Customer Reviews

Redeeming Time: T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets

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T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets is one of the most difficult and obscure poems ever written. Kenneth Paul Kramer's Redeeming Time is an excellent guide to understanding the poem's hidden meanings. The author has devoted more than thirty-five years to Eliot's masterpiece: he wrote his Ph D. thesis on Four Quartets, made numerous research trips to all four locations of the titles to each poem, taught courses on it at university, and continued his study of the poems while writing numerous books. Redeeming Time is well-written,clearly organized, and includes one hundred pages of Notes in the back of the book, plus a bibliography of the works cited and an index. This is truly a scholarly work. Best of all, Kramer's analysis unlocks many of the difficulties for the reader. I found this book to be the most helpful and useful analysis on Four Quartets written thus far.I highly recommend it.

Four Quartets captured me in its spell when I first encountered it in November '05. I have been trying to understand it, and its magnetic pull, ever since. Redeeming Time is brilliant in lifting the veil on Four Quartets and revealing the timeless truths so evoked there- and so hidden 'here'. If you are even vaguely interested in the contemplative / mystical life, or in touching 'sacramental existence' in the ordinary, feed your soul here- in Kramer's enabling strucutre- and let Four Quartets flow with even more power. Kenneth Kramer: what a gift. Thanks!

The fifth line of the first Quartet states that time is unredeemable. Kramer's book is a very long argument to the contrary, and in the end he doesn't persuade me. It seems to me that Eliot himself had troubles with his use of paradox to explicate Ecclesiastes, and so does Kramer. Glad I bought the book, it's great poetry, if unconvincing as a combination of philosophy and mysticism, and I'm happy someone as sensitive to the poetry as Kramer has spent what must be most of a lifetime pondering the riches of the text.

The Quartets are great poetry, but this overweening PhD thesis is the opposite of poetry. Wish the whole thing was cut to a quarter, and all of the windy theorization culled. Some good facts are here, but better to read the Bhagavad Gita in the original than suffer the author's hands-off opinions about its relation to the Quartets. I recommend Satchidananda's Bhagavad Gita (Yogaville, VA).

So far I just haven't gotten into the book. The poem is like 40 pages and the book explaining "Four Quartets" is 400? But I'm ignorant. I expect in a few years I'll wrestle with both books and see jewels under the puzzling lines of Eliot