The Four Quartets’ individual quartets, in the order of their composition as well as their placement in the sequence, are “Burnt Norton,” “East Coker,” “The Dry Salvages,” and “Little Gidding.” Read as if they were conceived and composed as the consecutive and interactive elements in a preconceived sequence to begin with, they will not disappoint any reader.

A survey of the four individual poems that would eventually compose this mature poetic achievement of Eliot’s, furthermore, also exposes much about the manner in which Eliot conceived of the relationship among poetry writing, the poem, and the personal experiences that provide a framework for the former two.

Such is the achievement of the poem in question, nonetheless, that the modernist literary canon would have had to have found a place for it even if Eliot had been a relative unknown at the time. It was a singular publishing event, for t he Four Quartets came to be regarded almost from the first as one of the great literary masterpieces of a very rich literary century.īy then Eliot’s worldwide reputation as a poet was substantial enough to warrant such critical accolades, of course. A relatively slim volume of poetry, it nevertheless brought together between its covers a single, coherent poetic work that would prove to be the final fruits of a lifetime of creative endeavor on Eliot’s part as a poet.

At the end of October 1943, in the midst of the terrible violence, destruction, and slaughter of World War II, Faber & Faber, Eliot’s publisher since the mid-1920s, released Four Quartets.

Eliot four quartets