T. S. Eliot and the Presocratics: Four Quartets as Lyric Philosophy

T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets is a complex masterpiece of lyric philosophy that owes much to the deep thinking of the ancient Presocratics. Burnt Norton is preceded by two epigraphs lifted from Heraclitus’s extant fragments. Far from being a mere paratextual threshold, they anticipate philosophical concerns that pervade all four Quartets. This article explores how Heraclitus’s philosophical thought on the logos, the eternal flux implicit in the world and the strife of opposites has a bearing on Eliot’s own lyric philosophy on the manifold facets of time (personal, ancestral, historic, and solar time), one that brings together the abstraction of philosophy and the synaesthetic thinking inherent in the lyrical.