Four Quartets was published as a collected volume by Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, on 11 May 1943, priced at $2.00. The four poems had been published individually: Burnt Norton (1936), East Coker (1940), The Dry Salvages (1941), and Little Gidding (1942). Each is named for a place significant to Eliot: Burnt Norton is a country house in Gloucestershire; East Coker is the Somerset village from which Eliot’s ancestors emigrated to America; the Dry Salvages are a group of rocks off Cape Ann, Massachusetts; and Little Gidding is a seventeenth-century religious community in Huntingdonshire. The complete work is Eliot’s final major poetic achievement and his most sustained attempt to articulate a religious vision through poetry.
The Poems
Each quartet follows a five-movement structure modelled on Beethoven’s late string quartets (the musical analogy is Eliot’s own). The first movement introduces a theme and setting; the second offers a lyric meditation; the third explores the theme through narrative or discursive means; the fourth is a brief, intense lyric; and the fifth resolves (or fails to resolve) the poem’s contradictions.
Burnt Norton meditates on time, memory, and the unrealised possibilities that haunt human life: “What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present.” The rose garden of Burnt Norton becomes a symbol of the timeless moment — a point at which past and future converge.
East Coker begins and ends with the same words reversed: “In my beginning is my end” / “In my end is my beginning.” The poem explores ancestry, the limits of knowledge, and the humility required for genuine wisdom.
The Dry Salvages is the most American of the quartets, drawing on Eliot’s childhood memories of the Mississippi River and the New England coast. It addresses time and the sea, Hindu philosophy, and the intersection of the timeless with time.
Little Gidding is the crowning poem: written during the London Blitz, it transforms the fire of the bombing into a figure for the refining fire of spiritual purgation. Its central passage — a meeting with a “familiar compound ghost” on a London street after an air raid — is one of the greatest passages in English poetry, modelled on Dante’s encounters in the Inferno.
The Achievement
The Four Quartets represent a radical departure from The Waste Land. Where The Waste Land is fragmented, allusive, and modernist in its despair, the Quartets are meditative, repetitive (deliberately), and searching for wholeness. They are religious poems — specifically Christian, specifically Anglo-Catholic — but their theological content is woven so deeply into the fabric of the language that readers of any persuasion can respond to them. The famous closing lines of Little Gidding — “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time” — have become part of the common culture.
Collecting Four Quartets
First collected edition (1943, Harcourt, Brace): First printing, $2.00.
Individual first editions (Faber and Faber, London):
- Burnt Norton in Collected Poems 1909–1935 (1936)
- East Coker as a pamphlet (Faber, 1940)
- The Dry Salvages as a pamphlet (Faber, 1941)
- Little Gidding as a pamphlet (Faber, 1942)
Approximate market values:
- First collected edition (Harcourt), Fine/Fine in jacket: $2,000–$6,000
- Individual Faber pamphlets (first printings, set): $3,000–$10,000
- East Coker Faber pamphlet (first supplement): $500–$1,500
- Signed copies: $5,000–$20,000+
Value trajectory: Stable and strong. Eliot is a permanent fixture in the canon, and the Four Quartets are his most beloved work among readers who find The Waste Land too fragmented. The individual Faber pamphlets are the desirable bibliographic items — complete sets in fine condition are rare. Signed Eliot items of any kind command premium prices; he died in 1965.
The Last Great Long Poem
The Four Quartets may be the last great long poem in English. The tradition that runs from Milton through Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Eliot has not produced a comparable achievement since 1943. This is not to diminish the work of later poets — Heaney, Walcott, Hill — but to acknowledge that the ambition to write a sustained, unified, philosophical poem of major scope has largely disappeared from English-language poetry. The Quartets stand as both the culmination and the endpoint of that tradition.