ABSTRACT The 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.’

中文翻译：

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浪漫主义的怀疑论与虚无主义的堕落，在TS艾略特的《伯恩·诺顿》中

摘要第一次世界大战后产生的虚无主义，以及TS艾略特的《四重奏》在某种程度上试图消除的虚无主义，出现在“伯恩·诺顿”中，是公认的救赎理想主义的令人震惊的顶点。与他浪漫的前辈，特别是华兹华斯和科尔利奇一样，艾略特的第一个四重奏的矛盾叙述者怀有一种渴望，即通过提出一个他怀疑可能是虚幻的理想世界来超越时间的局限。结果是虚无主义的极端到绝对的下降：一种虚无主义，尼采在五十年前就将其视为“虚无意志”。