Four Quartets is in many ways a work of purification and purgation, linguistically and morally, and one which strives to “dispossess” itself of the world and its “distractions” in its quest for the absolute. The more severe and homogeneous diction of Eliot's later style, heralded in the 1929 essay on Dante – “one has learned from the Inferno that the greatest poetry can be written with the greatest economy of words, and with the greatest austerity in the use of metaphor, simile, verbal beauty, and elegance” (CP3 712) – means that the multiple discourse of the earlier work – the quotations in foreign languages, the presence of dialect, jazz idiom, nursery rhyme, all The Waste Land's different voices, as well as its multifarious personae – has disappeared. What we rather have in Four Quartets is the “I” persona in a state of prolonged spiritual self-communing within a pronounced doctrinal context, with a good deal of iteration of some of the poem's key points: “You say I am repeating / Something I have said before. I shall say it again” (CPP 181). If this suggests that Four Quartets remains primarily the preserve of the religious interpreter, a significant amount of recent criticism has emphasised historical contexts and occasions, focussing on the poem as a document of the Second World War, and indeed the later three Quartets, East Coker, The Dry Salvages and Little Gidding, published in 1940, 1941 and 1942, respectively, are heavily imbued with wartime experience. But whatever the social, political or “patriotic” interventions Four Quartets can be seen as making, these cannot be divorced from religious positions that heavily inflect the topical commentary the poem has to offer, and to neglect such positions precisely obscures the insistent dialogue between religion and “history” that takes place throughout. In Jed Esty's words, Four Quartets is not “a retreat from history into religion” but a “confrontation” between the two. I will return to this issue at the end of this chapter, pursuing in the meantime the poem's religious narrative particularly in relation to its abiding consciousness that, as Little Gidding puts it, “History may be servitude, / History may be freedom” (CPP 195).

James Longenbach has argued that “Eliot forces his readers to feel the weight of his allusions very strongly.” The point is thought-provoking; forcing us to “feel the weight of … allusions” is part of that process of “assuming a double part” which Gareth Reeves notes is acknowledged as “an articulated and articulate strategy” in the terza rima passage in Little Gidding. In Eliot, allusion brings to mind a particular literary moment and a larger generic model. At the same time allusion finds a home in an imaginative world that is innovative.

This newness may often involve shaking us out of conventional responses, as when, in John Crowe Ransom's words, Eliot “inserts beautiful quotations into ugly contexts.” Ransom is discussing the use of Olivia's song from Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) in The Waste Land. Here, Eliot turns lyric melancholy into a simulacrum of automatic response. He does so by making us hear the original differently. That original (“When lovely woman stoops to folly”) has a tetrametric lilt and movement that are called up yet almost cancelled through the addition of “and” in line 253, “an unaccented syllable,” as Jason Harding points out. The reworking satirises lyric sentimentality. But it stops short of mere debunking; Eliot/Tiresias may have “foresuffered all” (CPP 69), yet there is something to be “suffered” in the scene, and the allusion suggests that there is, as well, residual value in the original lyric mode.

That value allows Eliot to express tacit sadness at the fate of the woman who “smoothes her hair with automatic hand, / And puts a record on the gramophone” (CPP 69). The quatrains of the passage's central section imitate the “automatic” nature of the sexual encounter they depict. The formal means are metronomic iambs and alternating, often sardonic rhymes: “guesses” and “caresses,” “tired” and “undesired” (CPP 68). However, as a whole, the passage accommodates disciplined feelings of yearning. Secret sympathy for the woman insinuates itself beneath the air of detachment. Her washing “perilously spread,” she is a descendant of the Keats who imagines voyages across “perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn” (“Ode to a Nightingale,” line 70).

Though his fame rests upon his poetry, T. S. Eliot spent a significant portion of his career writing about drama and composing plays. Before he was the author of The Waste Land or the editor of the Criterion, before he converted to Anglicanism or won the Nobel Prize for literature, Eliot was a critic and theorist of the stage, profoundly concerned with the state of contemporary theatre and determined to change its direction. His productions eventually drew the best actors from Hollywood and London and won him great commercial success. This chapter seeks to emphasize Eliot's lifelong commitment to the theatre and especially to plays composed in verse rather than in prose. He regarded drama as a genre of poetry, like lyric or epic, rather than as a distinct form. And he believed, like many of his contemporaries, that naturalistic prose plays had severely limited its range and expressiveness. “The prose play,” he frequently insists, offers “only a part of what the theatre can give,” adding that “the verse play is capable of something much more intense and exciting.”

