T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets as response to The Wasteland

Buirnt Norton

East Coker

The Dry Salvages

Little Gidding

Eliot

Among the best-known and most respected poems in American literature,

The Wasteland reflects T.S. Eliot's dissolution with Western civilization

after World War I. The poem is long and involved but within it the poet expresses concerns deeply held that indicate to the reader that he needs to view a world that is full of life not death and stagnation. In this

paper those concerns and needs are compared and contrasted with the far more joyous and hopeful images he portrays in the Four Quarters.

To answer the question -- How satisfactory do you find the Four Quarters as fulfillment of the needs so powerfully expressed in the Wasteland? -- a person must first review and critique the "needs" in T.S. Eliot's the Wasteland. And once that review is complete, and the Four Quartets have been reviewed and critiqued, it seems to be the case that Eliot has, in the Four Quartets, found fulfillment and because of that discovery he has answers to the dark questions and bleak images brought forth in the Wasteland.

Statement of Problem

First of all the Wasteland is interpreted as Eliot's disillusion based on the aftermath of WWI and on Eliot's own personal problems. And it should be remembered that Eliot wrote the Wasteland while in a sanatorium in Switzerland. He was 33 years old and later said that the poem was "…the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life…just a piece of rhythmical grumbling" (Lewis, Modernism Lab, Yale University). While Eliot clearly was minimizing the value and quality of his highly revered poem, the scholarly criticism in years to come considered the Wasteland a major statement made by a giant in the genre of modernist poetry. Besides, as critic Monroe Beardsley stated, "The poem is not the critic's own and not the author's (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it). The poem belongs to the public" (Lewis, Yale University).

Meanwhile, what are the needs that Eliot "so powerfully expressed"? A poet who sees April showers as cruel instead of sweet and nourishing could be reflective of the fact that after the First World War the "soil" (society) was not able to sustain new growth. The needs that the poet and society shared were built around healing the "stony rubbish" (line 20) and the "heap of broken mages" (line 22). The dead tree needs to come back to life so in can provide shade and shelter (line 23). After all the title of the first section of the Wasteland is "The Burial of the Dead" and in the ground / soil the way the new plants will grow in the spring once the "forgetful snow" is gone; and the "little life" that will pop up is based on the nutrients left by decaying leaves from plants that thrived earlier. Line 45 defines Madame Sosostris as a famous clairvoyante and the speaker here is the wife of a soldier; she is asking Madame Sosostris what happened to her husband in the war. Eliot needs to know what happened to the soldiers although he surely does know, but raising the question through these lines is his protest. If pearls are the eyes of the dead soldier, he has been down there a long time. In line 63 he needs to understand why "death had undone so many."

Clearly the cries through metaphor and simile are both about the intellectual and emotional needs that Eliot has in his passion to understand the decay and violence in Western civilization. Rats slithering over the muddy riverbank and the "rattle of bones" -- Eliot needs some new life; and he needs water (line 331-337) because "Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think" but if there was water "we should stop and drink."

Buirnt Norton -- Number One of Four Quartets

Certainly this is a poem that thematically fulfills some of the needs that the poet expressed so grimly in the Wasteland. Anything expressed that is positive and contains pieces of the fabric of life is fulfilling a need for life and color and hope when juxtaposed against the Wasteland. Indeed, the Four Quartets is built around the concept of music, for starters, and music in contrast to the "frosty silence in the gardens" is a welcome image. "He who was living is now dead," Eliot wrote (line 328) in the Wasteland. And in the Wasteland the poet hates spring because everything is dead and the land is depressing and there is only rock but no water. But in Burnt Norton the roses "Had the look of flowers that are looked that…as our guests, accepted and accepting" while the pool was "filled with water out of sunlight" and wars are "long forgotten."

In the first stanza Eliot expresses that what "might have been"; might there have been a way to avoid World War I, one wonders upon reading these lines? Might there have been a way to eschew the slaughter of tens of thousands of men who fought in foxholes full of snow and mud and blood? Oh well, the poet explains, all time is "unredeemable" so those things that are nagging at the world's consciousness are gone forever. it's all an abstraction to the poet, and so it is "a perpetual possibility" only for those who care to speculate.

