PRIZE ESSAY |
T. S. Eliot’s Ghostly Footfalls: The Versification of Four Quartets
Ruth Abbott recently graduated from Clare College, Cambridge with the highest starred First in her year in English. She is continuing her research into versification under Dr Simon Jarvis.
This article explores the versification of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, demonstrating the alignment of its dialectical quality with Eliot’s own writings on scepticism, wit and drama. The pattern of Four Quartets is shown to be a dramatic one, populated with ghostly characters, who are not so much dramatic personae as dramatic versifications; much of this pattern is formed by sceptical dalectic between different uses of versification as a custom or habit. But this scepticism becomes a self-critical search for a poetic mode of truth. Into the pattern of self-conscious self-parodies, Eliot weaves moments of profound distraction, in which verse is inhabited, and becomes a kind of incarnation.
‘Skilled verse is the art of a profound sceptic’.1Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present