The poems were finally published as a series in 1942 (in New York) and 1943 (London). During this time, many people in England found Eliot's writing encouraging, because the thought of Nazi invasion made Eliot feel like he needed to defend England's culture and history, and in this sense, the war actually gave him the kick he needed to start getting a little more positive about the country he'd trashed so badly in 'The Waste Land.' Who would've thought that the threat of Nazi invasion was all it would take?Įliot wrote the four poems that make up 'Four Quartets' at different times and published them in different years. That's surprising, really, since the dude wrote most of the thing while the Germans were dropping bombs over his head during World War Two. Eliot Reads His Modernist Masterpieces “The Waste Land” and “The Love Song of J.Well, in a nutshell, ' Four Quartets' is about as hopeful a poem as you're ever going to get from T.S. Point to one end, which is always present. To follow along as you listen, click here to open the full text in a new window. You can hear Eliot reading the Four Quartets above. Despite their initial appearance as four separate poems, the themes are tightly interwoven and each poem is composed of five parallel parts. The Four Quartets were first published as a unified whole in 1943. The poem is named for a village in Cambridgeshire, England, which was the site of a 17th century Anglican commune that based its daily life around the Book of Common Prayer. Its underlying theme is one of purgatorial Fire. The final poem, “Little Gidding,” (39:08) was published in 1942. The third poem, “The Dry Salvages,” (beginning at 24:17) is associated with Water and is named for a treacherous cluster of rocks off Cape Ann that was among the hazards Andrew Eliot’s ship needed to avoid in order to safely reach the coast of Massachusetts. “East Coker” (which begins above at 10:46) is associated with Earth, and takes its name from the village in Somerset, England, from which the poet’s ancestor, Andrew Eliot, set out for America in 1669. It is named for an English manor house Eliot visited in the 1930s. The first poem, “Burnt Norton,” is associated with the element of air. “In The Waste Land the waste was place, the ‘Unreal City,'” writes Eliot’s biographer, Lyndall Gordon “here, the waste is time–time unredeemed by a sense of the timeless.”Īs in The Waste Land, Eliot uses the four classical elements as a structural device in the Four Quartets. Each one is a meditation on time, mixing Christian and Hindu imagery with personal and historical events. The Four Quartets are perhaps the most mystical and religious of Eliot’s poems.

Eliot 4 quartets