Still, "a perpetual possibility" is a phrase that is a joyful refrain in comparison to the gloom and darkness in the Wasteland. There were no possibilities reflected in the Wasteland, only death, dying, and bitterness. But in the rose-garden of the country house ("Burnt Norton" is the modern day spelling) he finds a number of things that resemble or reflect life. In the shrubbery music is "unheard"; at least he recognizes that the music is in there, whether it is heard or not.

What is happy about Burnt Norton is that in the end children are laughing in the "foliage" (bushes) and the word "Love" is used. "Desire itself is movement," the poet writes, and "Love is itself unmoving, Only the cause and end of Movement, Timeless, and the undesiring Except in the aspect of time." Ending this first quartet with the image of a "shaft of sunlight" is like knowing there is a flicker of hope, a teasingly fleeting sense of positive thought because it is "ridiculous" to waste time being sad.

East Coker -- Number Two of Four Quartets

In the Wasteland there was no love of springtime, in fact April was the least favorite month of the year for the poet. Death was all around and rocks were everywhere but water was not to be found. Meanwhile in the very first stanza of East Coker "…there is a time for building and a time for living and for generation" and the dahlias are waiting for the "early owl" (nighttime). Generation? In the Wasteland there was no hope of generation or regeneration. But this poem was written in 1940, 18 years after the Wasteland and yet right in the midst of Hitler's maniacal march to slaughter in Europe, which raises interesting questions.

Still, to think that a man and a woman would be dancing around a bonfire on a summer night and there is music in the air; it would seem that Eliot has found some artistic fulfillment in this second phase of the Four Quartets. Flames licking wildly in the night -- and heavy feet "in clumsy shoes" being energized enough to leap through those flames -- present an image of stark bright heat and light against the black of the night sky. Hope is renewed, one presumes, when the corn is being nourished and the harvest time is here. "Milking" at the time of the harvest is a productive answer to the awful stench of war that Eliot was so obsessed with in the Wasteland.

Hollyhocks are bright, tall flowers that reach out to the sun, and if they "aim too high" they tend to fall over from their own weight, the poet is saying. But at least they aimed high, and were not like the rats that slithered in the mud to rattle bones in the Wasteland. Do old men have wisdom? Are the old men the ones who started the World War I? They may be, in the poet's perception. "Do not let me hear of the wisdom of old men," he writes, "but rather of their folly, Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession." In other words the past was based on so-called wise individuals, but look what it brought the world -- war and woe.

"The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility," Eliot continues, because humility "is endless." And the poet in this second of the four quartets insists that if you want to "arrive at what you are not [then] you must "go through the way in which you are not." In other words, you can't change the way you are or the way you think by staying in the same clothes or the same consciousness that you have been in all this time. You must be willing to sacrifice and accept that things may get worse before they get better. "…to be restored, our sickness must grow worse" Eliot writes, and this is actually a recipe for emotional health albeit nothing close to that was to be found in the Wasteland. Indeed the world "become stranger" and the pattern of our lives becomes "more complicated" as we grow older. But these are words that sound like philosophy, not the remorse that was saturated throughout the Wasteland.

The Dry Salvages -- Number Three of Four Quartets

In the Wasteland there was no water to be found. Not a drop of water -- just rock and dust and death. And yet here in number three of the four quartets the water is everywhere, even "within us" and "all about us." Eliot wrote this on the northeast coast of Massachusetts, and he is drenched in images of life, water, hope, and quite a contrast to the dry darkness of the Wasteland. Here in this section again Eliot has fulfilled his need to be hopeful albeit he is never far from skepticism and cryptic thoughts. In this section readers learn that the people in the city, who "worship the machine" (live in the industrial world), do not honor the natural world. So what? At least Eliot is referencing the world that is alive and not dead or dying. His poetry is brilliant no matter what his theme is, but it is indeed refreshing to read about the animals that come from the sea. By mentioning the starfish, the seagull, the horseshoe crab, and whales and sea anemone -- not to mention lobsters -- Eliot is suddenly the quintessential romantic living on the coast of Massachusetts. "We cannot think of a time that is oceanless or of an ocean not littered with wastage," he warns, after painting a lively, fulfilling picture of all the wonderful natural life that thrives at the ocean's edge and in the deep ocean waters.