Redeeming Time: Winnicott, Eliot, and the Four Quartets

Beginning from the observation of Winnicott's well-attested predilection for Eliot's Four Quartets as an expressive vehicle for his own thoughts and concerns about dying as a fact of, and a factor in, the life of the individual, this paper examines the extent of Winnicott's explicit and implicit "borrowings" from this poem in his theoretical and clinical writings over the last two decades of his life. The author considers the reasons why Winnicott may have found the sentiments expressed in it to be so compatible with his own. The paper attends particularly to Eliot's central concept of "redeeming time" and what this may have meant for, or been interpreted as meaning by, Winnicott.