About Four Quartets
T.S. Eliot considered Four Quartets to be his masterpiece. He wrote Burnt Norton in 1935. East Coker did not appear until 1940, and it seems to be at this point that Eliot decided to create a sequence of four poems. The Dry Salvages followed in 1941, and Little Gidding in 1942. Eliot himself rejected autobiographical interpretations of his poetry. Certainly simplistic parallels between images in the poem and events in the poet's life are best avoided, but works such as Lyndall Gordon's biography of Eliot show that reading the poems in relation to the poet's experiences can reveal additional layers of meaning. The three later poems were all composed during the Second World War, and I think that although they are not 'war poetry' in any usual sense, reading them with an awareness of that background also adds to their significance.
Each of the poems is divided into five sections, and although they do not follow a strict pattern, it is possible to find parallels between them. It is also possible to read them in relation to the four elements of earth, air, water and fire. The titles of the poems all refer to places. Burnt Norton is a stately home near Chipping Camden in Gloucestershire that Eliot visited with Emily Hale in 1934. East Coker is a village in Somerset, from which Eliot's ancestors emigrated to America. The Dry Salvages is a small group of rocks off the coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts, the area where Eliot spent his childhood. Little Gidding is a village in Huntingdonshire, the site of a seventeenth century religious community, sacked by Parliamentary soldiers after giving refuge to Charles I in 1646.
