September 16, 2003
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The Form, the Pattern
“…the sort of organization that Eliot later called musical, in his lecture ‘The Music of Poetry’, delivered in 1942, just as he was completing Four Quartets: ‘The use of recurrent themes is as natural to poetry as to music,’ Eliot says:
There are possibilities for verse which bear some analogy to the development of a theme by different groups of instruments ['different voices', we might say]; there are possibilities of transitions in a poem comparable to the different movements of a symphony or a quartet; there are possibilities of contrapuntal arrangement of subject-matter.”
– Louis L. Martz, from
“Origins of Form in Four Quartets,“
in Words in Time: New Essays on Eliot’s Four Quartets, ed. Edward Lobb, University of Michigan Press, 1993
“… Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness….”
– T. S. Eliot,
Four Quartets
Four Quartets
For a discussion of the above
form, or pattern, click here.
