The Form, the Pattern

"…the sort of organization that Eliot later called musical, in his lecture 'The Music of Poetry', delivered in 1942, just as he was completing Four Quartets: 'The use of recurrent themes is as natural to poetry as to music,' Eliot says:

There are possibilities for verse which bear some analogy to the development of a theme by different groups of instruments [‘different voices’, we might say]; there are possibilities of transitions in a poem comparable to the different movements of a symphony or a quartet; there are possibilities of contrapuntal arrangement of subject-matter."

— Louis L. Martz, from
"Origins of Form in Four Quartets,"
in Words in Time: New Essays on Eliot’s Four Quartets, ed. Edward Lobb, University of Michigan Press, 1993

"…  Only by the form, the pattern,     
Can words or music reach
The stillness…."

— T. S. Eliot,
Four Quartets

Four Quartets

For a discussion of the above
form, or pattern, click here.