“At the still point”: T. S. Eliot, Dance, and Modernism

Abstract

T.S. Eliot's “Burnt Norton” initially appeared in 1936, but eventually this poem became the first of the Four Quartets (1943), a cycle expressing the poet's most mature meditations on time and the timeless. The Quartets confirmed Eliot's already well-established position as a modernist poet, but they also suggested a new sense of spiritual resolution, in part reflecting his journey from religious doubt to newfound faith through his conversion to Anglicanism in 1927. Throughout his work Eliot had described moments of sublime spirituality, but these do not usually endure within the framework of the early poetry. In “Burnt Norton,” however, he embarked on a sustained exploration of time and transcendence. In a striking invocation of this theme, the speaker alludes to dance as representative of the human experience of timelessness: At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only dance. I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where. And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time. (Eliot 1952, 119) Eliot's definition of dance seems paradoxical, claiming that it is neither still nor in motion, yet both. Its spatial and temporal locations are indefinable and unfixed; the place to which Eliot refers cannot be named—the still point is simply there—but the speaker cannot say where.

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