엘리엇의 네 사중주와 라이프니츠의 단자론

Cheol-Hee Lee. 2015. Eliot’s Four Quartets and Leibnitz’s Monadism. Studies in British and American Language and Literature 116, 1-18. This paper is to trace Eliot’s poem by way of Leibnitz’s Monad. To Leibnitz, all things in the world can be called monads and they can be classified by consciousness. And he calls the highest level of monads God. That is, Leibnitz diagnoses that God controls and manages all things in our world. Certainly God controls other monads which are in low level. Similarly, Eliot regards God as the center of our world (he calls it logos) and depicts the status which is God’s absences as sterile, barren and desperate. Also Eliot classifies time into three categories: past, present, future. But it is remarkable that they have a linear quality. It continues to connect with each other without stopping. This is like Leibnitz’s monad, meaning that it is not atomical as Eliot’s time has “continuity” which cannot be separated each other. After all, as Leibnitz thinks of God as the highest of all monads, so Eliot regards God as the center of all things in the world. Regretting that there is no God in the modern world, Eliot suggests that a modern man should go back to God.