Francesca Cauchi2025-10-0620172051-28562051-286410.1080/20512856.2016.1221619http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2016.1221619https://gcris.yasar.edu.tr/handle/123456789/6107The nihilism consequent upon the First World War and which T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets sought in some measure to dispel emerges in Burnt Norton' as the chilling culmination of a putatively redemptive idealism. In common with his Romantic forebears Wordsworth and Coleridge in particular the ambivalent narrator of Eliot's first quartet harbours a desire to transcend the limits of temporality through the positing of an ideal world that he suspects may be illusory. The result is a descent into nihilism as extreme as it is absolute: a nihilism which Nietzsche fifty years earlier had decried as a will to nothingness.'English'Burnt Norton', T.S. Eliot, idealism, nihilism, Friedrich Nietzsche, romanticism, scepticism, William WordsworthArticle