Conclusion

Abstract

Four Quartets is a poem which defies attempts at classification. It exhibits in turn the characteristics of music, meditation, occult literature, philosophy, mystical and visionary poetry, doctrine, lyric poetry, and all of these together. It remains first and foremost a poem — not a philosophical treatise, nor a prose passage of mystical theology —just as Eliot himself remains first and foremost a poet. So profoundly, however, has the poem been influenced by the mystical attitude of its author and by the poet’s own astonishingly wide-ranging knowledge of mystical literature and philosophy that at times one can say: the mysticism, the philosophy and the music have become one thing. And — though it may be necessary at a moment of critical assimilation — it is no longer enough to separate analytically the music of his words from the philosophical and mystical vision which takes shape in their sound. The poem must be allowed to work its own immediate alchemy on the reader, and communicate its own disturbing vision and utterance in being recited, heard and turned over in memory. What the critic of music has to offer in the end — as Soren Kierkegaard remarked on one occasion concerning a work by Mozart — ‘has a meaning only for those who have heard, and who keep on hearing. To such I may be able to give a suggestion here and there for renewed hearing.’1