T. S. Eliot's Poetics of Self: Reopening Four Quartets‪.‬

This article discusses how T. S. Eliot's long poem, Four Quartets, employs the thematics of time, self, and history in an autobiographical work of literature. The article approaches autobiography primarily as an intellectual concern, rather than as a factual account of the author's life, in examining a work that is difficult to subsume under available interpretive paradigms. The first part of the article emphasizes how Augustine's Confessions, when considered as a meditation on time and religious experience, illuminates the hermeneutics of Four Quartets. The second and central part of the article provides close readings of key passages in this poem, which inscribes Greek cosmology and medieval epic in a narrative of literary development and spiritual change. The third and concluding part of the article explores how the author's later poetry and criticism highlight major tendencies in twentieth-century literature and anticipate the postmodern interpretation of history. **********