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T. S. EliotA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The speaker, hungry for the transcendent, is horrified by the destruction of war and feels the first intimations of his own mortality. He argues that to shake free of the iron boundary of time allows the soul to feel the radiant urgency of the transcendent love of Christ.
Appropriately, the thematic argument of “Little Gidding,” widely regarded as one of T. S. Eliot’s greatest poetic achievements, is actually anticipated in one of his earliest poems. In 1910, when Eliot was a Harvard undergraduate, he wrote “Silence.” The brief lyric, eventually published posthumously in Inventions of the March Hare (1998), recounts a walk through the crowded streets of Cambridge. There, amid the “garrulous waves of life” (Eliot, T. S. “Silence.” Poetry Nook, Line 3), in a moment the speaker describes as “the ultimate hour / When life is justified” (Eliot, Lines 8-9), he taps into the stunning calm of a transcendent moment, when the “seas of experience” (Eliot, Line 10) part, and the speaker feels “such peace [they are] terrified” (Eliot, Line 15). That moment, beyond language, as inexplicable as it is unanticipated and unforced, envelopes the speaker: “There is nothing else beside” (Eliot, Line 15).
By T. S. Eliot
Ash Wednesday
T. S. Eliot
East Coker
T. S. Eliot
Four Quartets
T. S. Eliot
Journey of the Magi
T. S. Eliot
Mr. Mistoffelees
T. S. Eliot
Murder in the Cathedral
T. S. Eliot
Portrait of a Lady
T. S. Eliot
Preludes
T. S. Eliot
Rhapsody On A Windy Night
T. S. Eliot
The Cocktail Party
T. S. Eliot
The Hollow Men
T. S. Eliot
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
T. S. Eliot
The Song of the Jellicles
T. S. Eliot
The Waste Land
T. S. Eliot
Tradition and the Individual Talent
T. S. Eliot