Eliot, Orwell... Swerdlow

Eliot's "Four Quartets" accentuated two lessons that I learned recently. The first came from Dr. Swerdlow in a poetry workshop. We discussed the length of poems and how, if you are true to what you are writing about, a poem is almost never short. This is a testament to that class; if you told me to take the cliche "there's no time like the present" and write about it in a new way, I might be able to solidify a few stanzas at best. But the way Eliot writes about the insubstantiality of the past and the future and how neither are redeemable, it really made me admire him for his devotion to the subject. It felt fresh, not forced, and insightful--that is always hard to do with such a dissected, common subject.
The imagery in the "Four Quartets" was also impressive. There were birds in trees responding to unsung music, scars that served as testaments to a war that--as far as the present is concerned--never happened. There is the door we never opened, the bowl of rose-leaves we never knew. It is all parable for how unrealistic "what ifs" are.
The second lesson, which is more of a continuing path of reasoning, was enforced in Eliot's poetry. I recently read Orwell's 1984, and without giving much away, the novel raises serious questions about the (ir)relevance of the past as well as the basis of solopsistic reasoning, a mode that Eliot adopts to some extent in this poem. I just found it interesting that such a conundrum has become a parallel theme in several Modernist works.