An excellent reading of Eliot’s Four Quartets
Dove Descending: A Journey Into T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets by Thomas Howard
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Thomas Howard apologizes regularly for the prosaism and reductiveness of his line-by-line reading of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. And he is correct that the poetry is much better and much more than his analysis. Yet great poets need great readers, as Whitman maintained. And it is wonderful as one reader to be in the room listening to another, deeply appreciate and erudite reader as he lives with one of the great poems of the last 100 years.
Howard clearly is of a mind with Eliot in terms of the religious assumptions and faith consistent with Anglo-Catholicism. That does not mean a reader of another faith, or no faith, cannot find power, meaning, and even solace in the poem or in Howard’s exegesis of it.
I recommend Dove Descending, not as any sort of substitute for reading and rereading the Quartets themselves, but as a great resource in helping inform and reveal the poetry.