Eliot’s Quartets

“. . . a white light still and moving.”

In the course of an artist’s development certain phases may detach themselves and challenge comprehension as completed wholes. Eliot has rounded out such a cycle with Little Gidding, and we are now able to see the full significance of the experiments with structure which he inaugurated in Burnt Norton eight years ago. He speaks of the four poems which form this cycle as “quartets,” and has evolved for them all the same kind of sequence of five parts with which he composed Burnt Norton. The Waste Land was also composed in this fashion, but the contrast is instructive. In his earlier desire for intense concentration the poet so eliminated connectives that The Waste Land might be called an anthology of the high points of a drama. It was as though its author had determined to make his poem of nothing but Arnold’s “touchstones or had subscribed to Poe’s dictum that no longer poem could exist than one to be read at a sitting. In the intervening years Eliot has given further thought to the problem, and he has recently concluded that “in a poem of any length there must be transitions between passages of greater and lesser intensity, to give rhythm of fluctuating emotion essential to the musical structure of the whole.” He has also enunciated “a complementary doctrine” to that of Arnold’s “touchstones”: the test of a poet’s greatness by “the way he writes his less intense but structurally vital matter.”