Eliot: I Still Like Him, but We’re Not Speaking Right Now

Hands down, my absolute favorite author this semester is Katherine Mansfield. It was a tie between Mansfield and Eliot, but now I have deducted some points from Eliot for “Four Quartets.” Sometimes, I feel like I am not a good Literature person when I do not like the greats, but that does not change the fact that I still do not like them. Woolf is mediocre. Howard’s End was a little better. Eliot was awesome until now. My major problem with “Four Quartets” is that even with the extra reading, I do not think I understand it and apparently, I am not the only one. You (Dr. Sparks) said that it told you years to grasp and Brooks says the same. However, Brooks also says that even though scholars can explicate “Four Quartets” line for line, they still do not understand the whole. I do not understand why T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” is a classic if no one understands it, except Brooks. I am thinking of writing my masterpiece by making it intentionally elusive and including a ton of allusions. It might not sell, but I have no doubt that it will make the canon. People will read it and praise it forever and never feel like they understand it. In much the same way that people refer to a foreign accent or language, they will say, “I don’t know what Wiley said, but it sounds so good.”

There are many images in “Four Quartets” that Eliot reuses from other poems, such as aridity, dying things, the state of time, the king fisher, ether, seasonal changes, and Dante and Shakespeare references. So it must be essential to deftly understand the previous works before tackling this later one. However, even the meaning of these previous images change in “Four Quartets,” which adds ambiguity to an already ambiguous poem.

Since I cannot yet deal with “Four Quartets” as a whole, I will deal with it in parts like everyone else. I really like the following stanzas:

The chill ascends from feet to knees,The fever sings in mental wires.If to be warmed, then I must freezeAnd quake in frigid purgatorial firesOf which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

The dripping blood our only drink,The bloody flesh our only food:In spite of which we like to thinkThat we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

Eliot begins this excerpt by mixing burning and freezing images in a confusion of the senses. He illustrates this picture of descent into hell, but this hell is simultaneously cold and hot. Maybe it is like a freezer burn. Then he says that the roses, the only beauty in hell and one of the things necessary for life, are the flames. This initiates a recurring theme of barrenness. I am actually surprised that with all of the Biblical allusions in “Four Quartets,” Eliot never mentions some of the famous once barren women in the Bible. These flames are not actually beautiful or life giving: they are the opposite of an earthly rose. This becomes clearer in the following line. He also illustrates a person breathing in briars. Just as oxygen is what roses produce, smoke is what flames produce. Concordant with this analogy, just as the roses give life, hells flames are an eternal death. However, I think that Eliot believes that in order to live, one must die. Similar to him saying “to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.” Thus, this flame might be a purging flame rather than a deathly one.

Eliot stresses that the flame is a purging one in the second stanza. He paints a primitive and even cannibalistic picture by having people drink blood and eat flesh. This is actually a reference to Communion and he expresses a viewpoint that I have long held about Communion (I think that might make me a genius, too.) He says that even though Christians are celebrating a resurrection, they do it by enacting a death—pretending to eat someone’s flesh and drink that person’s blood. Because it is Good Friday, everything is suppose to be kosher. When one breaks down the basic concepts of Communion, it sounds like some occult stuff to me. I understand that it is a symbol of sacrifice and that the sacrifice sustains and nourishes the person who is saved. That symbol still does not change the fundamental cannibalism.

To quote a famous heiress, “That’s hot!” —a burning freezing heat. My thoughts about these stanzas apply sporadically to other parts of the poem. There are moments, like the ones he explains in the Buirnt Norton, of epiphany and splendor. However, they are rare and short moments. I am just frustrated with Eliot right now. I still like him. I just choose not to like him right now and choose to belittle his craft as I did at the beginning of this journal because he is pissing me off. I want to be a true Klingon right now and scream “You have dishonored me!” then challenge him to a fight. However, my Vulcan side keeps reminding me how illogical that is. I will wrestle with “Four Quartets” some more and then make a new assessment. For now, Eliot and I are not cool.