A Critique of Time in Shakespeare Wordsworth Iqbal and T.S. Eliot

Contents: Preface. 1. Time in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. 2. Wordsworth and the Spots of Time. 3. Iqbal’s engagement with time. 4. Islamic atomism: time and space in Iqbal. 5. Concept of time in Eliot’s Four Quartets. Index.

Adapting the title of Kant’s celebrated treatise Critique of Pure Reason this book is focused on the nexus of relationship between time and the timeless: this has been explored by Shakespeare in terms of ambiguities of human love; by Wordsworth, by evocation of a congeries of memories leading on to emergence of imaginative wholes and by Iqbal and Eliot, speculative thinkers alike, by polarization of time and eternity. Both of them recognize and highlight the role of history in the conundrum of daily living and concede the ineluctability of destiny in the affairs of men. Both of them are deeply fascinated by the juxtaposition of becoming and being the temporal processes on the one hand and the primordial or existenz on the other. Most exciting and enjoyable in this respect is the linguistic finesse and density and subtlety of meaning achieved through the deft ordering of image and symbol by these three outstanding British poets and the distinguished Urdu poet, Iqbal.