10 Facts About Four Quartets

Four Quartets is a set of four poems written by T S Eliot that were published over a six-year period.

Four Quartets are four interlinked meditations with the common theme being man's relationship with time, the universe, and the divine.

Four Quartets believed that the problem with the poem was with himself and that he had started the poem too soon and written it too quickly.

Four poems comprising Four Quartets were first published together as a collection in New York in 1943 and then London in 1944.

The Four Quartets were favoured as giving hope during the war and for a later religious revival movement.

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The central meaning of the Four Quartets is to connect to European literary tradition in addition to its Christian themes.

Four Quartets relied on Dante's imagery: the idea of the "refining fire" in the Four Quartets and in The Waste Land comes from Purgatorio, and the celestial rose and fire imagery of Paradiso makes its way into the series.

Eliot's poetry is filled with religious images beyond those common to Christianity: the Four Quartets brings in Hindu stories with a particular emphasis on the Bhagavad-Gita of the Mahabharata.

The achievement is of a high order, but the best qualities of Four Quartets are inevitably different from those of The Waste Land.

The Four Quartets are poems about a nation and about a culture which is very severely under threat, and in a sense, you could describe The Four Quartets as a poem of memory, but not the memory of one individual but the memory of a whole civilization.