Valerie Eliot to Barbara Hardy, 30 June 1977: “My husband would often quote passages of Dickens to me from memory, especially when he was happy. You may be interested to know that his original epigraph for Four Quartets was ‘What a rum thing Time is, ain’t it, Neddy’, but he was afraid it might be misunderstood” (Pickwick Papers ch. XLII; Composition FQ 28; the unadopted heading to Parts I and II of The Waste Land, “HE DO THE POLICE IN DIFFERENT VOICES”, was from Our Mutual Friend). TSE to his Aunt Susie (Mrs. Hinkley), 28 Dec 1931: “I suppose you are all engrossed with Barbara junior’s wedding. Barbara and Chardy bring home to me the ‘flight of time’. As the Fleet gate keeper in Pickwick said:—‘What a rum thing time is, ain’t it, Neddy?’” TSE’s “Pickwick Paper (Advanced)”, sent to the Fabers and Hodgsons in Feb 1939, asked examinees to identify this Dickens quotation. (“flight of time”, Virginia Woolf: “The flight of time which hurries us so tragically along”, Jacob’s Room, 1922, ch. XII.)
9. TSE ON FOUR QUARTETS
To Hayward, 12 June 1944, sending a proof of Four Quartets: “Going through them again, I am depressed by a certain imprecision of word and phrase, especially in Burnt Norton, but also in East Coker: my only solace is that I do think the writing improves toward the latter part of the book.” Lehmann on TSE’s reading Four Quartets at Bryn Mawr in Oct 1948: “According to him, they are by far the best thing he has written up to now. He read the third part, The Dry Salvages.”
[Poems I 177–209 · Textual History II 483–545]
Henry Eliot to Henry B. Harvey, 10 Oct 1946: “Best evening we had was at Dublin [New Hampshire], when he read two of his Quartets to us, with some commentary. In re the title, asked him why Four Quartets; pointed out that a musical quartet has four voices, also four or perhaps three parts, whereas each of TSE’s quartets has five parts. I mentioned having bought one of Beethoven’s quartets on having read a review which attempted to draw parallels (not evident to me). Well, TSE said, there wasn’t that much of a parallel. Asked whether in Dry Salvages the river was the individual (or his soul) and the sea the world (or universe) · · · he said, well, no, he hadn’t thought of that. Asked whether the silent motto (E. Coker) referred to the Eliot motto Tace et Fac, said yes, he had thought of that. Rose garden (Burnt Norton, I), Alice in Wonderland” (Wilson Library, U. North Carolina).
To E. R. Curtius, 16 Feb 1946: “I am deeply shocked that my poem should have presented itself to you in that light. Whatever its merits or demerits, to me it seems to express much more of Christian hope than any of my previous work. I have had opinions from theologians both Anglican and Roman, and I am sure that to none of them, English or French, has it appeared to depict a ‘Welt ohne Gott’ [world without God]. Three criticisms have been made of the pertinence of which I am sensible: 1. that the second poem is excessively influenced by the negative way of St. John of the Cross; 2. in relation to the first, that I am too deeply influenced by Indian thought; 3. that I have grasped the Incarnation but not the Resurrection. But I must protest against your interpretation! I cannot but feel that there enters into it a good deal of your own vision at the present time. For that I can only condole in silence.” 13 Mar: “I was not so surprised that you should have found my Four Quartets depressing as that you should have found them depressing in comparison to my earlier work. To me it seems that viewed in relation to my earlier poetry these four poems represent as a whole a considerable degree of progress in the direction you desire. I have always been very anxious to write only from the stage I had actually reached and not to fall into the temptation of writing from a more advanced stage of spiritual life than I had mastered. I also admit to a natural tendency to Jansenism which no doubt is partly individual temperament and partly the reflex of a strong element of Calvinism on both sides of my family in the seventeenth century, but it does seem to me that I have kept on moving, although perhaps at a very slow pace.” For Jansenism and Calvinism, see headnote to East Coker 4. AFTER PUBLICATION.
