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Four Quartets

Eliot regarded Four Quartets as his masterpiece, and it is the work that most of all led him to being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. It consists of four long poems, each first published separately: " Burnt Norton " (1936), " East Coker " (1940), " The Dry Salvages " (1941) and " Little Gidding " (1942). Each has five sections. Although they resist easy characterisation, each poem includes meditations on the nature of time in some important respect— theological, historical, physical—and its relation to the human condition. Each poem is associated with one of the four classical elements, respectively: air, earth, water, and fire.

"Burnt Norton" is a meditative poem that begins with the narrator trying to focus on the present moment while walking through a garden, focusing on images and sounds such as the bird, the roses, clouds and an empty pool. The meditation leads the narrator to reach "the still point" in which there is no attempt to get anywhere or to experience place and/or time, instead experiencing "a grace of sense". In the final section, the narrator contemplates the arts ("words" and "music") as they relate to time. The narrator focuses particularly on the poet's art of manipulating "Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, under the tension, slip, slide, perish, decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, / Will not stay still." By comparison, the narrator concludes that "Love is itself unmoving, / Only the cause and end of movement, / Timeless, and undesiring."

"East Coker" continues the examination of time and meaning, focusing in a famous passage on the nature of language and poetry. Out of darkness, Eliot offers a solution: "I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope."

"The Dry Salvages" treats the element of water, via images of river and sea. It strives to contain opposites: "The past and future / Are conquered, and reconciled."

"Little Gidding" (the element of fire) is the most anthologised of the Quartets. Eliot's experiences as an air raid warden in the Blitz power the poem, and he imagines meeting Dante during the German bombing. The beginning of the Quartets ("Houses / Are removed, destroyed") had become a violent everyday experience; this creates an animation, where for the first time he talks of love as the driving force behind all experience. From this background, the Quartets end with an affirmation of Julian of Norwich: "All shall be well and / All manner of thing shall be well."

The Four Quartets draws upon Christian theology, art, symbolism and language of such figures as Dante, and mystics St. John of the Cross and Julian of Norwich.