Redeeming Time: T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (review)

Many of us first encountered literary modernism’s most original and challenging English-speaking poet, T. S. Eliot, as the author of a much-anthologized and disquieting “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” or his dark lyric “The Hollow Men.” If we later ventured into his heavily footnoted and haunting The Waste Land, written in the early 1920s, its complexity may have effectively stifled any further interest in his poetry. The more talented persevered to discover Eliot’s spiritual autobiography rendered through irony, ambiguity, and myth, and yielding a newly reflective poetry dramatically organized in a structure of opposing tensions which the poem strives to resolve. His mature meditations upon the hope of grace give voice to internal narratives in an age when poets no longer found significance in merely external action. The austerity of works like The Waste Land, Ash Wednesday, and Four Quartets achieves a form that effectively communicates dramatic spiritual struggle. Kenneth Paul Kramer’s Redeemed Time uses interpretive clues from a variety of the poet’s writings to measure the spiritual substance of Eliot’s masterpiece, Four Quartets. His effort rewards the reader with new insight into Eliot’s contemplative spirituality and the claim (in a 1930 letter) that his poetic ambition is to explain “his intenser [sic] human feelings in terms of the divine goal” (xii). More importantly, Kramer invites us to experience Eliot’s ceaseless exploration as encouragement for continual acts of spiritual resistance.

On the feast of Ss. Peter and Paul (June 29) in 1926, at the age of thirty seven, Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965) was baptized into the Church of England—becoming an “Anglo-Catholic,” as he preferred to put it. He left the liberal Unitarian religious identity of his family and youth for a religious tradition that sought to integrate the intellectual, the devotional, and the mystical. Works of St. John of the Cross, Julian of Norwich, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, St. Benedict, and Dante play a unique role in Four Quartets. The presence of these mystics and contemplatives stakes out an obvious domain for the study of Christian Spirituality in the Eliot canon. Yet Kramer challenges the reader to engage a deeper spiritual dynamic in these four lengthy poems. A Professor Emeritus of Comparative Religious Studies at San Jose State University, he draws upon his expertise in what he names “Interspiritual Practices” (the title of his concluding chapter) to reveal a “dialogic motive” behind his analysis of the text. As the author of Martin Buber’s I and Thou: Practicing Living Dialogue (Paulist, 2003), Kramer applies the Jewish sage’s liberating method: to enter dialogue with the text of Four Quartets, apply its message to his life (as may any reader), and take the additional step of “sharing the resulting interpretation with a community of inquiry” (22).

This encounter with newly awakened meaning in a poem that succeeds as dialogue (though interaction with the poet who lives through the text) moves one beyond what Buber called “alienating oddness” to a personal response that appropriates a surprising new reality. Kramer traces this pattern in all four poems, Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding, the creative task that consumed Eliot for nearly a decade, from 1934–42. A chart (140) succinctly identifies key images, metaphors, and “reciprocating mutualities” corresponding to the five movements in each poem:

	I	II	III	IV	V
B.N. (Air)	Lotos Rose	Still Point	Descend Lower	Kingfisher’s Wings	Coexistence
E.C. (Earth)	Open Field	Wisdom of Humility	Be Still	Wounded Surgeon	Union and Communion
D.S. (Water)	River & Sea	Sudden Illumination	Fare Forward	Queen of Heaven	Impossible Union
L.G. (Fire)	Tongued with Fire	Compound Ghost	Purify the Motive	Pyre or Pyre	Dancing Together

Kramer first follows the pattern of narrative unity that passes consecutively through the five movements: (1) a meditative landscape; (2) sudden illumination generated by the landscape; (3) spiritual practices; (4) a brief interlude in lyric form; (5...