To Anne Ridler, 15 Aug 1949, on her revision of The Faber Book of Modern Verse (1951) and Michael Roberts’s wish, before his death, to drop Ash-Wednesday but add a Quartet: “I suppose I shall have to release single ‘Quartets’ eventually, and I should prefer to do it first in a volume of our own.” To F. O. Matthiessen, 19 Aug 1949: “We are now willing to release for the first time one of the later quartets for the Oxford Book of American Verse. But I have personal and sentimental reasons for asking you to take The Dry Salvages. In the first place this is the only one of the Quartets in which the scenery is American, referring to the Mississippi and the New England coast. In the second place Little Gidding is particularly English, and if it appeared in any Oxford collection I would want it to be in the Oxford Book of English Verse. It is not only East Anglian in scenery but historical in content and is in fact essentially a patriotic war poem of 1942.” The Oxford Book of American Verse included The Dry Salvages.
[Poems I 177–209 · Textual History II 483–545]
“If the last two Quartets seem obscure to some, then the obscurity there is inherent in the ideas expressed”, T. S. Eliot Answers Questions (1949). “I see the later Quartets as being much simpler and easier to understand than The Waste Land and Ash-Wednesday. Sometimes the thing I’m trying to say, the subject matter, may be difficult, but it seems to me that I’m saying it in a simpler way”, Paris Review (1959). “I cannot explain the Four Quartets. Any attempt on my part to explain would merely be saying something else. One can say that Little Gidding is a patriotic poem—it was written during the dark days of 1942—but that is only one aspect of it. It was after writing the first two that I saw the pattern required four in all. I associated them with the four elements: air, earth, water and fire, in that order”, Grantite Review (1962). In his copy of Charles M. Bakewell’s Source Book in Ancient Philosophy (1907), TSE had scored: “For with earth we perceive earth, with water, water, with air, the air divine, and with fire, the devouring fire, and love we perceive by means of love, hate by means of dismal hate” (46).
Smidt 34: “Eliot told me in 1948 that it was during the writing of East Coker that the whole sequence began to emerge, with the symbolism of the four seasons and the four elements. Burnt Norton then had to stand for spring in the sequence, though its imagery was perhaps more summery.”
Hayward’s notes for Leyris’s French translation (1950) began by recommending Helen Gardner’s The Art of T. S. Eliot, “but more helpful and suggestive than any critical study is the background of knowledge provided by the poet’s own earlier writings, in prose as well as verse. Only with this knowledge can the evolution of much of the meaning of the Four Quartets be properly understood · · · In a letter to an American student Mr. Eliot states that the four poems ‘gradually began to assume, perhaps only for convenience, a relationship to the four seasons and the four elements’. This relationship is merely implied and should not be stressed. Viz. Burnt Norton: air; early summer. East Coker: earth; late summer. The Dry Salvages: water; autumn. Little Gidding: fire; winter.”
Translations. To Paul Flamand, 29 Jan 1946: “in the course of the last few years, translations of all of these Four Quartets have appeared separately in one or another French review, all by different translators mainly of mediocre quality and none of them under my supervision.” To Jean Mambrino, 25 Nov 1946: “As for the Four Quartets, I must admit that I am not really satisfied with any of the translations which I have so far seen in magazines, though that done by Madame Bosco and Monsieur Gide is certainly the best.” To E. R. Curtius, 30 June 1947: “it seems to me that if poetry is to be translated at all it should appear in several translations and not be restricted to the interpretation of one translator”. To the Public Orator of Oxford University, Thomas Higham, 27 June 1948, after receiving an honorary D.Litt: “I have been able to appreciate the virtuosity, and relish the wit, of your words in reading them at leisure: and I can only say that I would gladly confide to you the authority, which you would less gladly accept, to translate—or restore—
the whole of my works into Latin. I am convinced that I should be better served, than I have been by some of my translators into other tongues.”
Copies of the French translations of East Coker by Roger Montandon (Lettres 31 May 1944) and of Little Gidding by André Gide and Madeleine Bosco (Aguedal Dec 1943) and then by Pierre Leyris (Dieu Vivant 13, 1949) are at King’s with annotations by TSE. The more important of his comments are recorded below. The pages of the Leyris have not been cut open, so TSE did not read the entire translation in this copy. On 24 Oct 1949, however, he wrote to Leyris’s publisher to secure Hayward a £30 fee for his work on it, offering if necessary to reduce his own royalties.
