Argument and Parody in T.S. Eliots Four Quartets Essay -- T.S. Eliot

The Seduction of Argument and the Danger of Parody in T.S. Eliots quatern Quartets Though its more lyrical passages present detailed and evocative imagery, demonstrable portions of T.S. Eliots Four Quartets afford no such easy approach. Since the initial display of Burnt Norton it has been a critical commonplace to regard these portions of the text as at once its most conceptually profound and its most officially prosaic. Of course, the Quartets offer enough cues toward this critical attitude that it may fairly be said to reside within the poem at least as much as it is imposed from without. As the text of the poem itself plainly gives license to the view that its poetry does not matter, the preponderance of critical fear to the Quartets non-lyrical passages has been devoted to philosophical and theological paraphrase of its argument, to explicating the system of belief or thought behind the words. Meanwhile, relatively little attention has been paid to the work of the poetry itself, to the construction of the presumed meaning, in these discursive or conceptual passages. Seduced by the desire for a systematic argument, criticism has overestimated these passages straightforwardness and largely neglected their ambiguity and indeterminacy. The seductive vox of argument which is already a voice within the poem invites conceptual scrutiny save repels formal depth psychology it displaces the concerns of poetry in order to work its poetry undetected. I depart be reading critically several critical discussions, but endlessly in the belief that the criticisms concerns are not projected onto the poem from without, but express the critical voices within the poem. The seduction of reading the Four Quartets as a systema... ...loise Knapp. T.S. Eliots Negative Way. Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, 1982. Kenner, Hugh. The Invisible Poet T.S. Eliot. London Methuen & Co., 1965. Orwell, George. T.S. Eliot. In T.S. Eliot Four Quartets A Casebook. Ed. Bern ard Bergonzi. London Macmillan, 1969. Reed, Henry. Chard Whitlow. In Collected Poems, p. 15. New York Oxford University Press, 1991. Shapiro, Karl. Poetic Bankruptcy. In T.S. Eliot Four Quartets A Casebook. Ed. Bernard Bergonzi. London Macmillan, 1969. Thompson, Eric. T.S. Eliot The Metaphysical Perspective. Carbondale, Ill. Southern Illinois University Press, 1963. Times literary Supplement. Mr T.S. Eliots Confession. In T.S. Eliot Four Quartets A Casebook. Ed. Bernard Bergonzi. London Macmillan, 1969. Traversi, Derek. T.S. Eliot The Longer Poems. London The Bodley Head, 1976.