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Bettie's Books

A Stuga On the Cusp of the Orust Riviera, tucked away next to a hobbit hole in the woods.

Four Quartets

Four Quartets - T.S. Eliot

bookshelves: radio-4, published-1943, winter-20132014, poetry, nobel-laureate, philosophy, religion

Read from January 16 to 19, 2014

 

Sat 18/1/2014 R4

Jeremy Irons reads TS Eliot's four linked meditations.

BBC description: Four Quartets is the culminating achievement of T.S. Eliot's career as a poet. While containing some of the most musical and unforgettable passages in twentieth-century poetry, its four parts, 'Burnt Norton', 'East Coker', 'The Dry Salvages' and 'Little Gidding', present a rigorous meditation on the spiritual, philosophical and personal themes which preoccupied the author. It was the way in which a private voice was heard to speak for the concerns of an entire generation, in the midst of war and doubt, that confirmed it as an enduring masterpiece.

With an introduction by Michael Symmons Roberts, Lord David Alton and Gail McDonald.


It is all very Proustian:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.


Found it a wonderful experience to read as I listened, and you can listen too. Without this I would have read salvages the wrong way: Eliot wrote it to be pronounced 'salve-ages', which is incredibly neat and in context.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.


4* Four Quartets
3* The Waste Land
5* Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
3* Murder in the Cathedral