Four Quartets
T.S. Eliot wrote Four Quartets as a set of four long poems, Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding, published together in 1943. Each takes its title from a place and meditates on time, eternity, and the search for meaning, drawing on Christian belief and on Eliot's reflections during the Second World War. The poems are dense and musical, returning to images of fire, water, gardens, and the still point of a turning world. Eliot considered them among his finest work, and they were central to the case for his Nobel Prize in Literature. The sequence is more reflective and spiritual than his earlier The Waste Land, trading shock for sustained contemplation. It rewards slow, repeated reading and remains one of the major long poems in English of the twentieth century.
What you might want to know about Four Quartets
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A sequence of four linked poems on time, memory, and faith, written by Eliot in his later years.
They are four linked poems, Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding, each named for a place and meditating on time and meaning.
It is more reflective and spiritual. Where The Waste Land is fragmented and shocking, Four Quartets offers sustained meditation on time, faith, and eternity.
Four Quartets was written by T.S. Eliot, published in 1958 by Copenhagen University Publications Fund.
Four Quartets is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
