ABSTRACT
The tension between music as transcendent and as something that must be controlled echoes a sense of the necessary ordering of things that can be found in Eliot's cultural writings, especially Notes towards the Definition of Culture. Eliot's apparently precise combination of patterns made of sound and associational linguistic meaning remains interlocked. Music, in Eliot's terms, can be seen as another facet of his attempt to shore his fragments, not only against his own ruin, but that of his cuiture's as well. Crucial, to Eliot's poetic music of redemption is the technique of repetition upon which the Quartets are based. Eliot's poetic "music," interimpli-cated as it is with his cultural-religious sensibility, is part of the endless repetition, the homage, to the absent (if not "missed") reality of his conservative Christianity. In the Quartets themselves, it is the image of music as an aesthetic object that Eliot uses as the model for the artistic, cultural, and spiritual overcoming of time.
