Greetings and Welcome to our Midcoast Senior College course on T.S.Eliot’s “Four Quartets”
I look forward to seeing everyone, albeit in tiny pictures, at our first class discussion on “Burnt Norton” February 4. Compared to previous courses that some of you have taken with me, most featuring 800-1200 page Russian novels, the reading load for this course may seem light. The entire main text, Eliot’s four part poem, may take only an hour or so to read — and that’s the only required reading for all four weeks. So, to paraphrase our poet: there is time for reading and rereading., and time for discussion and rediscussion. And despite many rereadings and rediscussions, there will be much that we will not understand. Eliot himself, when once asked if he could help interpret some lines he had written ten or fifteen years before, replied that he had no idea what he had meant with those lines at that time. He found it impossible to move his mind back to that time and that poem. So if Eliot himself couldn’t do it, we shouldn’t be surprised if now and then in the poem we too feel mystified. Fortunately, listening to the poem as read aloud by Eliot or by Alec Guinness or Jeremy Irons (Iinks on our course web page) , and aloud to ourselves, can help us experience the poem on a level beyond literal meaning. We can appreciate even what we cannot understand.
And if readings and rereadings, silent and aloud, still make the reading load seem too light, I’ve added optional supplements below. As you may have discovered, the secondary literature on Eliot is mountainous. The list below includes a few of the most valuable items I’ve found available either online or in print.
Recommended additional reading for now or in future. By T.S. Eliot. Poems: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Gerontion,” “The Waste Land,” “The Hollow Men,” “Ash Wednesday,” “Journey of the Magi.” (each free online in Google search by title) Essays: “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” “The Function of Criticism,” “Dante.” (https://archive.org/ details/in.ernet.dli.2015.220297/page/n7/mode/2up)
Contemporaries: Ezra Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” Part I:( https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44915/hugh-selwyn- mauberley-part-i) ABC of Reading, Especially Chapter 4 (https://monoskop.org/images/a/a4/ Pound_Ezra_ABC_of_Reading.pdf) On Emily Hale: Michelle, Taylor, “The Secret History of Eliot’s Muse,” The New Yorker, Dec. 7, 2020 (https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-secret-history-of-t-s-eliots-muse) (online only, not in printed version of magazine)
Life and Works: Lyndall Gordon, T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. Norton, 1999 Louis Simpson, Three on the Tower: The Lives and Works of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams, Morrow, 1975 Grover Smith, T.S. Eliot’s Poems and Plays, A Study in Sources and Meaning. Chicago, 1973
Online Lectures on YouTube: Google by title Thomas Howard, “A Reader's Guide to T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets” Jay Parini, “T.S Eliot's Four Quartets: a pattern for Christian Living”
For February 4. Assignment: read “Burnt Norton.” Listen to one of the recorded readings. Voluntary: Select a passage that you find especially good, interesting, or meaningful, to read aloud and discuss in class.
See you soon,
George