27 pages • 54 minutes read
Little Gidding
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Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“Contemplations” by Anne Bradstreet (1645)
Written by a first-generation American Puritan, Bradstreet’s poem, like Eliot’s, juxtaposes the material world with its clock time and harsh movement toward death against the promise and grandeur of the transcendent Christian plane. Like Eliot, Bradstreet assumes the voice of a preacher addressing an errant congregation in need of the solace of the consoling message of the Incarnation.
“Design” by Robert Frost (1922)
Frost, the only contemporary rival to Eliot as an international figure in English-language poetry, unsettles Eliot’s affirmation that the brutalities and violence of the material world can lead to the spiritual dimension. Using a terrifying tableau of a spider calmly munching the moth caught in its web, Frost suggests that if this material world is designed by a God, then that God is surely twisted and dark.
“The Wild Swans at Coole” by William Butler Yeats (1917)
An influence on Eliot (Yeats may be the model for the stranger the speaker encounters in the streets of London), Yeats here ruminates, as Eliot would have 30 years later, on a material world that offers only suffering, disappointment, and bitterness. This poem reflects the melancholy message the stranger gives to the speaker, a message Eliot’s speaker will finally overcome.
Further Literary Resources
T. S. Eliot and Mysticism: The Secret History of Four Quartets by Paul Murray (1991)
Still considered the most helpful guide through Eliot’s dense theological argument and the poems’ intricate use of layers of allusions, this book-length study argues Four Quartets is Eliot’s Christian masterpiece and his answer, at last, to the pessimism and angst of The Waste Land.
Anglo-Catholic in Religion: T. S. Eliot and Christianity by Barry Spurr (2010)
The book explores the question of how Catholic Eliot is in his argument about time, death, and history. Specifically, the argument investigates how Eliot leans more toward Eastern ideology, particularly Buddhism, in his search for a way to transcend the agonies and ironies of the material world.
“The Vortex and World War II: Ezra Pound’s and T. S. Eliot’s Treatments of Wartime” by Charles Bax (2010)
The study focuses specifically on how Pound and Eliot responded to the horrors of World War I and then compares that response to their reaction to World War II. The argument uses Eliot’s Four Quartets to suggest how Eliot argues a transcendent way to hope lacking hinted in the forbidding endgame of The Waste Land.
Listen to the Poem
Eliot recorded the entire Four Quartets under the direction of the British National Council of the Arts shortly before his death. This recording captures Eliot’s own inflection, his brittle trembling tenor voice with its rise and fall (particularly his rolling r’s) as he guides his reader through the horrors of the war in the opening sections toward the transcendent prayer of the closing.
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By T. S. Eliot
