The first thing to note here is the sheer intellectual achievement of these poems. I’ve dragged myself through many dry, boring academic texts that deal with the same themes but Eliot managed to approach metaphysics in text and make it beautiful.
There are four longish poems here. They were published separately but hang together perfectly, and the central characters are time and reality. The first, Burnt Norton, is the most abstract. God is that which can exist outside time, we’re bound together by time and experience everything in terms of it. The present is of paramount importance and is all we know.
The others bring in wordly metaphors: the sea, the weather, fire, London, wildlife, singing and dancing move in and out, employed to describe a set of Christian philosophical beliefs, more than ethics and into the nature of reality.
There’s a lot of Christianity here but no preaching. It’s laid out for the reader to interact with but at no point is it necessary to believe it. This is what it is, what you do with it is your affair.
Go and read this book. It’s very short, so you can read it again, and then again after that. This is what the twentieth century was like.
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