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Four Quartets As Spiritual Meditation
- Four Quartets is T.S. Eliot's late, deeply spiritual meditation on time, life and death composed around WWII.
- Eliot moves from public wartime observation to universal, mystical concerns in a personal voice.
Burnt Norton’s Theatrical Origin
- Burnt Norton grew from a passage Eliot left over from Murder in the Cathedral about time.
- That leftover speech became the seed for the first of the quartets.
Personal Visits Shaping Poems
- Eliot left his wife Vivien in 1932 and later visited Emily Hale, with whom he walked at Burnt Norton in 1934.
- That visit helped shape the poem's garden revelation scene.