This paper examines how Eliot builds his autobiography, Four Quartets based on more radical perspectives on time and self. Four Quartets is considered Eliot's autobiography in the sense that it addresses the poets' attempt to illuminate and represent himself, focusing on transcendence in his finiteness and temporality. The tension between temporality and timelessness provides the matrix on which Eliot constructs a relatively new concept of the past. Eliot describes the past as the integration of actuality and potentiality of past experiences, which leads to a breakdown of the boundary between self and others. Eliot illustrates the immersion of self and others as well as actual pastness and potential pastness based upon juxtaposition of discrete images which embrace diverse times. He describes the consciousness of self as a text and gives the consciousness a spatial role. In this way, he tries to show the mechanism how the individual self can contain much larger and more general references. Alongside, Eliot suggests that the ideal self escape from his own shell and communicate with others throughout various generations.
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