Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, in which writers reflect on a piece or conversation from history that all of us should commit to heart. This week, Tara Isabella Burton admits that every time she rereads T.S. Eliot’s magnificent ‘Four Quartets,’ she feels like a bit of an idiot—but that’s why it’s so meaningful.
There was a time when I thought Four Quartets was about getting back together with your ex-boyfriend. I was a teenager, then, and I read everything through the lens of my love for the first boy ever to recite me poetry. When T.S. Eliot wrote in the final poem in the series that “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,” I took it to mean that the final love, in my life, would be the one I’d loved first. I found it reassuring.
That’s what I adore about Four Quartets: I’m always, always a little bit of an idiot, reading it. Whatever I think Four Quartets is about, right now, is wrong. A group of intimate friends and I have an annual Four Quartets read-aloud around Christmas every year, and every year the lines that strike me are different. Every year, I think the poems are about something else. Every year, the poems are still about whatever my life is about.
That’s the point of Four Quartets, though—if the poems, published between 1936 and 1942, can be said to have a point at all. Taken together (or so I think now, and did not think when I was 17, and probably will not think when I am 45), “Burnt Norton,” “East Coker,” “The Dry Salvages,” and “Little Gidding” are about the attempt—at once doomed to failure and yet the only understandable vocation for artists, or maybe just for human beings—to untangle the skein at the heart of the world. It’s about death—I didn’t realize until I was almost 30 how much about death it was—and it’s about art, and language, and love, and God, and life, and whether any grand unifying theory can make sense of any of them.