Eliot found examples of that intensity and excitement in ancient Greek and Renaissance English sources: Aeschylus and Sophocles, Marlowe and Jonson. But the form also flourished in the nineteenth century, as he recognized: “Nearly all the greater poets of the last century,” he admits, “tried their hands at verse plays” (OPP 27). Though frequently critical toward them in his essays, Eliot was influenced by the verse plays of Byron, Shelley, Browning, and Tennyson. He was drawn to the tragedies of Swinburne, especially Atalanta in Calydon (1865); and he admired Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac (1897) and Hardy's The Dynasts (1904–8). Of course he found a stalwart ally in W. B. Yeats, whose ritualistic, abstract play At the Hawk's Well (1916) he attended when it opened. And he promoted the theatrical experiments of W. H. Auden, whose Paid on Both Sides: A Charade (1930) first appeared in the Criterion and whose collaborations with Christopher Isherwood were indebted to Eliot's own work, especially to the many essays and reviews in which he had begun to elaborate his theories of dramaturgy.

Consider the first verse-paragraph that opens The Waste Land:

These lines pose an intriguing question: How many people are speaking here? To answer it, we can only scrutinize the text in order to identify the lexical and syntactic patterns that distinguish each individual's speech.

If we begin to do that, we swiftly observe that lines 1–7 are very distinctive. We notice the participial constructions that end many lines: “breeding” (1), “mixing” (2), “stirring” (3), “covering”(5), and “feeding” (6), a pattern that is even repeated once more and reappears at line 8, in “coming over the Starnbergersee.” We also can't miss the use of adjective-noun pairings that occur in these lines, usage so insistent that there are seven of them: “cruellest month” (1), “dead land” (2), “dull roots” and “spring rain” (4), “forgetful snow” (6), and “little life” and “dried tubers” (7). Taken together, then, participial constructions and adjective-noun pairing seem to typify a coherent voice, and we can identify that voice for the moment as Zone 1. Further, we can also identify that voice as masculine, oddly, because we have no idea whatsoever who is speaking the poem's first four lines; yet they sound threatening (“cruellest month” and “dead land”), and minatory speech not assigned to any individual or source is conventionally spoken by a masculine voice.

In July 1922, as part of an attempt to assemble a list of distinguished writers for the Criterion, Eliot contacted E. R. Curtius, professor at the University of Marburg, to express admiration for his recent book, Die literarischen Wegbereiter des neuen Frankreich (1919) [Literary Precursors of the New France] (L1 694). When Curtius responded positively, Eliot expressed “the hope that we may some day see a work from you on English literature comparable to your book on contemporary France” (L1 721). In August 1923, Eliot repeated his suggestion: “I wish you wd do a series of English Wegbereiter,” adding that “my choice” would include Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Rudyard Kipling, and “I shd be tempted to add Frazer and Bradley” (L2 186). Curtius did not write such a book, but two months later, in October 1923, Eliot finished an essay for Vanity Fair making his own case for James, Frazer, and Bradley as precursors: “A Prediction in Regard to Three English Authors: Writers Who, Though Masters of Thought, are Likewise Masters of Art.” He claimed that these writers had shaped the sensibility of a generation and predicted that they would endure because their work, compared to that of their contemporaries, “throbb[ed] at a higher rate of vibration with the agony of spiritual life” (CP2 517). Of the three “masters,” only James, strictly speaking, is a “literary” precursor; Frazer is a social scientist and Bradley a philosopher. The author of The Golden Bough undoubtedly influenced the sensibility of a generation, but the author of Principles of Logic and Appearance and Reality was relatively obscure, known primarily to students and fellow philosophers. Frazer and Bradley made Eliot's list in large part because they were his own precursors, touchstones in his intellectual biography. With James, they represent the three core areas of his university education: literature, social science, and philosophy.

Eliot was educated, chiefly at Harvard, between 1906 and 1916. In June 1910, he received his B.A, and in October, he crossed the Atlantic to attend the lectures of Henri Bergson. At the end of his year in Paris, he returned to Harvard to work on a Ph.D. in philosophy, in the course of which Frazer and Bradley joined Bergson as major influences.

