Īfter months of not working on the poem, Eliot began to feel compelled to finish it it was not until August 1942, however, that he started working on it again. After the first draft was written, he set the poem aside, and he left in September to lecture throughout Great Britain.
He believed the problems with the poem lay with his own inability to write, and that, precipitated by air raids on London, he had started the poem with too little preparation and had written it too quickly. The first draft was completed in July 1941 but he was dissatisfied with it. During this time, Eliot started writing Little Gidding. St John's Church, Little Gidding, as rebuilt in 1714įollowing the completion of the third Four Quartets poem, The Dry Salvages, Eliot's health declined and he stayed in Shamley Green, Surrey while he recovered. Little Gidding focuses on the unity of past, present, and future, and claims that understanding this unity is necessary for salvation.
Within the poem, the narrator meets a ghost that is a combination of various poets and literary figures. According to the poet, humanity's flawed understanding of life and turning away from God leads to a cycle of warfare, but this can be overcome by recognising the lessons of the past. The poem uses the combined image of fire and Pentecostal fire to emphasise the need for purification and purgation. The title refers to a small Anglican community in Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire, established by Nicholas Ferrar in the 17th century and scattered during the English Civil War. It was first published in September 1942 after being delayed for over a year because of the air-raids on Great Britain during World War II and Eliot's declining health. Eliot's Four Quartets, a series of poems that discuss time, perspective, humanity, and salvation. The first two podcasts are rerecorded after the event as the podcast was lost, and the last three are ‘live’.Little Gidding is the fourth and final poem of T. In these podcasts, Mark Oakley first introduces the whole sequence, and then in the following four podcasts explores each of the Quartets by turn. By turns mystical, musical, philosophical and fragmentary, the Four Quartets scrutinise our relationship to time, the universe and the divine. TS Eliot’s Four Quartets is a classic in the great tradition of Western spirituality. Podcasts of Canon Mark Oakley talking about TS Eliot’s Four Quartets at St Paul’s Adult Learning reflective day in April 2016.
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