Orwell believed religion was not a worthy topic. John of the Cross and Julian of Norwich.Īlthough many critics find the Four Quartets to be Eliot's last great work, some of Eliot's contemporary critics, including George Orwell, were dissatisfied with Eliot's overt religiosity. In describing his understanding of the divine within the poems, Eliot blends his Anglo-Catholicism with mystical, philosophical and poetic works from both Eastern and Western religious and cultural traditions, with references to the Bhagavad-Gita and the Pre-Socratics as well as St. The poems were not collected until Eliot's New York publisher printed them together in 1943.įour Quartets are four interlinked meditations with the common theme being man's relationship with time, the universe, and the divine. They were first published as a series by Faber and Faber in Great Britain between 19 towards the end of Eliot's poetic career ( East Coker in September 1940, Burnt Norton in February 1941, The Dry Salvages in September 1941 and Little Gidding in 1942).

After a few years, Eliot composed the other three poems, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding, which were written during World War II and the air-raids on Great Britain. The first poem, Burnt Norton, was published with a collection of his early works (1936's Collected Poems 1909–1935). Eliot that were published over a six-year period. Fiennes’s encounter with Eliot is unique.Four Quartets is a set of four poems written by T. As the poet Daljit Nagra suggests in the programme, each person must seek their own Eliot. One instance: the way Fiennes (director and actor) transposes Eliot’s verbal textual allusiveness into physicalised theatrical layerings – of Shakespeare soliloquies, of wartime broadcasts, of Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring (this last, the closest the production comes, for me, to a sense of transcendence, as the narrator figure recounts the movements his body mirrors while he watches a medieval rustic courtship dance). If I have a hesitation about the conceptualisation, this is still a brilliant – really brilliant – piece of work. Implicit visual allusions, perhaps, to the fact that Four Quartets was published, as war still raged, also setting off resonances with the darker aspects of our own world today. Tonal contrasts between dark and light are given spatial quality through architectural, chiaroscuro lighting by Tim Lutkin (both used together to coup-de-théâtre effect).

An overall sense of sombreness is intensified by Hildegard Bechtler’s set of soaring, grey slabs slanted to open on to a changing-colour suffused cyclorama.

Four quartets text