Dialecticism And Mysticism In Four Quartets

Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot's masterpiece leading to his winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, magnificently records down a modern chaotic world which is devoid of basic values and fraught with people seeking unreasonably for power and technological progress. In Four Quartets, the poet not only makes exploration into the human soul but studies the human history as well, presenting a profound perception of human kind as a whole, its philosophical values, its religious beliefs and also its deep insight into language as an indispensable but inadequate means to convey human speech and thought. In this light, T. S. Eliot is always concerned with the right choice of words in his spiritual journey in the confusing world; however, the poet always proves unable to fully achieve such a task and poetry always inadequate to convey the thought and the meaning for to Eliot "poetry does not matter". Owing to his education of western philosophy and the eastern philosophical influence from his Harvard life, in order to seek for a way out of the moral' and spiritual chaos of the modern world, appealing to the ancient Chinese Taoist spirit, Eliot takes in the primal essence of the oriental dialecticism and mysticism, and hereby manages to achieve a profound understanding of language as...