Romantic Scepticism and the Descent into Nihilism in T.S. Eliot's 'Burnt Norton'. (2nd January 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Cauchi, Francesca
• Is Part Of: Journal of language, literature and culture. Volume 64:Number 1(2017)
• Page Start: 62
• Page End: 77
• Publication Date: 2017-01-02
• Subjects: 'Burnt Norton, ' T.S. Eliot -- idealism -- nihilism -- Friedrich Nietzsche -- romanticism -- scepticism -- William Wordsworth; Philology -- Periodicals; Language and culture -- Periodicals; Literature -- Periodicals; 400
• DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2016.1221619
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2051-2856

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The nihilism consequent upon the First World War, and which T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets sought in some measure to dispel, emerges in 'Burnt Norton' as the chilling culmination of a putatively redemptive idealism. In common with his Romantic forebears, Wordsworth and Coleridge in particular, the ambivalent narrator of Eliot's first quartet harbours a desire to transcend the limits of temporality through the positing of an ideal world that he suspects may be illusory. The result is a descent into nihilism as extreme as it is absolute: a nihilism which Nietzsche fifty years earlier had decried as a 'will to nothingness.'