Eliot wrote Four Quartets to release the English from their fear of death and destruction during the Second World War by means of religious belief, and as a result, he reinforced his belief in Christianity as well. For this purpose, he chose the historical sense related to his impersonal theory and discussed in his early criticism, “Tradition and Individual Talent,” wherein he explained the real meaning of tradition. In the poem, Four Quartets he makes a journey into the past in order to arrive at our divine origin. In Four Quartets Eliot presents the historical sense as a sense of time and the timeless, attaching more importance to the latter. According to him, time can be restored through the historical sense, which means that history deals with, not the past events themselves, but their meaning in connection with the general truth of life that is timeless. For Eliot the truth is God's Word. Death is predominant in Eliot’s historical sense since every life ends in death. Death has two different meanings: one is the end of human life; the other, the beginning of a new spiritual life. A man's life can appear to be meaningless, but its meaning will be completed by his death when he is united with the other dead. In the poem Eliot recalls not only his ancestors’ past life but also our prehistoric one and places stress on our inevitable and ceaseless death. Death, however, can lead to a spiritual life as manifested by Christ's Resurrection. The bell tolled by the ground swell not only announces our imminent death, but also another annunciation: that is, the Annunciation means God's Word signifying Christ's Incarnation. Eliot made great efforts to convey God’s Word in his poetry, which resulted in his despair of human words. In this poem he eventually turns to religion and realizes the truth of God's love in our death in the religious community of Little Gidding, exclaiming, “History is now and England.”

• 김재인(성신여자대학교) | Jae-Inn Kim