Four Quartets
The Four Quartets are a set of four poems written by T. S. Eliot that were published over a six-year period. The first poem, Burnt Norton, was published with a collection of his early works.
After a few years, Eliot composed the other three poems, East Coker, The Dry Salvages and Little Gidding, which were written during World War II and the air-raids on Great Britain. They were first published as a series by Faber and Faber in Great Britain between 1940 and 1942 towards the end of Eliot's poetic career. The poems were not collected until Eliot's New York publisher printed them together in 1943.
Four Quartets are four interlinked meditations with the common theme being man's relationship with time, the universe, and the divine. In describing his understanding of the divine within the poems, Eliot blends his Anglo-Catholicism with mystical, philosophical and poetic works from both Eastern and Western religious and cultural traditions, with references to the Bhagavad-Gita and the Pre-Socratics as well as the Christian mystics, John of the Cross and Julian of Norwich.
Although many critics find the Four Quartets to be Eliot's last great work, some of his contemporary critics were dissatisfied with his overt religiosity. George Orwell argued that religion was not a worthy topic for Eliot's poems. Later critics have disagreed with Orwell and argued instead that the religious themes made the poem stronger. Overall, reviews of the poem in Britain were favourable, while those in the United States were split between those who liked Eliot's later style and others who felt he had abandoned positive aspects of his earlier poetry.
Background
While working on his play Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot came up with the idea for a poem that was structured similarly to The Waste Land. The resulting poem, Burnt Norton, named after a manor house, was published in Eliot's 1936 edition of Collected Poems 1909–1935. Eliot decided to create another poem similar to Burnt Norton but with a different location in mind. This second poem, East Coker, named after a village the poet visited in Somerset, was finished and published by Easter 1940. His ashes would later be entombed at the village's St Michael and All Angels' Church.As Eliot was finishing East Coker, World War II began to disrupt his life and he spent more time lecturing across Great Britain and assisting in the war effort to the best of his ability. It was during this time that he began working on The Dry Salvages, the third poem, which was put together towards the end of 1940. This poem was published in February 1941, after which Eliot immediately began to plot out his fourth poem, Little Gidding. Eliot's health declined and he stayed in Shamley Green to recuperate. His illness and the war disrupted his ability to write and he became dissatisfied with each draft. He believed that the problem with the poem was with himself and that he had started the poem too soon and written it too quickly. By September 1941, he stopped writing and focused on his lecturing. It was not until September 1942 that Eliot finished the last poem and it was finally published.
While writing East Coker Eliot thought of creating a 'quartet' of poems that would reflect the idea of the four elements and, loosely, the four seasons. As the first four parts of The Waste Land have each been associated with one of the four classical elements so has each of the constituent poems of Four Quartets: air for Burnt Norton, earth for East Coker, water for The Dry Salvages, and fire for Little Gidding. However, there is little support for the poems matching with individual seasons. Eliot described what he meant by 'quartet' in a 3 September 1942 letter to John Hayward:
... these poems are all in a particular set form which I have elaborated, and the word "quartet" does seem to me to start people on the right track for understanding them. It suggests to me the notion of making a poem by weaving in together three or four superficially unrelated themes: the "poem" being the degree of success in making a new whole out of them.
The four poems comprising Four Quartets were first published together as a collection in New York in 1943 and then London in 1944. The original title was supposed to be the Kensington Quartets after his time in Kensington. The poems were kept as a separate entity in the United States until they were collected in 1952 as Eliot's Complete Poems and Plays, and in the United Kingdom until 1963 as part of Eliot's Complete Poems 1909–62. The delay in collecting the Four Quartets with the rest of Eliot's poetry separated them from his other work, even though they were the result of a development from his earlier poems.
World War II
The outbreak of World War II, in 1939, pushed Eliot further into the belief that there was something worth defending in society and that Germany had to be stopped. There is little mention of the war in Eliot's writing except in a few pieces, like "Defence of the Islands". The war became central to Little Gidding as Eliot added in aspects of his own experience while serving as a watchman at the Faber building during the London blitz. The Four Quartets were favoured as giving hope during the war and also for a later religious revival movement. By Little Gidding, World War II does not simply allude to the then-present time, but is also connected to the English Civil War.Poems
Each poem has five sections. The later poems connect to the earlier sections, with Little Gidding synthesising the themes of the earlier poems within its sections. Within Eliot's own poetry, the five sections connect to The Waste Land. This allowed Eliot to structure his larger poems, which he had difficulty with.According to C. K. Stead, the structure is based on:
- The movement of time, in which brief moments of eternity are caught.
- Worldly experience, leading to dissatisfaction.
- Purgation in the world, divesting the soul of the love of created things.
- A lyric prayer for, or affirmation of the need of, intercession.
- The problem of attaining artistic wholeness, which becomes an analogue for and merges into the problem of achieving spiritual health.
Epigraphs
The quartets are preceded with two epigraphs taken from the fragments of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus:The first may be translated, "Though wisdom is common, the many live as if they have wisdom of their own"; the second, "the way upward and the way downward is one and the same."
''Burnt Norton''
The concept and origin of Burnt Norton is connected to Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral. It discusses the idea of time and the concept that only the present moment really matters because the past cannot be changed and the future is unknown.In Part I, this meditative poem begins with the narrator trying to focus on the present moment while walking through a garden, focusing on images and sounds like the bird, the roses, clouds, and an empty pool. In Part II, the narrator's meditation leads him to reach "the still point" in which he doesn't try to get anywhere or to experience place and/or time, instead experiencing "a grace of sense." In Part III, the meditation experience becomes darker as night comes on, and by Part IV, it is night and "Time and the bell have buried the day." In Part V, the narrator reaches a contemplative end to his/her meditation, initially contemplating the arts as they relate to time. The narrator focuses particularly on the poet's art of manipulating "Words strain,/Crack and sometimes break, under the burden , under the tension, slip, slide, perish, decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, /Will not stay still." By comparison, the narrator concludes that "Love is itself unmoving,/Only the cause and end of movement,/Timeless, and undesiring." For this reason, this spiritual experience of "Love" is the form of consciousness that most interests the narrator.