Abstract

Poem as Psychopomp, Poem as Prayer: A Reading of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, by Sandra Lackenbauer, explores the mythic dimensions of Four Quartets, focusing primarily but not exclusively on the poem's concerns with psychopomp, the Underworld, and with the sayings and unsayings of prayer. A novel interpretative template is developed to investigate psychopomp and prayer and other themes and to ascertain the ways in which seemingly disparate images from the poem relate to one another mythologically. ;After researching literary, psychological, and historical analyses of Four Quartets, comparative studies of Eliot's poetry and plays, and critical biographies of T. S. Eliot, the author found no exegesis of the interrelationships of the various mythic themes of Four Quartets. In response, she founded a figural theory of art on eight archetypal and interdependent perspectives of imagination. This method, inspired by the Amerindian Council process and the Sufi Enneagram, is represented by a mandala, a circle with eight different aspects of imagination around its circumference. These imaginative perspectives include creation , contemplation and prayer , passion , aesthetics and psychopomp , domesticity , ethics , alchemy , and wisdom . ;Even though works of art may be evaluated from any of the imaginative perspectives individually, this hermeneutical and experiential reading of Four Quartets engages all eight, together with some of their interactions, to call forth the ways in which the poem's themes echo and respond to one another. First, each imaginative perspective is introduced and the archetypal patterns of Greek, Roman, Hindu, Buddhist and Christian myths that underpin them are described. Then, using these eight perspectives of imagination as a template to read Four Quartets, an interpretation of the poem is presented