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Which four poems make up Four Quartets?
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T.S. Eliot
T.S. Eliot working on his play The Cocktail Party in his office at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, 1948. The letters of the alphabet in his diagram represent characters in the play. The Greek letters represent characters yet to be invented.
The Four Quartets is a series of four poems by T.S. Eliot that are considered his masterpiece. Published individually between 1936 and 1942 and later collected in a single volume in 1943, the poems are titled after specific locations:12
- "Burnt Norton" (1936)
- "East Coker" (1940)
- "The Dry Salvages" (1941)
- "Little Gidding" (1942)
While each poem is self-subsistent, they function as a single, unified work that explores themes of time, history, spiritual renewal, and the nature of human experience.12