THE FOUR QUARTETS gain their strength in part from a subtle and sustained coordination of different and indeed at times opposed religious and philosophical traditions. These are brought together in a way that makes less of their oppositions and disjunctures than of their capacity to indicate or suggest by their very differences a third point of view. The result is neither an exploraion of dissonance (a marked effect in The Waste Land) nor a completely harmonized synthetic vision, but rather something between the two – counterpoint, perhaps, or fugue. Here, more than in any other work, Eliot seeks, defines by negation and contrast, and eventually finds the voice of Wisdom, greater always than her “actualization” in any single human soul, a voice the result of a “native gift of intuition, ripened and given application by experience, for understanding the nature of things, certainly of living things, most certainly of the human heart” (OPP 157–8).