The Semiotics Analysis Of Eliot’s Four Quartets

Since his Semiotics of Poetry came into being, Michael Riffaterre’s theory hasexerted great influence in the field of semiotics and linguistics, and his semiotic modelhas been widely employed to study poetic works and culture phenomena. But up to thepresent day, Riffaterre’s theory has rarely been applied to analyzing long poems.The rules of expansion and conversion, and intertextual model developed byRiffaterre are applied to T.S. Eliot’s modern long poem Four Quartets. Thetransformations of hypograms are studied, such as the expansion of the four elements ofHeraclitus’ cosmic cycle and the conversion of symbols. What’s more, in order to give afull analysis of the text production of the poem, the intertextualities between this poemand the previous poetic works are studied as well.The results indicate that:1) Riffaterre’s semiotic theory could be applied to analyzemodern long poems, and the rules of expansion and conversion, and the intertextualmodel could be combined to reveal the process of text production；2) the poem isdeveloped from the hypogram that could be hypothesized in the phrase “at the still pointturning the world”. Under the model of the hypogram, the paradoxical expressions in thepoem can be reconciled and the poem can be interpreted as a dynamic unity.