BASC50026 - T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and “Tradition and the Individual Talent"

Course Description

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time....”

These four lines open the last stanza of the last section of a work eminently to be studied, returned to, loved. Eliot’s Four Quartets, in their sections “Burnt Norton,” “East Coker,” “The Dry Salvages,” “Little Gidding”, were published individually between 1935 and 1943, gathered in book form in 1945. The work is brief; its subject and impact at once fully particular, and cosmic. We shall enter its gravity, its music, its conjoining of the mysteries of local place - towns American and British, stone, buoy, bone and rose - with those of eternity, time and meaning, its sensory ravishment and formal rigor. T.S. Eliot’s poetry and literary criticism vividly cross-fertilized his thought, and his, ours. We shall also enter his thought-provoking 1919 “Tradition and the Individual Talent” essay, juxtaposing its claims, provocations, implications, gravitas. T.S. Eliot. Four Quartets. (New York: Mariner Books, 1968) ISBN 9-780156-332255

Notes

Online registration deadline: Thursday, June 16 at 5 pm CT