In Sept 1947, HMV issued TSE’s recording of Four Quartets with, as a Leaflet, an Author’s Note. This had been submitted to Evelyn Donald of the British Council on 10 Apr, and had been slightly revised. It was subsequently printed on the record sleeve.
A recording of a poem read by its author is no more definitive an “interpretation” than a recording of a symphony conducted by the composer. The [draft: A] poem, if it is of any depth and complexity, will have meanings in it concealed from the author, and should be capable of being read in many ways, and with a variety of emotional emphases.
[Poems I 177–209 · Textual History II 483–545]
A good poem, indeed, is one which even [draft: the most inexpert reading cannot wholly ruin, and which even] the most accomplished reading cannot exhaust.
What the recording of a poem by its author can and should preserve, is the way that poem sounded to the author when he had finished it. The disposition of lines on the page, and the punctuation (which includes the absence of punctuation marks, when they are omitted where the reader would expect them) can never give an exact notation of the author’s metric. The chief value of the author’s record, then, is as a guide to the rhythms.
Another reader, reciting the poem, need not feel bound to reproduce these rhythms; but, if he has studied the author’s version, he can assure himself that he is departing from it deliberately, and not from ignorance.
[Poems I 177–209 · Textual History II 483–545]
Four Quartets: Commentary
Burnt Norton
1. The House and TSE’s Visit 2. Genesis
Published within 1936. No independent reprint was envisaged until the success of the Faber pamphlet of East Coker prompted a similar pamphlet of Burnt Norton, 20 Feb 1941 (five impressions to 1943). No separate US publication. Within Four Quartets in US 1943, 1944+.
1. THE HOUSE AND TSE’S VISIT
Hayward: “The poem takes its title from the chateau Burnt Norton, near Campden in Gloucestershire, the property of Viscount Sandon, elder son of the Earl of Harrowby. The chateau was uninhabited when the poet visited it as a stranger in the summer of 1934 during a holiday in Campden.”
Overlooking the Vale of Evesham, a mile north-west of Chipping Campden in Gloucestershire, Norton House was enhanced in the 18th century with extensive gardens by Sir William Keyt, but in Sept 1741, after a week of drinking, he set fire to the house and immolated himself. The ruins were pulled down in 1789, and the 17th-century farmhouse, subsequently expanded, became known as Burnt Norton. The estate was acquired by the Earls of Harrowby, and in 1902 the 5th Earl extended the rose-garden and constructed a swimming pool and a semi-circular amphitheatre. TSE to Raymond Preston, 9 Aug 1945: “I know nothing of the history of the house and what you tell me about Sir William Keyt is news to me. I daresay that I found some obscure attraction in the name, but otherwise I am afraid this house was only a point of departure for my poem. Indeed I suspect that anyone visiting the house with my poem in mind might find the house and gardens disappointingly commonplace.” To Hermann Peschmann, 12 Sept 1945: “You are quite correct in identifying the manor house Burnt Norton, and no doubt when you saw the house you were disappointed. The poetry—if any—is in the poem and not in the house. It is a perfectly third-rate manor house built on the site of an older one which had been destroyed by fire. I merely happened upon it one day when it was unoccupied; I think there was someone living in the lodge but I wandered through the grounds quite freely and it provided the suggestion for a deserted house.”
During his year in the US, 1932–33, TSE had met Dr. John Carroll Perkins, Minister of the Unitarian Chapel in Boston, and his wife, the aunt of TSE’s friend Emily Hale. In 1934—and for the next two summers—the Perkinses rented a house in Chipping Campden in the Cotswolds, where Emily Hale stayed with them. Soon after their arrival TSE was invited for the weekend. TSE to Mrs. Perkins, 30 July 1934: “I should like to formulate, if not express, my appreciation of a delightful weekend”. He visited again a month or so later, writing with renewed thanks on 4 Sept. Although none of his letters of 1934 is known to mention Burnt Norton, it is likely that he and Emily came upon it in late August or early September.
