T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, & Quarantine Notebook: What Writing Taught Me About Our Divided Times - Plenary I

By James Matthew Wilson

During the first months of the pandemic, I wrote a series of news-article poems recording the events, public and private, of the period. They were published serially in Dappled Things magazine and together constitute a narrative that, even at their most private or domestic, constitute a record of the American experience as a whole. The concrete fruit was a book-length poem; the intellectual fruit was a new and deepened perspective on the divisions in our country and the strange commonality Americans experience in and through that division. I will reflect on the composition of the poem and also on another long poem written through international disaster, T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, which also sought to be a national poem in a time of division and destruction.

Presentation at 10:00am on Friday, January 13 in St George Cathedral Fellowship Hall