T. S. Eliot and the Presocratics: "Four Quartets" as Lyric Philosophy

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5944/epos.40.2024.42213

Abstract

T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets is a complex masterpiece of lyric philosophy that owes much to the deep thinking of the ancient Presocratics. Burnt Norton is preceded by two epigraphs lifted from Heraclitus’s extant fragments. Far from being a mere paratextual threshold, they anticipate philosophical concerns that pervade all four Quartets. This article explores how Heraclitus’s philosophical thought on the logos, the eternal flux implicit in the world and the strife of opposites has a bearing on Eliot’s own lyric philosophy on the manifold facets of time (personal, ancestral, historic, and solar time), one that brings together the abstraction of philosophy and the synaesthetic thinking inherent in the lyrical.

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Author Biography

Leonor María Martínez Serrano, Universidad de Córdoba

Leonor María Martínez Serrano is Associate Professor in the Department of English and German Philology at the University of Córdoba (Spain). Her research interests include High Modernism, Canadian Literature, American Literature, Ecocriticism and Comparative Literature. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia (Canada), the University of the West of Scotland (UK), the University of Bialystok (Poland), and the University of Oldenburg (Germany). She is currently involved in the state-funded research project “Resisting the Capitalocene: Narratives of Hope in the 21st Century” (Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, PID2023-147494NB-I00). She has co-edited the collection of essays Modern Ecopoetry: Reading the Palimpsest of the More-than-Human World (2021, Brill) and authored the monograph Breathing Earth: The Polyphonic Lyric of Robert Bringhurst (2021, Peter Lang).

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Published

2024-12-18

How to Cite

Martínez Serrano, L. M. (2024). T. S. Eliot and the Presocratics: "Four Quartets" as Lyric Philosophy. Epos : Revista de filología, (40), 158–178. https://doi.org/10.5944/epos.40.2024.42213

Issue

No. 40 (2024): Epos: Revista de filología

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Articles

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Copyright (c) 2024 Leonor María Martínez Serrano

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