Abstract:

“Burnt Norton” (1935), the first section of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (1942), mirrors the poet’s inquisitive approach towards the complexity of human condition at modern age, particularly focusing on the central concepts of life, time, death, or eternity. Engaged in an existentialist exploration of such notions, Eliot designs the Quartets as an analogical musical composition. “Burnt Norton,” as the leading movement of the whole piece, becomes the first notes in Eliot’s poetic musicality in his entire work, with its variance in tone and poetic form and a rhythmical obsession with certain themes such as life, time, infinity, or memory. This paper aims to analyze such modernist pursuits voiced in the poem by treating its persona as a “Stranger,” or an archetypal errant of existentialist philosophy. As an English philosopher/author, Colin Wilson contributes to the development of the continental philosophy of existentialism, specifically identifying major characteristics of the Outsider figure. Wilson’s analytical account, The Outsider (1956) serves as a theoretical frame to characterize the speaker of the poem as an Outsider in this paper. It argues that the speaker of the Quartets, as primarily reflected in “Burnt Norton,” presents similar central existentialist crises of simultaneously searching for the ways to explore reality or denying its possibility.  He questions how much reality a human being “bears” without any meaningful attempt to understand it, and invites the reader to recognize their own unfit answers that deny their position as Outsiders in modern life.