Abstract
T. S. Eliot’s Fourth Quartet, Little Gidding, is set in a rich and fine network of themes and relationships which converge into the unified objects of the rose and the fire. The meaning of the poem, which is interwoven with images of metamorphosis, has to do with the historical importance of a little chapel and the everlastingness of human purpose.
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Notes
Husserl, Edmund, The Essential Husserl, ed. Donn Welton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 29.
Husserl, Edmund, op. cit., p. 26.
Husserl, Edmund, op. cit., p. 28.
Kenner, Hugh, “Into Our First World,” in Bernard Bergonzi (ed.), T. S. Eliot — Four Quartets, A Casebook (Nashville: Aurora Publications, Inc. 1971), p. 191. Professor Kenner opens avenues of meaning when he maintains that Eliot is associating place with the place of language. Certainly, the poem has explicit references to language and speech. Moreover, the pentecostal fire, the flaming tongues of Pentecost, as St. Luke relates, enabled the Apostles to speak in ‘tongues.’ There is a definite correlation in Little Gidding between fire and speech.
Eliot, T. S., The Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc. 1971), p. 138. All quotes from the poem, “Little Gidding,” are taken from this edition.
Rosenthal, M. L., Sailing into the Unknown; Yeats, Pound and Eliot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 48.
Husserl, Edmund, op. cit., p. 32.
Husserl, Edmund, op. cit., p. 28.
Kenner, Hugh, op. cit., p. 96.
Gardner, Helen, The Art of T. S. Eliot (London: The Cresset Press, 1949), p. 57.
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Prochaska, B. (2002). The Visible and the Invisible: T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding and Edmund Husserl’s Expression and Meaning . In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Visible and the Invisible in the Interplay between Philosophy, Literature and Reality. Analecta Husserliana, vol 75. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0485-5_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0485-5_12
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