The intersection of the timeless moment

Abstract

This work is a consideration of a poetic dialectic of structured and anti-structured philosophical thought within T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets. This dialectic, first perceived by Eliot during his years spent as a candidate for the degree of doctor of philosophy at Harvard University, sets a philosophical structure gleaned from the teachings of F. H. Bradley's pragmatic idealism and appreciated in the poetry of Dante Alighieri in poetic discourse with an anti-structure first apprehended by Eliot within the metaphysical void of Nagarjuna's Madhyamikan via negativa. This essay proposes a sustained link between philosophical and metaphysical interests explored and qualified within Eliot's graduate thesis and the poetic expression of the transcendent possibilities of those notions of structure and anti-structure within his Four Quartets.