Eliot Reads His Modernist Masterpieces “The Waste Land” and “The Love Song of J. 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. The title refers to a small parish in Somerset connected. You can hear Eliot reading the Four Quartets above. The second of Eliot’s Four Quartets, East Coker was published in 1940, four years after the original publication of Burnt Norton. 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. Neither flesh nor fleshless Neither from nor towards at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. 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 burnt norton