‘What shall I cry?’ Four Quartets and Language in a Fallen World

Abstract

The concept of Original Sin is central to Anglo-Catholic and Roman Catholic theology. In both Paul’s epistle to the Romans and Article IX of the Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles, Original Sin is not seen merely as an aspect among others of a Christian life but an unavoidable condition of existence. This belief in the fallen state of humanity and nature presents the Christian poet with particular difficulties and nowhere are these difficulties more in evidence than in the matter of language. T. S. Eliot’s embrace of Anglo-Catholicism within Anglicanism put the matter of language at the center of his later work, especially Ash-Wednesday and Four Quartets. If humans are fallen creatures, the language they use must, in some sense, be fallen too. Eliot recognized this dilemma and adopted a number of stylistic devices in his later poetry to convey his sense of the fate of language in a fallen world. These devices include his use of repetition that suggests a kind of stammering, incomplete grammatical structures and punctuation, self-deprecatory statements, moments of self-exposure and confession. Most notably in both Ash-Wednesday and Four Quartets, Eliot cautions his readers not to be beguiled by the beauty of poetry itself. In ‘East Coker’ he goes so far as to state baldly that the ‘poetry does not matter’.