Francesca CauchiCauchi, Francesca2025-10-06201720512856, 205128642051-28562051-286410.1080/20512856.2016.12216192-s2.0-85015035830https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85015035830&doi=10.1080%2F20512856.2016.1221619&partnerID=40&md5=8ae166482740cd0978f2269bae6957f2https://gcris.yasar.edu.tr/handle/123456789/9705https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2016.1221619The 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.’ © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.Englishinfo:eu-repo/semantics/closedAccessFriedrich Nietzsche, Idealism, Nihilism, Romanticism, Scepticism, William Wordsworth, ‘burnt Norton’ T.s. EliotNihilismWilliam Wordsworth‘Burnt Norton,’ T.S. EliotIdealismRomanticismundefinedBurnt NortonundefinedT.S. EliotScepticismFriedrich NietzscheArticle