Within days I had bought a cheap paperback edition of the Quartets and had begun the process of reading and rereading what I am inclined to think of as the greatest English-language poem of the twentieth century. (The remark also reminds us that art is concerned with elemental meaning: “communication” occurs before “understanding” because a great poem conveys, through the music and imagery of poetic language, the meaningfulness of certain “purely experiential patterns,” prior to any careful analysis of a poem’s meaning or structure.) 1 Eliot has said, famously, that great poetry communicates before it is understood this experience remains my touchstone for the truth of that remark. It was also vision-inducing, strangely moving, and deeply perplexing. This first encounter with the Quartets was therefore appropriately auditory and incantatory. That evening there was to be a broadcast of Alec Guinness reading Eliot’s Four Quartets in its entirety.Īt the appointed time I turned off all but one lamp, lay down on a couch, and listened. I was visiting family friends in southeast England, and during a period when my host family was away for a few days, I noticed a BBC program announcement in the newspaper. The conditions were unusually felicitous. Eliot’s masterpiece, the poem-cycle Four Quar tets, took place when I was twenty years old.
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