The Four Quartets is Christian mystical poetry that contemplates the intersection of the fleeting moments within time to the ever-present now of eternity, with Christ as the still point, the spiritual center, within time, around which all of time and history revolves, and through which we experience union with the divine. They are meant to be read and contemplated, and read and contemplated, and read and contemplated. Eliot, his poems are there to be dissected like a corpse. As the ancient Freman saying in the novel Dune says, “Truth suffers from too much analysis.” Although a certain amount of explanation and analysis is necessary to help get your bearings in the poetic world of T.S. I am not going to provide a detailed commentary or explanation of everything in each poem. In many ways, The Four Quartets is perhaps the hardest of Eliot’s poetry to understand-and that is saying something because all of Eliot’s poetry is hard to understand! Nevertheless, I want to share both a reading of each of the four poems in The Four Quartets, as well as just a few remarks that (hopefully) will make each poem a bit more understandable. It is actually a collection of four poems that Eliot wrote over the course of a decade: Burnt Norton (1935), East Coker (1940), The Dry Salvages (1941), and Little Gidding (1942). Eventually, when I returned from the Peace Corps and began my “career” in Biblical Studies, both with my graduate work and my teaching career, my books on Eliot went on the shelf-but as I look back, it is very easy to see just how much his poetry has shaped my outlook on life.Īnd so, to begin this year on my blog, I am going to revisit some of Eliot’s poetry, beginning with his masterpiece, The Four Quartets. I spent time in the Wheaton public library, reading books that analyzed his poetry, I marked up his poem with notes, and while in Kazakhstan I memorized many of his poems. In the years immediately after my graduation from college, both my two years as a substitute teacher and my time as a TOEFL teacher in the Peace Corps in Kazakhstan, I dove headlong into Eliot’s poetry. Later, as an English Literature major in college, I read a bit more of Eliot, and although he was still hard to understand, his poetry spoke to me. Nevertheless, there was something strangely appealing to it. To be honest, at the time, 16-year-old Joel could hardly make heads or tails of it. I was first introduced to Eliot’s poetry, as most people are, with his poem The Love Song of J.

Instead of a book analysis, or something about YECism, or a Biblical Studies post, I’m going to share my love of the poetry of T.S.

I’m going to start this year’s edition of Resurrecting Orthodoxy a little differently.

Ts eliot burnt norton