Environment, History, Literature: Materialism as Cultural Ecology in John Burnside's 'Four Quartets'

Abstract

"In history as in nature, decay is the laboratory of life" --Karl Marx. "So death will be a slower, surer fade than we imagine no mere extinction.. but absolute decay where absence is a form of generation" --John Burnside. John Burnside's stoical tenth collection of poetry, 'Gift Songs' (2007), embodies literary geographic aesthetics to demonstrate how poetry and landscape might interrelate, how one might act as an interface for the other. Centred upon an analysis of the four quartets, which correlate to T. S. Eliot's transcendental, macro-imaginative lexis in his canonical quartets (1936-42), this essay clarifies Burnside's tentative shift from Eliotean tropes towards a material realm. Eliot's quartets are all named by places; they concern growth and decay on multiple scales. Moreover, Eliot's quartets offer cognitive ways through figural and symbolic oppositions to herald past-present-future dynamics. Burnside's quartets follow this model to speak of a cultural ecology over time within an aesthetic realm of self-content poetry that pursues no dramatic or epic purpose but instances richly woven, emotionally charged registers of kinship and humility.