In “T. S. Eliot’s Profound Inquiry: Analysis of The Waste Land and The Four Quartets in the Context of the Restrictive Nature of Time,” Sheila Sagear investigates Eliot’s depiction of and attitude toward time in two canonical works of twentieth-century modernism. Saegar enrolled in the WR 150 seminar “Marvelous Modernism” because she was interested in writing about and researching The Waste Land, a poem she had some knowledge of before entering the course. Her final paper is what I call a long-arc research paper: Saegar wrote about and researched Eliot’s depiction of and attitude toward time in The Waste Land for a shorter mid-term research paper, then extended that investigation into “Burnt Norton,” the first of the Four Quartets, to develop a longer final research paper.
Saegar ponders the destruction and desolation of The Waste Land and considers Eliot’s depiction of the futility of human existence bound by time and mortality, then asks the important question of whether Eliot posits a greater meaning and reality outside of time. She looks carefully at “Part V: What the Thunder Said,” in which Eliot’s modern epic seems to come to a climax and resolution. She writes that “Eliot breaks the confines of the ‘beginning, middle, and end’ narrative style and instead employs a speaker who transcends temporal and physical human restrictions, moving around time as humans move through space.” This is a radical and imaginative reading of a poem that many critics argue ends with a sort of irony-laced pessimism. According to Sagear, Eliot gives the reader the experience of becoming unbound from time, “off the wheel,” so to speak, and in doing so argues for a more optimistic reading of the poem that also points ahead to Four Quartets, in which she sees a similar strategy at work from the very beginning.
An important and compelling part of Sagear’s argument is that there is more continuity than difference between The Waste Land and Four Quartets, an interpretation that is at odds with the mainstream critical view of Eliot as more pessimistic in The Waste Land, before he converted to Christianity, and more optimistic in Four Quartets, after he did so. Through a careful reading of the primary texts, and effective library and Internet research that brings a range of critical views to the conversation, Saegar argues successfully for this important connection and confluence between the two long major poems that bookend Eliot’s career, and in doing so makes a valuable and original contribution to Eliot scholarship.
— ANTHONY WALLACE
WR 150: Marvelous Modernism: The Poetry of Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and Allen Ginsberg