Four Quartets

First UK edition. 8vo, 44pp. Ex-library copy, rebound in two-toned blue cloth with Dewey numbers to spine and new endpapers. With the usual rubber stamps and markings on endpapers and verso of title page. Library bookplate partially torn from pastedown front endpaper with no damage done. Displays none of the usual bowing to the boards present in most copies. 1/6,000 copies printed.

The first UK collected edition of the Four Quartets, published on Oct. 31st, 1944, preceded by the Harcourt, Brace edition of 11 May 1943, and published separately in pamphlet form by Faber between 1940 and 1942. Consisting of the poems, 'Burnt Norton', which first appeared as the final poem in Eliot's Collected Poems 1909–1935 (1936); 'East Coker', first published as an integral "supplement" to The New English Weekly 'Easter Number', 1940, and was quickly followed by an off-print; 'The Dry Salvages', first published in the 27th February 1941 issue of The New English Weekly, some nine months before its appearance in pamphlet form; and 'Little Gidding', first published in the 15th October 1942 issue of The New English Weekly before its appearance in pamphlet form on 1 December the same year.

Four interlinked meditations, some 900 lines in length, on the nature of existence, time and reality, which blend Eliot's Anglo-Catholicism with the mystical and philosophical summits of the Western and Eastern tradition. The project "began with bits that had to be cut out of Murder in the Cathedral. I learned in Murder in the Cathedral that it's no use putting in nice lines that you think are good poetry if they don't get the action on at all".

As Eliot's comment in a 1959 interview above hinted, and as Helen Gardner* made clear, the first lines of 'Burnt Norton' revived a speech that Eliot had cut from his liturgical play Murder in the Cathedral: "Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past." Opening 'Burnt Norton', they comprise some of the most abstract poetry in the English language, poesy that seeks to locate temporal distinctions within a perspective that transcends time.

The poems take their titles from place names, and specifically: Burnt Norton refers to the 17th century, burnt-out Gloucestershire country house, whose formal gardens Eliot visited in 1934 in the company of Emily Hale, with whom he had a long unfulfilled romantic relationship; East Coker to the Somerset village from which his ancestors departed for the New World, in 1669; The Dry Salvages to a group of rocks off Cape Ann, Massachusetts, which Eliot visited every summer in his childhood; and Little Gidding (Cambridgeshire), to the Anglican lay community founded by Nicholas Ferrar in the mid-17th century. According to Faber, Eliot "always intended them to be published as one volume, and to be judged as a single work".

Cyril Connolly included the Four Quartets in his "Modern Movement: 100 Key Books 1880–1950," opining that it was "the most important poem since Yeat's 'The Tower,' and, as many think, of the century," while DNB calls it "the lasting achievement of the second half of Eliot's career." Eliot was awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry". "The most original contribution to poetry that has been made in our time." –Edwin Muir.

[*Gardner, Helen. The Composition of "Four Quartets". New York: Oxford University Press, 1978; Gallup A43b]