Faith With Feeling: Eliot’s “Four Quartets”

For much of his career, Eliot’s poetry and prose had, in one sense, been uniformly critical. They had succeeded in pointing out what ought to be present in modern life—in human life—if man were not to be reducible to a beast. But even in Murder in the Cathedral, where we witness only Becket’s last days under exceptional circumstances, Eliot had succeeded more at gesturing toward the demands of Christian life than in describing the contents of that life. Taking a deleted passage from that play for a starter, Eliot set to work writing what would become his greatest poem, Four Quartets. The ambition of that four-part sequence was to provide the fullest account of the truly Christian life the modern world had yet seen. Having diagnosed the inadequacy of devotional poetry on several occasions, Eliot’s poetic sequence would avoid them. Rather than expressing a feeling, the poem provides us the dramatic moments as well as the full intellectual architecture of faith necessary for us to feel.