“The Music of Poetry”? T.S. Eliot and the Case of "Four Quartets"

This book interprets the Quartets’ musicality by combining an intermedial approach with a cultural and aesthetic contextualization of Eliot’s modernist poetics, and, finally, with a textual analysis of the poem. Shifting the critical perspective onto the text itself, this study reads the poem’s musicality in the light of an interpretation of Eliot’s idea of “intersection” which is at once conceptual, formal, and thematic. In Four Quartets, this notion works as a formal and figuratively musical device which marries music and the religious Incarnation in a fusion of words, the Word and music.