By Dr. Paul Murray
The tale of the composition of "Four Quartets", when it comes to mysticism, constitutes an engaging bankruptcy in glossy literary heritage. T.S. Eliot drew his proposal not just from the literature of orthodox Christian mysticism and from a number of Hindu and Buddhist resources, but additionally from the literature of the occult, and from a number of unforeseen and to this point unacknowledged resources reminiscent of the "mystical" symbolism of Shakespeare's later performs and the visionary poetry of Rudyard Kipling. the first problem of this examine isn't really with the assets as such, nor with a space someplace in the back of the paintings, yet fairly with that time in "Four Quartets" the place Eliot's personal mystical angle and his poetry unite and intersect.
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Example text
27 One or two passages from this review article are, I think, worth noting here. It opens with a reference to Lewis's Aristotelianism and to 'his belief in the sovereignty of the intelligence in human affairs'. Developing this theme further in the second paragraph, the reviewer suddenly tosses out a rather unusual image to describe the difficulty of a thinker such as Lewis in the modern world; and I have no doubt that, at that time, it made an impression on the visual imagination of Eliot. The author, we feel, has been tempted like St Anthony by a very dextrous and protean devil, and his book itself is a recherche of Mr Lewis' own temps passe which might be given the alternative title of 'Temptations I have overcome'; but unlike most volumes of reminiscences Time and Western Man has a unity of theme quite independent of the author's experience.
20 On the other hand, Leonard Unger, whose influential paper on the subject appeared in 1956, is of the opinion that the scene in the rose-garden is 'not genuine but mechanical and devitalized . . The music is "unheard", and "hidden"; privacy is spoiled by an "unseen eyebeam" and the roses have the "look of flowers that are looked at". The details of the situation have been forcibly willed .... ' 23 One thing common to all these different approaches is, I think, a failure to come to terms imaginatively with the poem's extraordinarily complex and subtle meditative pattern.
Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. And here is a passage taken almost at random from the fifth chapter of The Mystical Theology: It is not immobile, nor in motion, or at rest, and has no power, and is not power or light, and does not live, and is not life; nor is it personal essence, or eternity, or time. 42 In both passages, there is the same negation of opposites and the same use of highly abstract language. Also, instead of taking 40 'Burnt Norton': At the Still Point existing abstract ideas and piecing them together in the ordinary way, there is a clear rejection of 'ready-made concepts that might have seemed appropriate to the concept' being created.