Lecture 14: Look Homeward, T.S.: Eliot’s American Quartet

English 140
Summer Session B, 2012
UC Santa Barbara

History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now. The French Revolution […] evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past. Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger’s leap into the past. This jump, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class give the commands. The same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical one, which is how Marx understood the revolution.

Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History XIV

A few administrative matters

  • Papers – what was successful?
  • Quizzes
  • Grades
  • Questions?

Notes on the structure of each Quartet

  1. Scenes of action and movement, combined with meditations on time, with fleeting glimpses of timelessness. (A comparatively long section.)
  2. An episode of dissatisfaction with worldly experience. (A comparatively long section.)
  3. Purgation in the world, divesting the soul of the love of created things. (A comparatively long section.)
  4. A lyric prayer for, or affirmation of the need of, Intercession. (A short section; usually an emotional, self-contained lyric, sometimes associated in some way with Mary, mother of Jesus.)
  5. The problems of attaining artistic wholeness and, at the same time, the problems of achieving spiritual health. (Normally a rhetorically elevated restatement of the poem's themes with a conclusion. A comparatively long section.)