Four Quartets

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Four Quartets

T. S. Eliot

Poetry

Jul 28, 2018

Written in the years before and during World War II, the Quartets consist of four long poems, each cohering around a season, one of the four natural elements (earth, air, water, fire), and a place: “Burnt Norton,” an English manor house and garden; “East Coker,” a village in Somerset, home to Eliot’s ancestors (and, ultimately, resting place of the poet’s ashes); “The Dry Salvages,” a group of rocks off Cape Ann, Massachusetts; and “Little Gidding,” seventeenth-century home to the Christian familial community of Nicholas Ferrar, which lived under the guidance of the Book of Common Prayer. Now formal and now free, Eliot’s verse wends its way through these locations like the river he invokes at the outset of “The Dry Salvages”: strong, flowing, impersonal and inspiring, animated with currents of consolation and desire that cannot measure the meaning of existence, but merely, and truly, carry it along. There is no other book of poetry quite like Four Quartets.

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DeAnn Rossetti

Oct 28, 2018

Though I love all of his poems, I am particularly fond of Pruefrock and the Jellicle cats!

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Harry

Feb 12, 2022

can't better the description but brilliant- as good or very nearly as prufrock imo and really visceral- it is almost a good way to show just how best poetry can be appreciated even to someone who doesn't like it- because it's so visceral you can't hopeto understand it literally but it hits as hard anyway

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