war are about to confront another

and the idea of endings and beginnings is taking on a resonance beyond, simply the spiritual or the autobiographical. Is that a reference back to Ameri Queen of Scots when she said, In My End is My Beginning, which makes sense, because when I die, I'll begin a new life. Yes, and it's got that point about it too, and the whole of East Coker is about that sort of cycle of life and renewal,

sometimes pitch very positively in that poem, and then at other points it becomes very bleak, you know, in that rather satirical dark, dark, we will all enter into the dark, and, you know, the Grim Reaper is the great leveller at that point and everybody's going into the mire, but to go into that darkness is also to find your way towards the light. So what is very bleak and dark about

that poem, which I think speaks to the condition of England at the time, also has a more positive ending in sight. And the chastity plays in here because I'll come for one moment, David, I just want to finish this thought of, giving up, so much give up, you give up, you go down, down, you throw things,

this doesn't matter, and he also doesn't matter. The poetry doesn't matter is what he also says. in there and it's the via negative the way of giving up everything, you know, the St. John the Cross, the more you sacrifice, the more you gain. On the other hand, back to the paradoxes again, if you have no worldly ambition, you

achieve everything you set out to achieve. David. The thing that strikes me about East Coker is it does become affirmative, but affirmative in a way that's unexpected and isn't what you would expect from the

initial entry into a poetry of ancestry, which seems to suggest ancestors, development, genealogy, looking for where you are now as descended from that. The emphasis of that first passage that moves through the beginning towards the end, towards the universal end, but the emphasis falls upon dung and death, which is extraordinary in a way, having begun with the sense that this is his ancestry, Here is a house that's burnt, but houses are renewed also. But it moves towards dung and death, and then, as you say, it moves on to embrace that.

The way forward is to embrace your end and to make your end ultimate. It requires a transformation. It is not the expected natural development and fulfillment. It's precisely not that. It's moving to another plane. And this, if I can introduce, the question of the quartet as a set of four instruments. The way in which the poem works is by using these different voices, different instrumentalities of the mind. There's first of all the lyric voice, which is used for natural experience, for memory and direct experience,

the world one's ordinary self, as one might say. then there's a philosophic voice which thinks about that experience which analyzes it in order to discover its meaning and then there's a voice which affirms the meaning and tries to integrate that into one's disposition and to affirm

the meaning. And the ultimate meaning is always, well, your life is a dying. That's the universal truth, the truth for all people at all time that living is dying. And that's what he sees it upon and then tries to transform that. This is the drive of the point, to transform that

into an affirmation of moving to the higher reality, which is reality of consciousness, of not only dying, but of ultimate being. That's the positive thing. Mark, can I turn to you? We get several fascinating positives, I think, throughout quartets. About writing, about how writing is hard, how he has to start again,

and he interrupts, you'll have the phrase at your fingertips. he says, well, that was okay, but it wasn't a good. He says it rather better than that, frankly, but obviously. Why can't I write our words? And that's showing his, it's like a Richard Rogers building, isn't it? The inside out is going on. That was a way of putting it, not very satisfactory, but you put it very well, Melbourne.

I think that it's one of the first poems, which is what could be called a meta-poem. It's a poem about writing poetry, and this becomes very popular in the postmodern. modern era, but Elliot is actually the first person to do it in a way which makes it spread around the world, that this is a poem about the troubles of writing poetry. So all his language becomes in some ways provisional, it seems to me, that he's using examples, quite generic examples often, children's voices in the garden, a bird song, the house falling down. They're

not particular examples, they're quite ordinary ones which illustrate things rather than being, so rather than being immediate experience. And he worried that there wasn't enough personal immediate experience in it. And this kind of prosy, discursive voice, which is rather uncomplimentary about what he's managed to do, leaving one still with intolerable wrestle with words and meanings, you'll never get there, but there's only the trying. And I think that the effort of the poem that attempts to write

also struck a chord with the British populace who were trying to win the war. So this is an ongoing effort. It can never be achieved in a quick way, but in some ways the going on trying is the point. If I could just, I mean, I probably want to query slightly the idea that this is the first poem that really embeds within it

the idea of the struggle in writing. Perhaps it does so more explicitly in this rather prosy way, which I sometimes find a little clunky, to be honest. I know that might be seen as part of the point, but I'm thinking back to say Yates and the epic struggle of poems in the 20s, such as the Tao or meditations in time of civil war, where there is that consciousness of what his position is as poet in relation to history

and how one labours in the process of writing and embeds that struggle within the writing. Perhaps I sometimes fill with four quartets where he's reflecting on his inadequacies, that was a way of putting it, not very satisfactory. That it sort of indicates a humility that he advocates in the poem, but it doesn't always feel terribly humble. It can sometimes feel, perhaps, to me, a little pompous. We keep saying the humility is endless. Well, he also thinks a state of humility is the only acceptable state of being, doesn't it?

