Four Quartets: Criticism in a New Key

Abstract Many passages in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (1943) are frequently described as ‘prosaic’ and sometimes even directly categorized as ‘prose’. In exploring what might thus be called Eliot’s mimesis of prose style, I consider what it might mean for the poem’s relationship to other forms of discursive writing, chiefly the kind of specialist discourse with which poetry, by the time Four Quartets was first published as a whole, was most frequently in contact: literary criticism. Whereas previous approaches have viewed the poem’s discursiveness as a form of exposition, or otherwise as expressing a newly sceptical relationship to poetry, I suggest that these so-called ‘antipoetic’ passages are actually anticritical, insofar as they serve to radically qualify the claims of academic interpretation, while conversely affording a greater role to an earlier mode of reading displaced by the institutionalisation of literary criticism: judgement. In this way, Four Quartets demands that we temporarily suspend our modern allegiance to interpretation as a means of participating in the Christianized sensus communis that the poem projects for us. In concluding, I ask whether this is a practice of reading that we can ultimately assent to, that is, whether the poem’s mysticism is compatible with professionalized literary study.