T. S. エリオットの『四つの四重奏』 : UNITYの詩
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概要
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Anyone who contemplates T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets and The Waste Land would be sure that these two poems are quite different in their character and that Four Quartets can be described as affirmative, and The Waste Land as negative, in expression and implication. When we study the texts more closely we notice in The Waste Land many passages where negative words are found in succession and that the predominant tone is clearly negative, while in Four Quartets lines are found by far the opposite, a typical phrase being "all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well," where everything that exists is affirmed and accepted. Examining the conclusion or recapitulating part of each of the four quartests together with that of The Waste Land, these five poems, we discover, have some consistency, which may perhaps be identified as the development of an attitude toward history and religion. We also notice that the development is also the transmutation of the author's concern from a survey of fragments found in the present world to the realization of unity within him. If the two poems are looked at from this point of view, The Waste Land may be perceived as a poem of fragments and Four Quartets as a poem of unity. This conclusion coincides with the structural devices of the two works: the lines of The Waste Land seem disconnected as the result of employing the stream of consciousness technique, and the sustained musical rhythm and structure of the Quartets integrate the whole poem into a unity. In the fragmented Waste Land repetition is a mere succession of the same word like "Burning burning burning burning," while in the closely-knit Quartets the repeated words form a new and higher unity as we see in such a line as "Distracted from distraction by distraction." Besides, the titles and the epigraphs of the two poems confirm this view. From the view-point of Eliot's literary career, the separate exercise of his talent as a playwright of poetic drama and poet of meditative poetry in his later years has resulted chiefly from his growing wish to help to establish order in the outer world (or at least to mend the contemporary fragmentariness) through the theatre and his yearning for unity in his inner life. Eliot has from the first been a pilgrim searching for order and unity (remember Henry Adams in his Education), and while he has apparently resigned the hope of attaining them in the outer world -though he never ceases to explore-he still cannot avoid the urge within him for the unity of his inner life. And the result is the Quartets. If we take Four Quartets as a poem of unity, the very last line of the whole Quartets, "And the fire and rose are one," may be regarded as its key line. These seven words, according to Raymond Preston, mean that "divine love and human love meet." But Stephen Spender criticizes Four Quartets, protesting against its lack of "human love." His naive and genuine criticism commands the present writer's assent, but why do Eliot and Spender disagree here, when they agree in their recognition of the contemporary world as fragmentary? Accepting the suggestion of T. E. Hulme, the present writer concludes that in crossing the logical discontinuity from historical judgement to ethical attitude Spender supports the will to life and Eliot the will to death.
- 財団法人日本英文学会の論文
- 1958-11-30
財団法人日本英文学会 | 論文
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