Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #181964 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 148 pages

Customer Reviews

Missing the still, small point.
This is a good literary exegesis of a work which someone declared was possibly the greatest mystical work to emerge in the West for the last five hundred years. And there's the rub, alas : for anyone who has not undertaken - and experienced - the spiritual journey that is St. John of the Cross's Dark Nights of the Sense and of the Soul - and the author manifestly has not - the Four Quartets will remain either a closed book, or worse, one open to mere literary misinterpretation. The passage which supplies the title to the work is a particular case in point : it is a description not of a diving stuka bomber, but of a raging, inward purgatorial fire, accompanied by inexpressible, white-hot terror, that is a part of the via negativa itself. This being so, the book - as do all other works on the Four Quartets - remains a pale shadow of that which is given by Constance de Masirevich's wonderful `On the Four Quartets'. As in so much else, there is simply no substitute for experience, I'm afraid.