Download T. S. Eliot and Mysticism: The Secret History of Four by Dr. Paul Murray PDF

By Dr. Paul Murray

The tale of the composition of "Four Quartets", with regards to mysticism, constitutes an attractive bankruptcy in sleek literary background. T.S. Eliot drew his suggestion not just from the literature of orthodox Christian mysticism and from numerous Hindu and Buddhist assets, but additionally from the literature of the occult, and from numerous unforeseen and to date unacknowledged resources similar to the "mystical" symbolism of Shakespeare's later performs and the visionary poetry of Rudyard Kipling. the first predicament of this research isn't with the assets as such, nor with a space someplace at the back of the paintings, yet particularly with that time in "Four Quartets" the place Eliot's personal mystical perspective and his poetry unite and intersect.

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Extra info for T. S. Eliot and Mysticism: The Secret History of Four Quartets

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A. THE MUSIC OF IMAGERY . . our concern was speech, and speech impelled us To purify the dialect of the tribe ... This statement, addressed to the poet of Four Quartets by· 'the ghost of some dead master' in 'Little Gidding' deliberately takes up and echoes a line from the French Symbolist poet, Stephane Mallarme ('Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de Ia tribu', Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe). The ideal of Mallarme, an ideal shared by many other French Symbolist poets, was to purge poetry of all prosaic contamination.

23 One thing common to all these different approaches is, I think, a failure to come to terms imaginatively with the poem's extraordinarily complex and subtle meditative pattern. Once one is made aware of this pattern, at least some of the many difficulties of interpretation begin to disappear, and one's appreciation of the poetry is greatly enhanced. But, it is only, I think, towards the end of the opening meditation of 'Burnt Norton' that one is finally able to make some judgment concerning the nature of Eliot's illumination experience.

T. S. Eliot, 'Poetry and Propaganda' (1930) Basic lack of information concerning mysticism is perhaps one of the main reasons why Eliot's mystical attitude, or his philosophy of mysticism, has not always been regarded by critics as fundamental to the inner composition of Four Quartets. The tendency in general is to imagine that a work of mystical literature - if it is really authentic - will be characterised by an intense eroticdevotional atmosphere. '[T]he erotic relation between man and woman', writes Dr H.

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