The impulse toward beauty in Prufrock, The Waste Land, and Four Quartets: T. S. Eliot's aesthetic response to the spiritual collapse of his era

[...]Augustine finds that while it is "[n]ot the prettiness of a body, not the gracefulness of temporal rhythm, not the brightness of light . . . not the sweet melodies of songs . . . not limbs which can be grasped in fleshly embraces" that he loves when he loves God, it is "something...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Yeats Eliot review 2010-03, Vol.27 (1/2), p.23
Main Author:	Boyd, Joshua T
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	1900-1999 Aesthetics American literature Authors beauty British & Irish literature Coward, Noel (1899-1973) Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans) (1819-1880) Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns) (1888-1965) Eliot, T. S English Literature Four Quartets Four Quartets (Burnt Norton East Coker The Dry Salvages Little Gidding) Irish literature Joyce, James (1882-1941) love poetry Poets spiritual decay The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock The Waste Land Twentieth Century Woolf, Virginia (1882-1941) Yeats, William Butler (1865-1939)
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Summary:	[...]Augustine finds that while it is "[n]ot the prettiness of a body, not the gracefulness of temporal rhythm, not the brightness of light . . . not the sweet melodies of songs . . . not limbs which can be grasped in fleshly embraces" that he loves when he loves God, it is "something like a light, a voice, an odour, food, an embrace" that he loves when he loves his God (Thiessen 32). [...]Eliot's "triumphal sequence of poems, Four Quartets, would realize [his] ambition not simply to diagnose the ills of the age nor merely to prescribe a solution . . . but to give to the benumbed and confused modern reader the experience of religious belief, grounded in an exact theology, in the form of a work of art" asserts James Matthew Wilson. The manifestation of such resolve comes at great cost, for the rock at the base of the mountain seems a "boundless grief . . . too heavy to bear" (377). [...]Camus leaves Sisyphus as one who acknowledges a burden he will never shrug off but finds great purpose in rolling his rock: "The universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. [...]people "feel great repugnance in speaking about it" (437). [...]in "East Coker," after a foray of poetic lines, Eliot writes of his poetry's being "a way of putting it," one that is "not very satisfactory."
ISSN:	0704-5700