Eliot’s poetic thought and his early engagement with philosophy. Through its ostensibly philosophical rhetoric and multiple allusions, Four Quartets manifests a continuity between T.S. The whole composition of Four Quartets, its architectonics, is built, as I tried to show, according to the principle of investigation, that is to say, of seeking the truth: each movement reveals its tensions and contradictions of being, the last movement of each "Quartet" is usually a denouement while the first movement of the next "Quartet" denies or develops the previous and reveals new contradictions. There is another characteristic feature of the ‘dialogic imagination’ in Four Quartets: according to Bakhtin, “dialogic imagination” is seeking the truth, while ‘monologism’ pretends to know it. “Little Gidding” reveals its own contradictions and at the same time is a coda, a denouement of the whole cycle its fifth part in a circular movement unites the themes of the rose and of the yew-tree, the end and the beginning. The philosophical and musical integrity of Four Quartets is a contrapuntual integrity of tensions and contradictions where each new movement denies the previous one, each fifth movement, a coda, is a solution and resolution of the entire quartet while the first movement of the next quartet reveals new contradictions - point counter point. This interrelation between time and space is already reflected in the titles themselves alluding to the places meaningful for Eliot.
The chronotopes of the road and of the quest, to use Bahktin’s formula, are dominant in Four Quartets, and it is evident that time plays the most crucial part in it.
This is certainly the case of Four Quartet. However, time-space, or chronotope, is perhaps even more important in poetry, even in lyric poetry, than in prose since poetry is much more condensed than prose and can be defined as time-space condensed in images. Bakhtin states that genre and genre varieties are determined by chronotope and that the most essential and leading part of it in literature is that of time. Mikhail Bakhtin in his seminal The Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel applies chronotope only to prose disregrading other genres, or arts, or culture in general. The image of time in Eliot, especially, in Four Quartets is, so to speak, a dramatis persona, one of the main characters of the poem.
History in Four Quartets is revealed through the images of time and space.
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