AN ECOCRITICAL APPROACH TO T. S. ELIOT’S “FOUR QUARTETS”
AN ECOCRITICAL APPROACH TO T. S. ELIOT’S “FOUR QUARTETS”

Summary/Abstract: This article is a detailed ecocritical study of T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”.The concepts which the poet sets to present through objective correlatives belonging mainly to nature and mankind’s relationship with it are mainly time (as past,and future) and timelessness (as the present timeless now), history (personal history as autobiography, family history as genealogy, the nation’s history and nature’s history (seasons, nature as a menace or a caress.T. S. Eliot is a lover of antithesis and paradox, often using oxymoron, even series of it.He draws inspiration from the medieval mystic Dame Julian of Norwich, from Biblical texts, from Buddhist texts like “Mahabmarata,” from Mary Stuart’s biography, from his ancestor Thomas Elyot’s book of 1530. This study applies the Timothy Morton’s ecocritical concept of ’hyperobject’ to the interpretation of the ciclicity and circularity of time and events in the poem, as cycles in the personal biography, genealogy, history and nature; also showing the inclusion of the part in the whole of human history and further in nature’s history.It applies Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann’s ’transcorporeality’ to the relationship between humans and nature. It regards religion both through the eye of mystic Julian of Norwich and through the ecocritical lens of ’the-more-than-human’. It uses Greg Garrard “Ecocriticism” tropes of ’Apocalypse’ and ’Wilderness’ in interpreting passages of the Quartets.

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