The Notion Of Image In T·S·Eliot’s Four Quartets

Thomas Stearns Eliot is a poet, critic, playwright, pioneer of Modernism as wellas signal image of Late Symbolism. His master works The Waste Land is a landmarkof20thcentury’s poem. He won the Nobel Literature Prize with Four Quartets, whichis one of his representatives in his later period, and the greatest poetry after hisretuning into The Great Britain.Most of the critics are focused on Eliot’s essays and poems, especially theories ofImpersonal Theory, Objective Correlative, Tradition and Individual Talent, and literateworks of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land,and Four Quartets.Researches at home and abroad are growing on The Waste Land and Four Quartets.This thesis focused on the image research of Four Quartets, aiming at seizing theparticular structure and the theme of the works through the approach of CloseReading.In the part of Introduction, this thesis briefly states the current research aboutEliot, mainly focused on critics of Four Quartets as well as the meaning and creativepoints of studying Four Quartets’s image.There are four chapters in this thesis：Chapter One states Eliot’s standpoint aboutimage, which is reflected from Objective Correlative and deeply influenced byMetaphysical Poets, French Symbolism and Imagism. Chapter Two analyses FourQuartets’s image in greater details, mainly focusing on three images of rose garden,water and fire. Based on the analysis of images, Chapter Three concludes theuniqueness of Four Quartets, which reflects “organic integrality”. Through thecorrelative structure and paradox, Four Quartets come into inner consistency andunified monolithic.Chapter Four expresses the theme of Four Quartets of time andreligion’s Redemption, which reflect the eternity of time and history. The reality is asdark and desolate as hell, one can only move towards Rose Garden throughexperiencing purgatory’s fire.The Conclusion brings the whole thesis to a close and sublimation.