[Poem I 179–84 · Textual History II 486–90]
Jeanette McPherrin, a friend of Emily Hale’s, later wrote to Judy Sahak, Librarian of Scripps College, 6 July 1980, that her own letters contained “no revelations about the relationship between Mr. Eliot and Miss Hale · · · which modern readers would find unbelievably ‘proper’ in the Victorian sense.” For TSE’s visit to the Perkinses, 26–29 Sept 1935, see headnote to A Valedictory Forbidding Mourning.
In The Recent Poetry of T. S. Eliot (in New Writing and Daylight, ed. John Lehmann, 1942), Helen Gardner gave a history of the house. On 2 Dec 1942, TSE wrote to her: “I have no such connection as you suggest with the house at Burnt Norton. It would not be worth while mentioning this except that it seemed to me to make a difference to the feeling that it should be merely a deserted house and garden wandered into without knowing anything whatsoever about the history of the house or who had lived in it. I am afraid, however, reading your comments, that anyone who visited the place would be disappointed by the mediocrity of both house and garden” (Composition FQ 37).
2. GENESIS
“For instance, the first of my Quartets is Burnt Norton: the inspiration for that was certain lines which were cut out of the beginning of Murder in the Cathedral. The lines are not identically reproduced, but essentially they are the same · · · the producer pointed out to me that the lines were strictly irrelevant to the action and didn’t get things forward. Well, those lines led to Burnt Norton”, A Conversation, recorded in 1958, between T. S. Eliot and Leslie Paul ([1964/]1965). Composition FQ 39: “The opening · · · was originally written as a comment by the Second Priest after the exit of the Second Tempter. The second of Thomas’s temptations is the temptation to attempt to retrace one’s steps, to try to go back to the moment when a choice was made and make a different choice.” The lines were cut before the first performance:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in the future.
Time future is contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is a conjecture
Remaining a permanent possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Into the rose-garden.
(Published in Composition FQ 82, omitting lines 4–5, 9–10)
For the context of a poem as opposed to a play, see Chad Schrock, EinC Jan 2014. TSE: “I was not writing verse of the same kind as my own lyric poems: but it struck me that I was using a verse which would serve my purpose for this one play and subject, and for no other”, The Aims of Poetic Drama (Nov 1949).
[Poem I 179–84 · Textual History II 486–90]
Grover Smith 1996 94–98 discusses the possible influence on Part I of Frederic H. W. Myers’s Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (1903, notably the sentence “In dealing with Time Past we have memory and written record,
in dealing with Time Future we have forethought, drawing inferences from the past”); as also An Adventure by Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain (1911, re-issued by Faber 1931) and An Experiment with Time by J. W. Dunne (1927, re-issued by Faber 1934). TSE to R. L. Mégroz, 26 Oct 1927, after the first appearance of Dunne’s book: “In view of a recent book on the subject, which has aroused a good deal of interest, I suggest that if you could get together an anthology of anticipation dreams it would go particularly well. I have never had any such myself, but I think that they are not uncommon.”
In the year of the Faber re-issue of An Experiment with Time, Ethelbert in The Rock (15–16) referred to its theory of serialism: “There’s some new notion about time, what says that the past—what’s be’ind you—is what’s goin’ to ’appen in the future, bein’ as the future ’as already ’appened. I ’aven’t ’ad time to get the ’ang of it yet; but when I read about all those old blokes they seems much like us.” Burnt Norton was composed the following year. TSE to Bonamy Dobrée, 7 Feb 1934: “Thats rather odd your Saying you may be in London from the 18th to the 17th it sounds to me like an Experiment with time nevertheless huzza.”
In a letter to Hayward, 5 Aug 1941, TSE acknowledged three literary sources for Burnt Norton: his own Landscapes I. New Hampshire, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s The Lost Bower (see note to Little Gidding II 67–96, first venture in verse [22]) and Kipling’s “They” (see note to Burnt Norton I 30–38). Kipling’s story (in Traffics and Discoveries, 1904) tells of an unplanned visit to a secluded garden, a child’s “laugh among the yew-peacocks”, “the silver of a fountain behind a hedge thrown up against the sun”, “the utterly happy chuckle of a child absorbed in some light mischief”, and a “broad stone path where the fountain-basin lay like one star-sapphire”.
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 129
