How Poetry Becomes Music | "Burnt Norton" Eliot's Four Quartets

Words move. Music moves only in time. But that which is only living can only die. Words after speech reach into the silence.

Only by the form, the pattern can words or music reach the stillness. as a Chinese jar still moves perpetually in its stillness. Well, if you found this poem difficult, possibly an intolerable wrestle with language, as Elliot will write in East Coker, you aren't alone. This is a difficult poem.

So, I want to encourage you not to feel not to feel overwhelmed with the difficulty. Remember to stand in the river of the poem, letting the po letting the the poetry just flow past you. And what comes to you from the river is for you. So try not to worry about comprehending everything.

You won't comprehend all, but you may apprehend some. And I also encourage you in our guided discussion not to feel shy. If you have a question about something, um we'll we'll discuss these questions together. And if it's a if it's something that one of my resources can answer, then I'll try in real time to to hunt down uh an answer to your question.

But it's always fun to wrestle together with the language and to to understand it from different angles. So we'll work through the difficulties and admire the beautiful together. When Elliott began writing Burnt Norton, uh it was a bad time to publish poetry. At least it was a bad time to be selling poetry, we might say.

Um some tough things were happening all over the the world. Millions of Americans were suffering from the Great Depression. There was uh the black Sunday dust storm across the great plains. The Atlantic hurricanes, there was one really great Atlantic hurricane that broke the record and struck the American South.

And in Europe, fascism was rising and many countries were militarizing. Hitler broke the Versailles treaty by moving troops into the Rhineland. And the Nuremberg laws stripped German Jews of citizenship. So everyone knew that war was coming.

Everybody was very tense. This was a a tough time. Um, and you see Elliot, we'll see next week, or rather when we get to East Coker in two weeks, we'll see how Elliot was wrestling with the question, what does it mean to be writing poetry when all of this is happening? But somewhere between the writing ...