The last major verse written by Nobel laureate T. S. Eliot, considered by Eliot himself to be his finest work. Four Quartets is a rich composition that expands the spiritual vision introduced in “The Waste Land.” Here, in four linked poems (“Burnt Norton,” “East Coker,” “The Dry Salvages,” and “Little Gidding”), spiritual, philosophical, and personal themes emerge through symbolic allusions and literary and religious references from both Eastern and Western thought. It is the culminating achievement by a man considered the greatest poet of the twentieth century and one of the seminal figures in the evolution of modernism.
Editorial Reviews
"Somebody, by precept and example, had to bring into the music of poetry the grace and freedom which had arrived in the art of pure music many years before. Eliot was the man." --John Crowe Ransom
"The poems must be read for the quality of their emotion and its meaning - and I think I am not wrong to say that the Four Quartets (without being in the least Wordsworthian) represent the best poetry of their kind since Wordsworth wrote The Prelude. For those who wish to take heart as against others who are convinced that poetry was among the earliest casualties of the present war, I strongly recommend a reading of Mr. T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets." --Horace Gregory, New York Times
About the Author
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri in 1888. He moved to England in 1914 and published his first book of poems in 1917. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Eliot is widely honored for his poetry, criticism, essays, and plays exerting a profound influence on his contemporaries in the arts as well as on a great international audience of readers. He died in 1965.