In the latter half of a war-torn decade, Eliot produced scores of reviews and essays but published only a handful of poems. While the most influential of his polemical pieces went on to shape literary discourse, the quatrains of Poems (1920) made but a negligible impression. In the wake of the positive reception of Prufrock and Other Observations, Eliot's formal experiments struggled to find an audience. Early critics of the quatrain poems thought them novel but “fatally impoverished of subject matter,” or fit only for “readers in the waiting-room of a private sanatorium” (Brooker 21, 47). Eliot was stung by the reception of his new poetry, which he hoped could take him beyond the burdensome success of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In a letter to his brother he reveals his estimation of the new work: “some of the new poems, the Sweeney ones, especially ‘Among the Nightingales’ and ‘Burbank’ are intensely serious, and I think these two are among the best that I have ever done. But even here I am considered by the ordinary Newspaper critic as a Wit or satirist, and in America I suppose I shall be thought merely disgusting” (L1 441).

Subsequent criticism has done little to rescue the quatrain poems from the early charges that were laid against them. They have been denigrated as plagiaristic, pseudo-scholarly and preparatory; they are seen to have little in common with the lyrical and psychologically poignant poems that stand on either side of these experiments. Yet Eliot's choice to trade free verse for the tautness of cross-rhymed tetrameters was deliberate. According to Ezra Pound, with whom Eliot scrutinised Théophile Gautier's quatrain poems in Émaux et Camées between 1917 and 1919, the two poets sought a way of addressing the lax formalism of their contemporaries. Eliot, perhaps less concerned with the general state of poetry than with framing his own thoughts, conceded in an interview that the “form gave the impetus to the content.” The statement is as cryptic as the content of the poetry is varied: subject matter ranges from sexual debasement to the tepidity of institutionalized religion, and the only common denominator would seem to be rhyme and rhythm. But the textual history of the quatrain poems suggests that they are also unified by an undercurrent of personal pain.

“A thin, firm minor music, of ceremonious intricacy, dissolving the world of Tiresias, Hamlet, and Mrs. Equitone”; “a visionary precision”; “a wholly transparent network of allusions, tacitly nourished”; “a religious poem which contains no slovenly phrase, no borrowed zeal, no formulated piety.” This is Hugh Kenner's description of the poem he identified as marking a departure from the conversational rhythms and “gritty substantiality” of Eliot's earlier writing. Ash-Wednesday (1930) marks a shift in Eliot's poetics away from the urbanity and Laforguean disaffection of his youth toward the lyrical assurance and meditative transcendence of Four Quartets. A religious poem devoid of dogma, Ash-Wednesday enacts the renunciatory suffering of the supplicant as the poetic consciousness strains to turn inward, forsaking the sensual life of memory and desire. It is a poem fundamentally concerned with alterations in state, with the painful processes of becoming, and with the subtle permutations of the changed and changing self. In seeking for an altered means of expression for his religious impulse, Eliot created a new language of spiritual lucency that becomes a form of metaphysical aspiration. In its wavering between personal and impersonal, in its subtle dream-like ellipses and sudden shifts in register, and in its syntactical involutions and recursions, Ash-Wednesday engenders a spiritual process in which poem and experience are often indistinguishable.

In the Christian calendar Ash Wednesday is a day of introspection and penitence. It marks the commencement of Lent, a liturgical period of forty days of prayer and abstinence that recalls the fasting and temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. The title Ash-Wednesday might therefore be expected to proclaim a public, ceremonial role for the poem in keeping with its uses of the Anglican Liturgy and the sermons of seventeenth-century Bishop Lancelot Andrewes, who preached before the court of King James I. Yet the poem eschews an explicitly ecclesiastical context and its recourse to liturgy only commences at the conclusion of the opening section (“Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death / Pray for us now and at the hour of our death” [CPP 90]). The voices of the Hebrew prophets Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Micah toll through the poem's other, stranger musics: Catholic prayers interwoven with Dante, eighteenth-century fairy tale, Elizabethan verse, and Symbolist aestheticism in a characteristically eclectic assemblage of fragments.

Though his fame rests upon his poetry, T. S. Eliot spent a significant portion of his career writing about drama and composing plays. Before he was the author of The Waste Land or the editor of the Criterion, before he converted to Anglicanism or won the Nobel Prize for literature, Eliot was a critic and theorist of the stage, profoundly concerned with the state of contemporary theatre and determined to change its direction. His productions eventually drew the best actors from Hollywood and London and won him great commercial success. This chapter seeks to emphasize Eliot's lifelong commitment to the theatre and especially to plays composed in verse rather than in prose. He regarded drama as a genre of poetry, like lyric or epic, rather than as a distinct form. And he believed, like many of his contemporaries, that naturalistic prose plays had severely limited its range and expressiveness. “The prose play,” he frequently insists, offers “only a part of what the theatre can give,” adding that “the verse play is capable of something much more intense and exciting.”

