T. S. Eliot and the Essay

7 Four Quartets: The Poem as Essay

91 = 7 Four Quartets The Poem as Essay In the third of Four Quartets, Eliot laments the way that we so often miss the meaning of an experience, thus echoing the discouragement of the opening of The Waste Land some twenty years earlier. Eliot’s words also recall his asseverations in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” against Wordsworth and the Romantic definition of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquillity.” Eliot makes clear in a subsequent essay, “The Metaphysical Poets,” that his objection centers on post-seventeenth-century reflection, which results from the “dissociation” in time of experience and reflection upon it. All along committed to observation, Eliot tries to reunite “sensibility” and to find meaning in the event, at the time of it, not later.1 Eliot’s prose writings are characteristically observational. Are they, then, essays? As I have argued here as well as in Tracing the Essay: Through Experience to Truth, this venerable and protean form, which takes its origin from the Essais of Montaigne at the end of the sixteenth century, exists as the site where certain important differences—even oppositions—meet and contend. Prominent among these stand literature and philosophy. What characterizes these sometime friends is, prominently, experience and reflection. In fact, the Montaignian essay occupies, however tentatively and uneasily, a central position on a spectrum with experience at one end and reflection at the other. Both personal and artful, it may be described—it resists definition—as that place where experience and reflection, literature and philosophy, come together. What characterizes this form, distinguishing it from “pure” autobiography and memoir (and paralleling Incarnation and its being as in-between transcendence and immanence), is the reflection it offers upon experience undergone . While the Montaignian, largely personal essay may not always be able 92 T. S. Eliot and the Essay to weigh—thus to assay—the meaning of experience, it most certainly and centrally involves reflection. So described, the essay runs afoul of Eliot’s defense of poetry and his practice of prose writing—which he often calls “essays.” Poetry is not about the poet reflecting, argues Eliot—it is neither reflective nor personal, that is, dominated by the poet’s “personality,” a focus that he traces directly to Montaigne and his Essais. Eliot’s so-called essays seem far removed from Montaigne ’s; they are nearly their virtual opposite, in fact. That Eliot does indeed write essays has been the subject of this book. So far, though, I have attended almost exclusively to his prose essays. Now I will turn to his essay in verse, Four Quartets. Trained as a philosopher and a poet-essayist in prose and verse alike, Eliot never strayed far beyond the intellectual and philosophical matters that he treated in his eventually published dissertation: differences, supposed oppositions , and dualisms. Not surprisingly, his greatest poem is also his preeminent philosophical, moral, and theological work; Four Quartets is as well, like the poet Pope’s greatest philosophical achievement, an essay. Differences, socalled oppositions, and dualisms—they are met and reconciled in this one magisterial work that effectively constitutes Eliot’s last word in nondramatic verse: the essay as poem. In my judgment, Four Quartets, which studiously shuns the thorough-going, this indirect, impure, and lovely creature, is the paradigmatic essay, Eliot’s supreme achievement. I hope it is obvious that I mean no disparagement of Four Quartets by calling it an essay. I am not the first, by any means, to think of Eliot’s poem in relation to Augustan poets such as John Dryden, whom he much admired, and the aforementioned Alexander Pope, both of whom made essays in poetry. Matthew Arnold famously thought these poets “masters of our prose,” perhaps as right as he was wrong. They are masters of the essay and poets, and they do one as the other. I am tempted to borrow from the German Romantic Schiller and call such efforts as Religio Laici, An Essay on Criticism , An Essay on Man, and Four Quartets “intellectual poetry,” but Schiller emphasized the adjective at the expense of the noun, whereas Dryden, Pope, and Eliot achieve a both/and that denigrates neither poem nor essay. The fact is, as I have argued elsewhere, being a place and a site rather than a genre, the essay knows, and has, no walls, no boundaries; it accommodates, embraces, the catholic and impure. The essay is as close to home in verse as in prose. Listen to the poet himself reading Four Quartets, and you...