Yes, I think to receive grace, you have to be in a state of humility. And humility is related to humus and earth. The prose, the prosy bits, I think, as you implied in an aside, are deliberately prosy and deliberately satiric. When he rejects, when he says that's not very satisfactory, that's because that is a form of rhetoric, and he's imitating a traditional form of rhetoric out of the 17th century, really, and he's saying that's not very satisfactory.

That's where putting it, which is not his own simply, but a traditional one, historical one, that's not very satisfactory. The treatment of the faces and the underground, particularly, when he gets on to the passages dealing with the underground, in each of the three, well, not little getting, but the first three, there's a touching upon the experience of people in the underground, and he means the underground to connect with the infernal, of course. Their life is apathetic, tumoured apathy, empty of meaning,

and he's putting that into a form which is a bit clunky, but deliberately. It's a deliberate lack of interest in it. He's not going to give his full mind to that, because he wants to hold it off to reject it and look for the further experience. Can I ask you, Fran Breeden, to talk about the dry salveages. These are rocks,

large rocks with a groaner, a boy bell which groans, it tolls its bell out from, comes from the deep currents. It's very convincing that. He's talking about time there and the deep time that moves this, the deep currents that move this bell to toll

and sailing there. And we're back to empty landscape. pre-os landscape, the waste, the ridiculous waste of the before and after. But can you just give us something about the dry salvages? It's interesting mentioning waste and that very title Dry Salveges, which was seen to be a look back in the sense to the wasteland. It wasn't understood by the first reader as an actual place, and he clarified that in the poem.

So it's that return to much of the imagery actually of the wasteland, the river to the rather kind of barren sense, but it has that bell tolling beneath it, which as he says about memory, and that bell ringing that's wrong by the waves becomes also the ritual that he's embraced in a new Anglican life because it becomes the bell of the Angelus ringing out three times a day. So it's both memory and ritual, you know,

the bells that summon that actually record moments through time and changes through time. I'm thinking of, you know, the way the church bells might ring out the dead, for instance, you know, that it becomes a way of, counting to and measuring time. But also in the end, for me in this poem, you may have different, something that actually is seen to make for one of those timeless moments of a recapturing of the past. I'm perhaps not explaining that very well. Feel free to jump in. The past is very, very early childhood. He's growing up on the Mississippi in St. Louis

and remembering the river with its, as he puts it, cargo of dead negroes, chicken coops, and the destructiveness of the Mississippi at that time. And the water, this is the water quartet, water is the Mississippi River as well as the sea as well, the Atlantic. And as I said, Elliot, was a keen sailor. And the Atlantic is, or the sea is the image that can destroy everything in one minute. The water is the sort of image of destructiveness. The water god, yeah.

Yeah. Yes, those who build cities, we put bridges over and forget about the river, but the river doesn't forget about us. I do not know much about gods, but Elliot does know a great deal about gods, which has always made that line seem particularly inauthentic to me. David Moody, is there a sense in which questions raised, or is it because you brilliant people are extrapolating this, is there a real sense in which are questions raised in the first three poems of this quartet

are answered in Little Gidding? And if so, what are they? I would put it slightly differently, that it's a matter of unfinished business, that as he works through these three patriarchalienable, Goddhiker wartime poems, he's developing his thought. The East Coker is but the death of earth, and its emphasis upon the death of earth.

Dry Salve did his emphasis upon the death of water, but also bringing in now explicit. Is it death of water or death by water? He also says the death of water. Right. Death by water, certainly, but the death of water, because he wants to annihilate the elements themselves, But the transformation here is to bring in explicitly religious terms, annunciation and incarnation.

So that death becomes an annunciation of a different kind of ending, the ultimate end. Now, he has moved towards explicit affirmation of the meaning, but he hasn't yet incorporated into a way of life. And this is what he wants to do in Little Gidding, to develop a sense of community, a religious community, and he moves in the book-getting towards that affirmation of society, of basically Christians who, because of their common belief and common practice, their common action, will be united in the divine will.