Eliot found examples of that intensity and excitement in ancient Greek and Renaissance English sources: Aeschylus and Sophocles, Marlowe and Jonson. But the form also flourished in the nineteenth century, as he recognized: “Nearly all the greater poets of the last century,” he admits, “tried their hands at verse plays” (OPP 27). Though frequently critical toward them in his essays, Eliot was influenced by the verse plays of Byron, Shelley, Browning, and Tennyson. He was drawn to the tragedies of Swinburne, especially Atalanta in Calydon (1865); and he admired Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac (1897) and Hardy's The Dynasts (1904–8). Of course he found a stalwart ally in W. B. Yeats, whose ritualistic, abstract play At the Hawk's Well (1916) he attended when it opened. And he promoted the theatrical experiments of W. H. Auden, whose Paid on Both Sides: A Charade (1930) first appeared in the Criterion and whose collaborations with Christopher Isherwood were indebted to Eliot's own work, especially to the many essays and reviews in which he had begun to elaborate his theories of dramaturgy.

In July 1922, as part of an attempt to assemble a list of distinguished writers for the Criterion, Eliot contacted E. R. Curtius, professor at the University of Marburg, to express admiration for his recent book, Die literarischen Wegbereiter des neuen Frankreich (1919) [Literary Precursors of the New France] (L1 694). When Curtius responded positively, Eliot expressed “the hope that we may some day see a work from you on English literature comparable to your book on contemporary France” (L1 721). In August 1923, Eliot repeated his suggestion: “I wish you wd do a series of English Wegbereiter,” adding that “my choice” would include Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Rudyard Kipling, and “I shd be tempted to add Frazer and Bradley” (L2 186). Curtius did not write such a book, but two months later, in October 1923, Eliot finished an essay for Vanity Fair making his own case for James, Frazer, and Bradley as precursors: “A Prediction in Regard to Three English Authors: Writers Who, Though Masters of Thought, are Likewise Masters of Art.” He claimed that these writers had shaped the sensibility of a generation and predicted that they would endure because their work, compared to that of their contemporaries, “throbb[ed] at a higher rate of vibration with the agony of spiritual life” (CP2 517). Of the three “masters,” only James, strictly speaking, is a “literary” precursor; Frazer is a social scientist and Bradley a philosopher. The author of The Golden Bough undoubtedly influenced the sensibility of a generation, but the author of Principles of Logic and Appearance and Reality was relatively obscure, known primarily to students and fellow philosophers. Frazer and Bradley made Eliot's list in large part because they were his own precursors, touchstones in his intellectual biography. With James, they represent the three core areas of his university education: literature, social science, and philosophy.

Eliot was educated, chiefly at Harvard, between 1906 and 1916. In June 1910, he received his B.A, and in October, he crossed the Atlantic to attend the lectures of Henri Bergson. At the end of his year in Paris, he returned to Harvard to work on a Ph.D. in philosophy, in the course of which Frazer and Bradley joined Bergson as major influences.

The nineteenth century gave us the idea of “culture” as the broadest framework in which the forms of life of a society, whether a tribe or a national state, can be located. From cooking to clothing, from poetry to dance, to marriage, to religion, these and every other aspect of a society's customs, practices, and beliefs are part of something we have come to call its “culture.” This is an idea that began in embryo in Giambattista Vico's Nuova Scienza (1725) and came fully into the light of day in Germany and France decades later in the work of Johann Gottfried Herder, Georg Hegel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the brothers Grimm, and others. The primacy of culture is an idea that has in the last two hundred years evolved into the social sciences as we know them today and, most brightly, in the discipline of anthropology. It found one of its strongest voices in England in the cultural criticism of Matthew Arnold in the nineteenth century. Arnold's was one of the first English voices to put the matter of “culture” on the intellectual agenda of his time.

