Four Quartets

Considered to be T.S. Eliot’s last great work, Four Quartets is a series of four long poems, 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 Dante Alighieri, philosopher Edmund Husserl, the Bhagavad-Gita, Pre-Socratics Greek philophers, and Christian mystics St John of the Cross and Julian of Norwich.

Published together in book form by Faber & Faber in 1943, the poems were released individually as pamphlets beginning with the appearance of “Burnt Norton”, the first poem, in 1936. Eliot then composed the other three poems, “East Coker” (1940), “The Dry Salvages” (1941), and “Little Gidding” (1942).