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THE LOGOS OF THE FOUR QUARTETS
Abstract
The last great poem written by T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets, offers a complete vision of his philosophical and poetical mind. Beginning with his first questioning poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, going through Gerontion and The Waste Land, with their expectations and prophecies, and advancing into the poems after conversion (Ash-Wednesday, The Ariel Poems) where the questions receive answers and the prophecies, fulfillment, the main themes and symbols of this last poem develop their power of revelation and significance. Though human struggles continue in manВ’s intertwining condition of life and death, between meaning and loss of meaning, these tensions are meant to be solved in the presence of the Logos. We shall revisit and add a few references to the interpretation of its main images, symbols and philosophical notions that recur in EliotВ’s poetry and come to their fullest accomplishment in The Four Quartets. Though written at a considerable distance in time, stylistically different, and inspired by very different life contexts, The Waste Land and The Four Quartets reveal a large unity of conception. In the first, the presence of God is affirmed by His apparent absence and the consequences of it, and also by prophecies. In The Four Quartets we have flashes of the revelation of His Incarnation into this world, as its still point and complete meaning. The philosophical counterpart is sustained by original technical and stylistic poetical achievements.
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