To say that culture encompassed a whole series of pursuits such as football matches, cheese-making, and brass bands was one thing, but it was quite another when Arnold wrote that religion and the spiritual life of a people were also part of culture. Objections to this characterization of religion as merely a part of a people's culture were quick in coming. The counterclaim that culture derived ultimately from religion and that the spiritual truths of a people gave birth to any serious notion of culture was put forward in the nineteenth century by those who were seen to be defending an old idea. Progressive opinion already accommodated to the scientific cast of mind and to secularism applauded Arnold's bold claim. All the momentum of persuasion was on the side of the arguments of the secularists and the quick growth of anthropology, sociology, and political economy in the later years of the nineteenth century anchored the proposition in the academy. There were objecting voices of course – John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, and any number of bishops of the Church of England – but the force was with “culture,” not religion, as the nineteenth century ended. For all intents and purposes, the argument was over.

Four Quartets is in many ways a work of purification and purgation, linguistically and morally, and one which strives to “dispossess” itself of the world and its “distractions” in its quest for the absolute. The more severe and homogeneous diction of Eliot's later style, heralded in the 1929 essay on Dante – “one has learned from the Inferno that the greatest poetry can be written with the greatest economy of words, and with the greatest austerity in the use of metaphor, simile, verbal beauty, and elegance” (CP3 712) – means that the multiple discourse of the earlier work – the quotations in foreign languages, the presence of dialect, jazz idiom, nursery rhyme, all The Waste Land's different voices, as well as its multifarious personae – has disappeared. What we rather have in Four Quartets is the “I” persona in a state of prolonged spiritual self-communing within a pronounced doctrinal context, with a good deal of iteration of some of the poem's key points: “You say I am repeating / Something I have said before. I shall say it again” (CPP 181). If this suggests that Four Quartets remains primarily the preserve of the religious interpreter, a significant amount of recent criticism has emphasised historical contexts and occasions, focussing on the poem as a document of the Second World War, and indeed the later three Quartets, East Coker, The Dry Salvages and Little Gidding, published in 1940, 1941 and 1942, respectively, are heavily imbued with wartime experience. But whatever the social, political or “patriotic” interventions Four Quartets can be seen as making, these cannot be divorced from religious positions that heavily inflect the topical commentary the poem has to offer, and to neglect such positions precisely obscures the insistent dialogue between religion and “history” that takes place throughout. In Jed Esty's words, Four Quartets is not “a retreat from history into religion” but a “confrontation” between the two. I will return to this issue at the end of this chapter, pursuing in the meantime the poem's religious narrative particularly in relation to its abiding consciousness that, as Little Gidding puts it, “History may be servitude, / History may be freedom” (CPP 195).

Poets are notoriously resistant to categorisation. In Britain, as elsewhere, the spoken word category encompasses a wide range of poets, a large proportion of whom are black and Asian Britons. Yet, as Kwame Dawes observes, poets who perform their work are often keen to escape such labels as ‘performance poet’. Many poets also regard the terms ‘spoken word poet’ or ‘spoken word artist’ as reductionist. ‘Spoken word poetry’ itself is a contested category, implying the separateness of oral and printed poetry. Such distinctions touch on the sensitive issue of literary status, pointing to a long-standing poetic injustice in Britain whereby influential publishing houses rarely endorse poetry associated with the performance scene. The lack of parity between so-called ‘page’ and ‘stage’ poets points to a long-running, unresolved argument in Britain about what poetry is and who it is for, an argument that reaches back to the British poetry revival of the 1960s.

This chapter challenges some persistent assumptions about spoken word poetry's province and provenance, given the considerable contribution of British black and Asian writers. It places spoken word poetry in the context of the wider devolution of literary culture, emphasising the pivotal role of non-metropolitan localities in its development, to ultimately question the idea that British spoken word poetry is, and always has been, an urban form.

Provenance

It should not be said that poets of the 1980s inaugurated Britain's spoken word scene. More accurately, post-1980s British Asian and British black poets have recuperated and developed British poetry revival poetics, bringing them into dialogue with popular traditions such as dub poetry. This confluence of ideas has proved productive. Spoken word's transnational routes have obscured its 1960s British literary origins and British black and Asian poets, who reinaugurated Britain's ‘submerged’ traditions of performance, collectively integrating the national performance scene into the international world of poetry.

Advocates of spoken word poetry routinely observe that all poetry has its roots in orality. As John Coutts notes, ancient poetry was orally transmitted. The semi-literate medieval world of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales marks the emergence of printed poetry in English literary history, coinciding with the development of the printing press. Male writers especially, including John Agard, Fred D'Aguiar and Linton Kwesi Johnson, are umbilically connected to 1960s British poetry, when the form reached giddy heights of popularity, with charismatic performances in mass readings throughout the country.