Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot Reviewed by V. Sackville West
I was just sorting out a first edition of Four Quartets by TS Eliot when I found a contemporaneous newspaper clipping of a review and in-depth synopsis written on publication by non other than V. Sackville-West.
Given the importance of the book and the standing of both T.S. Eliot and Vita Sackville-West I thought I would preserve it for posterity for any out there who may be interested
Hope you find it interesting and of use.
Music of the Mind
Four Quartets By T.S. Eliot (Faber. 6s) By V. Sackville-West
The Observer Newspaper - London, Sunday October 22, 1944
IN this volume we have the four long poems, BURNT NORTON, EAST COKER, THE DRY SALVAGES, and LITTLE GIDDING, presented together in accordance with the author’s intention that they should be judged as a single work. The leit-motifs now become more apparent—the rose, the yew—like little linking melodies, des phrases de Vinteuil; but that realisation, though helpful, is superficial; decorative. What is interesting is to discover towards what end Mr. Eliot is working; into what concrete the sandy pessimism of THE WASTE LAND is trying to cohere. Above all, and apart from Mr. Eliot’s personal striving towards some kind of synthesis, these four poems are bound to provoke the question of how far philosophical moralising can be successfully blended with poetry.
Mr. Eliot is, fundamentally,’ a worried moralist. There is much that one could say about him: our finest critic himself, he is the critic’s godsend, the critic’s quarry (meaning ” mine,” not ” prey”). So many lodes that might be endlessly tunnelled. There is. for example, his religious perplexity, to which his Anglo-Catholicism has surely not provided the final answer. There is his curious pre-occupation with tradition and derivation,, as though, perhaps on account of his American birth, he could not accept European culture as a matter of course; a consciousness of overwhelming inheritance where, in the case of an intellect less truly distinguished, we might paradoxically discern the bewilderment of a nouveau riche.
Then there is his own condemnation of originality in the artist. (”To assert that a work is ‘original’ should be very modest praise: it should be no more than to say that the work is not patently negligible.”) Yet who more “original” than Mr. Eliot himself? He is as recognisable as a well-known voice in the distance or a scrap of handwriting on a stray bit of paper. One might suspect, indeed, that he owes seventy-five per cent, of his present reputation to his originality; but that is said
in parenthesis.
Discarding these side-issues, ‘here remains the central problem “£,the four quartets. The thread which holds them together is, really, a deep sense of the voyage of man,
You are not the same people who
left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus,
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you
mingled with Mr. Eliot’s peculiarly acute awareness of the mystery of Time, past, future, and that unsplittable moment we call the present. (Herein he betrays an affiliation, perhaps accidental, with St. Augustine; as in other passages he betrays an affiliation, not, I fancy, at all accidental, with St. John of the Cross.)
These poems are informed throughout by a fine earnestness and austerity. We have learnt to expect that from their author. But how far do they succeed, considered as poetry? Opinions will I differ; but I feel myself that the occasional treat of such fruits of the imagination as metaphor and imagery has here been added as an ornament to satisfy some demand from what is left of Mr. Eliot’s aesthetic conscience: that which was once organic has become a’ trick, so often practised that it can be repeated whenever required; as in the same way the abrupt transition from the ” poetical ” to the familiar, e.g.,
Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road, so effective once, has now grown somewhat suspect, even dated; an old friend cropping up amongst Mr. Eliot’s stock-in-trade.
Mr. Eliot, obviously, must be judged by high standards, though not, I think, by the highest. And. with that condition always in view, we are entitled to ask whether the poet is not likely to become submerged in “the philosopher. The poet in him will die hard, but-should be put on his guard against a very dangerous adversary.
