Download Four Quartets: A Poem Illustrated By T.S. Eliot Viewable As Edition

is the first record of my reading that I have not posted on this website inand a half years,

You can find my full review of the amazing experience of this book at soapboxing: sitelink net/fourqu


ORIGINAL: Well, I just I what I mean to say is, . . I think I

Holy fuck.

Yeah, gimme a minute on this one, guys, If you read this to yourself out loud and slowly, it will echo in your head the rest of your life, I think it will last forever, We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.


Eliot appears to be brooding on the elusive nature of time, This meditation doesn't shirk the inviolability of biological time but rather impales itself as an aesthetic act in the ouroboros of our conscious entanglement, The Four Quartets is a series of poems written inby T, S. Eliot. On YouTube, there is an old scratchy recording of TS Eliot reading these poems, and it was such a unique experience, taking the time to slow down and allowing the imagery to come to mind as these poems were read.


The memories that these poems invoked were so visceral that I could not only imagine the visual aspects but also the smells, being fully transported in the moment.
These poems serve as a reminder of our time and place in the world,

Some of my favorite lines:
“Reconciled among the”
“Distracted from distraction by distraction”
“In my beginning is my end, ”
“The poetry does not matter, ”
“Had they deceived us Or deceived themselves”
“The only wisdom we can hope to acquire Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless, ”
“Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure”
“We had the experience but missed the meaning”
“Not fare well, But fare forward, voyagers.
”

This book is part of James Mustichs,Books to Read,

Reading Schedule
Jan Alice in Wonderland
Feb Notes from a Small Island
Mar Cloud Atlas
Apr On the Road
May The Color Purple
Jun Bleak House
Jul Bridget Joness Diary
Aug Anna Karenina
Sep The Secret History
Oct Brave New World
Nov A Confederacy of Dunces
Dec The Count of Monte Cristo

Connect With Me!
sitelinkBlog sitelinkTwitter sitelinkBookTube sitelinkFacebook sitelinkInsta This type of poetry fills me with bewilderment of where was I till now and how it took me this

much time to encounter something as brilliant as this!



Seriously, where was I
Just beautiful! Eliots multifaceted set of poems deserves many readings.
Nothing beats a glimpse approaching this attempt to write a few words about Eliot's "Four Quartets",
This long poem, a meditation on life, time, poetry or quite merely on words, earned its author the Nobel Prize for literature in,
Four poems called according to places in England and the United States "Burnt Norton", "East Coker", "The Dry Salvages", and "Little Gidding" were first written separately, only to reappear together inas then "Four Quartets".

T. S. Eliot who belonged with Joyce, Woolf and Pound among the most excellent representatives of modernist literature in the English language puts us before his most universal work but also the most difficult to describe.
I remember being at my first anatomy dissection as a demonstrator took this slim volume out of his pocket and said to me, in a room full of cadavers, "In my end is my beginning.
Isn't that wonderful TS Eliot, Do you know it You must read it, " If I'd read the scene in a novel I would have thought it contrived and overly theatrical, But I swear it actually happened, For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice,

And last, the rending pain of reenactment
Of all that you have done, and been the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others' harm
Which you once took for exercise of virtue.




History may be servitude,
History may be freedom, See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
to become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.


All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching,



Who then devised the torment Love,
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove,
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire,



A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments,

And all shall be well
When the tongues of flame are infolded
Into the crowded knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph, And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and this is where we start.

We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them,
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them,
T. S. Eliot, Quartet"Little Gidding"


Ah, yes, So bracing, like ice cold water to the face early in the morning! This reminds me a bit of my favorite book in the Bible, Ecclesiastes, which is so relentlessly honest about the vanity of it all.
Surely you recall the words of the Prophet:


I have seen all the works that are done under the sun and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.


That which is crooked cannot be made straight: and that which is wanting cannot be numbered,

I communed with mine own heart, saying, Lo, I am come to great estate, and have gotten more wisdom than all they that have been before me in Jerusalem: yea, my heart had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.


And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit,

For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow,


If you want to vex your spirit in a more modern way, then, T, S. and Eliot is your law firm, Of the four books in this Quartet, my favorites were the evens:"East Coker" and"Little Gidding", Some parting wisdom from "East Coker":


In my beginning is my end, In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a bypass.

Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.

Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the fieldmouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.


In my beginning is my end, Now the light falls
Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
And the deep lane insists on the direction
Into the village, in the electric heat
Hypnotised.
In a warm haze the sultry light
Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone,
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence,
Wait for the early owl,


I don't know about you, but I can never get enough circle of life stuff, Ends. Beginnings. Births. Deaths. The closer you get, the clearer it becomes,

Further proof that all great literature, in some way, shape, or form, treats on the folly of desire and craving thank you, Buddha, . . did you write Ecclesiastes while no one was looking in the face of death,

Yeah, him. The Hooded Reaper. The Dark Muse of all Literature from time immemorial, This is something that I've been reading and returning to for more thanyears, Few works are so intimately connected with my own life changes, Truly, all poems are read afresh with each reading: as oneself changes, the poems change, In the case of Four Quartets, I used to go o it for melancholy comfort, a vague spiritual longing too balmed with its reverberations of paradox and eastern thoughts while rooted in the soil of an East Anglian mysticism.
I also found its original influence along with Auden et al on me towards Leavisite cultural pessimism now reflected back, refracted rather, through prisms of my own beginnings and ends.
I have swerved away from both such indulgences, especially the second which I now feel as naive and elitist,

One thing that hasn't changed is that these are excellent poems by any standard, I heard not long ago a worldfamous novelist decry Eliot's poetry on the ground that he was antisemitic, He said that if Eliot's stuff was good poetry it doesn't say much for poetry, Leaving aside the intense debates about Eliot's views debates without any agreed conclusion, less controversial would be his adherence to a strict and disciplined anglicanism, royalism and belief in tradition none of which I personally have any time for.
As it happens, I don't think Eliot was any more 'antisemitic' than, say Winston Churchill, or any of the thousands of other establishment figure's in England's torrid history of discrimination against Jewry.
The poems themselves gain their power not from statements, affirmations and exclusions, but from their formal qualities, Insofar as I have just reread them it was to appreciate again Eliot's persistent difficulty in expressing the ineffable, in using words no matter how brilliantly, to go beyond themselves.
For me, the best poets and writers have as their chief energy a longing which can at best be partially expressed only by dismantling the very means of expression:

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it.
And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion.
And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulatebut there is no competition
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious.
But perhaps neither gain nor loss,
For us, there is only the trying, The rest is not our business,

East Coker V


Words move, music moves
Only in time but that which is only living
Can only die.
Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence, Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.

Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the coexistence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.

And all is always now, Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.
Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them, The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.


Burnt Norton V,