And the formal unity of the Quartets' imagery and structure, their very apparent craft, suggests an analogous unity of content. Many critics have remarked that these quotations are "integrated" or "assimilated" (Traversi 89) rather than "twisted" into a "clash" with their original meanings (Gardner 30) like the allusions of The Waste Land.
John of the Cross, et cetera), and its citations are made to appear thematic and unified: all bear on time and renunciation, a negative theology or mysticism. The text integrates paraphrases, near-quotations and direct citations from disparate times and cultures (Heraclitus, Krishna, St. The seduction of reading the Four Quartets as a systematic, coherent exposition (whether of doctrine, thought, or faith) is both induced and resisted by the text itself. I will be reading critically several critical discussions, but always in the belief that the criticism's concerns are not projected onto the poem from without, but express the critical voices within the poem. The seductive voice of argument which is already a voice within the poem invites conceptual scrutiny but repels formal analysis it displaces the concerns of "poetry" in order to work its poetry undetected. Seduced by the desire for a systematic argument, criticism has overestimated these passages' straightforwardness and largely neglected their ambiguity and indeterminacy. Meanwhile, relatively little attention has been paid to the working of the poetry itself, to the construction of the presumed meaning, in these "discursive" or "conceptual" passages. As the text of the poem itself apparently gives license to the view that its "poetry does not matter," the preponderance of critical attention to the Quartets' non-lyrical passages has been devoted to philosophical and theological paraphrase of its argument, to explicating the system of belief or thought behind the words. Of course, the Quartets offer enough cues toward this critical attitude that it may fairly be said to reside within the poem at least as much as it is imposed from without. Since the initial appearance of "Burnt Norton" it has been a critical commonplace to regard these portions of the text as at once its most conceptually profound and its most formally prosaic. Eliot's Four Quartets afford no such easy approach.
Though its more lyrical passages present detailed and evocative imagery, substantial portions of T.S. The Seduction of Argument and the Danger of Parody in the Four Quartets
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