• Alireza Farahbakhsh

  Author

• Zahra Habibi

  Author

The present paper aims to observe to what extent Heraclitus' "Unity of Opposition"
and Bergson's "duration" are discernible in Eliot's "Prufrock," "The Waste Land," and "Four
Quartets," which consists of four sections – "Burnt Norton," "East Coker," "The Dry Salvages,"
and "Little Gidding." It seeks to see in which passages and to what purpose Eliot has distanced
himself real time and replaces it with cyclic and subjective or inner time. Neither Heraclitus in
his negation of opposition nor Bergson in his duration admit separation among past, present;
they are both of the opinion that time should be approached in terms of unity, continuity, and
totality. The paper shows that among other kinds of time, such as real, sequential, biographical,
and objective time, there are passages in Eliot's poems which can be said to be in line with
Heraclitan and Bergsonian conception of temporality.

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