ABSTRACT
This book guides through the poem Four Quartets movement by movement, indeed line by line, by a continuous elucidation which blends paraphrase with commentary, and relies on frequent cross-reference in the process of clarifying and filling out the ‘meaning’. The throwback of meaning and the forecasting of meaning are as consistently natural to the poetic practice of Eliot in Four Quartets as they are to that of Joyce in Ulysses. The critic who comes to the surface after months of being submerged in Joyce inevitably looks at twentieth-century literature (and criticism) in a new light. The form of Four Quartets resembles musical form in that figures and hints are transformed into articulate themes by a process of repetition and accumulation. Hints of Hamlet , for instance, are eventually blended in Little Gidding with allusions to King Charles I to form what might be called the theme of the murdered or martyred king.
