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Themes Of The Four Quartets

Decent Essays

Manganiello focuses on the interplay between Dante and Eliot manifested in their use of the Incarnation. Drawing on the intent search of the confused speaker of The Waste Land, Manganiello proposes that the Four Quartets answers the search for the essential word with Logos. The epigraphs for Burnt Norton, the opening quartet, center around Logos and the intersections of time. Manganiello fleshes out Eliot’s exploration of time and eternity through the lens of the Incarnation. The Incarnation is, of course, the meeting of divinity and humanity, of time and timelessness, of Logos and flesh. Drawing on Dante’s comparison of God to both a circle and a point–the eternal and the temporal–Manganiello begins utilizing images from the Divine Comedy, specifically the Paradiso, to provide a deeper understanding of Eliot’s themes in the Four Quartets. Focusing specifically on Burnt Norton, Manganiello narrows in on the rose garden, examining the “primal memories of both an earthly and supra-terrestrial paradise of bliss” it triggers. He eventually concludes that, “Eliot, like Dante, invites the reader to cross over from the ‘human to the divine, from time to eternity’” (111). Switching his focus to the intersection of time and eternity in the Incarnation, Manganiello discusses an article Eliot translated for the Criterion entitled ‘On Reading Einstein’. The article, written by Charles Mauron, argues that “Einstein’s theory of relativity does not

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