So it's a wishing to create or to speak to and to speak for a society. Fran Brayton, coming back to something which was raised earlier in the programme, is there a sense in which for some readers and for many non-readers, Elliot's intense religion and the mysticism,

we haven't really talked about the mysticism, yes, Julian of Norwich. Is it a problem, it's a barrier even? I think it can be. That debate began early and it began in 1942 in Poetry, London, where Orwell came in and said, I prefer the early poems of glowing despair to the later ones of melancholy faith,

because he didn't like to see that Christian agenda, if you like, driving the poem. But I think we also have to differentiate between how a readership responded to it and saw it and read it in those terms of a Christian or Anglican message, and whether the poem may be about many other things and maybe read in many different ways. there is a, I think for some people, a sense that the four quartets, Elliot is different from. He may have alienated some of the readers of the wasteland, who read the wasteland very differently in terms of disillusionment too.

Ted Hughes in the early 80s said in one of his letters that if a poet moves into faith in that sense, perhaps they can bring the poetry with them and that Elliot is one of the people who did that successfully. But in doing so, they may well lose the first really. readership, or they may abandon the poetry altogether as actually no longer necessary now that the religious life has actually taken its place. And to some extent, you know, this is also Eliot's Swan Song as a poet. You know, there's nothing else really of significance

for the remaining 20 years of his writing life. And it's deliberately meditative and rehearsing something and then back to it again. Not only, he doesn't have to say, did I get it right? He does it again, the beginning and end, the beginning, all this present. all the radius of the present and so on. So we haven't talked about an element that I think, everybody, I think so, it's important, it's due with mysticism. Mark, what do you think, Mark Ford?

I think the poem makes sense as the work of a mystic. I mean, it's incredibly beautifully patterned, exquisitely, very, very carefully patterned, and the intricacy of the patterning is in order to release these timeless moments, as he calls them, in which he glimpses the divine.

And these glimpses of the divine are what give meaning to Elliot's life in a sense that he will possibly be redeemed. And I think the problem that Fran was raising was that to many people, the horrors of the 20th century couldn't be answered by high Anglicanism, Stalinism, Nazism,

high Anglicanism didn't seem particularly telling solution to the atrocities which the poem was responding to. And many people doubted the use of Elliot's faith, I think Pound, where Elliot said to Pound, I'm going to go to hell, and Pound said,

I just don't get it, I don't get it, that you're worried about that when the world is going to hell in a handcart, so to speak, so that Elliot's solution seemed a very kind of narrow and tribal one in relation to the problems that the poem was diagnosing. How persuaded you, David Moody, at the close of the four quartets, he uses the phrase, all shall be well.

He wrote before the dropping of the atom bomb. I don't know why I thought of that, but there you are. And we're talking about the destruction and that. Soon after he finished the quartets, the bomb dropped. It connects with what Mark... All shall be well. Yes, it connects with what Mark was just saying. What pound said, this love of death that was in them,

I do not understand it. This love of death. And that's a way of thinking that Elliot is talking, So that, given that there is apparently a love of death, apparently, I say, then the dropping of the atom bomb would not disturb him. That would be part of the pattern of things. All right, an absolute of killing. But is the end reassuring, you ask?

That depends upon whether you followed him in his faith. If you have followed him in his faith, then, yes, I think it will be reassuring. If you have not, then it is problematic. if you really understand a condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything. I'm not sure what not less than everything is, but it's certainly an absolute. Brian?

I wonder the phrase you quote, All manner of things shall be well, is of course the phrase from Julian of Norwich and from the Revelations of Divine Love, and that is a genuine mystical text. I think Elliot's is not in the same way and isn't purporting to be either, but her message in the revelations

is rather more positive, actually, in its emphasis on love, than the way Elliot employs her at the end of four quartets. I think Elliot isn't including love, but this is a love which consumes. The divine love is a purgatorial fire which refines, and the end is of the refining fire. Very briefly. There's a lot of personal suffering which goes into the creation of that fire in the rose, the excruciation which kind of Elliot charts for us,

is, if not masochistic, it's pretty painful. Right. Wow. Excruciation is a good word because it is almost close to crucify, which connects with the incarnation and the death of Christ. Well, thank you all very much. Thank you, David Moody, Fran Breden and Mark Ford. Next week we'll be discussing the German astronomer Johannes Kepler, who is widely regarded as one of the greatest scientists of all time.

Thank you very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Did we miss out anything that I should have got in? What do you think, Fran? I'd have liked perhaps to have a chance to talk a little bit about the way this poem negotiates with Yates. And Yates's death in 1939 is something that, in a way,

clears the way for Elliot to be the grand old man of poetry. Yates has gone. Kippling has gone in 1936, both 20 or years. years older than him. And I was conscious reading through four quartets again, which I was doing really after many years working more on Yates, how much he is looking back to that, how much he's revising Yates. So the beginning of East Koko, with its houses fall and built again, is almost direct echo from Yates, that idea of decay and destruction and reconstruction. But Yates, of course, is the one who builds the tower and holds it intact while Elliot is writing about as falling towers. think the dantsk ghost who appears to rebuke him as a slightly Yatesian figure in some ways too.

But he's rewriting what Yates stood for, the frenzy and folly and wisdom. Elliot's ideas of that are actually very different from Yates'. So, I mean, as Ordin said by Yates, the words of dead man are modified in the guts of the living. And I think in this poem you see Elliot modifying Yatesian words in his own image rather than in the way Yates would have employed them. Yes, Elliot said about Yates and his rage against old age. If he had had a belief that Elliot had the Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Catholic belief, he would have had something more sensible to rage against. Well, conversely, Yates, of course, said that he didn't believe really

Elliot's lack of self-surrender in relation to his God is something... Like a what? Lack of self-surrender. That he didn't give himself in the way that Anglo-Catholicism or Catholicism required. and that was his criticism also that he simply described men and women getting into an bed out of mere habit. But he wasn't an admirer, I recognise that. So there's a nice dialogue between them. I'd like to touch on the relation with Dante and also St. John of the Cross.

In his modifying them, the lyric in East Coker, the wounded surgeon, implies the steel, is based upon the poem by John of the Cross, which is the base. of his Dark Night of the Soul, which Elliot invokes. It's five stanzas of five lines, which is exactly the form of St. John of the Cross's poem, and it is following it, in this case, with agreement. In the case of the Sestina, which begins part two of the Dry Salveges, it's Dante's Sestina, Pocigiano, which he is imitating,

but changing. The Sestina works through a series of changes of the same rhymes. Elliot fixes those rhymes, so that the same pattern of rhyme is repeated in each. So the stina here is not a progression, but a repetition and fixing. So he's following Dante, of course, the whole poem, as has been said, is following Dante very closely,

and ends up that Chiquant knot of fire as an image out of the purgatoria of Anno Daniel, but he's following Dante's form while at the same time adapting it. And so on the subject of sources, I tend to see this poem as very, as placing Elliot clearly in the New England Puritan tradition, that this is Elliot almost in his pulpit and explaining to the congregation how they're going to be redeemed and offering a kind of spiritual paradigm for the progress that they might make towards a kind of Evita Nuova. So that although he borrowed from Europe all the terms and the illusions often, I find there's lots of the 17th century New England preacher in Elliot.

And although he does it in a very kind of subtle and insinuating and seductive way, what he says is fairly uncompromising in relation to his vision of last things. I wonder if that's part of, there's a great deal of talking this poem about what goes into it, what sources go into it, what influences are there. There's perhaps less critical discussion about where it goes. And that interests me too in terms of what is the legacy of four quartets in post-1945 poetry. And it's there and it's a very problematical one. So you can see it at work in Ordom's the Sea and the Mirror, but not necessarily to the best effect. You can see it in some of Geoffrey Hill's work as well and things like the,

triumph of love. So it does have an afterlife too, but it doesn't have an afterlife in the way that the wasteland had an afterlife. And there's something about it that seems to have ended with it as much as it's. And the prosiness and the self-consciousness and the meditiveness goes into strands of American poetry quite, a poet like John Ashbury, for instance, develops that kind of discursive voice over lots and lots of long poems. So there's a ways in which, although I take your point that Yates's self-consciousness is of a different kind of kind of models it earlier, but Elliot's sort of chatiness becomes a kind of part of the chatiness of a poet like John Ashbury.

Yeah. But he, what Elliot has done is invented a form, which is a new form, but he's also exhausted it. Because unless you want to say the sort of thing that he's saying, write the kind of metaphysical poem that he's writing, you don't have a use for this particular form. The elements of it that you mentioned, like the prosiness or the rest of it, you can take out elements of it. But the total form, that closely organised quartet form, which is following a kind of sonata form, closest to a Bartok sonata, that is not immutable except for the same purpose.

Even by Elliot himself. I mean, he had 22 years to write, and he didn't write any more poetry of significance. So he did feel when he finished Little Gidding that he had come to the end of his... of his poetic journey. Well, I think the producers burst in to get in with the announcement of the morning. Four coffees or four teas? And for more podcasts on arts and ideas from the BBC. Follow the link on our website to the best of BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking programme.