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'I wish to read the opening passage of T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton,” the first of Four Quartets (1944), because I find it the most difficult part of the poem as well as one of the richest sections of it. Its difficulty and its richness are co- ordinate in ways that need to be specified, and while Four Quartets as a whole continually interprets the opening passage while further enriching it, it is also true that this passage establishes the lines along which we interpret the whole of the Quartets, including what we understand to be the character of its wholeness. “Burnt Norton” was written in the autumn of 1935 and published before the idea of the further three poems came to Eliot.2 That Four Quartets is a whole can scarcely be denied – its unity is thematically and formally insisted upon in “East Coker”, “The Dry Salvages” and especially “Little Gidding”. And yet “Burnt Norton” also exists as a poem in its own right. More exactly, one might say that it once existed simply by itself but now does not. It was progressively taken up into a greater unity, and now the later three sections permeate the first, ramifying and deepening some if not all of its lines. This first poem, section or movement of Four Quartets has two epigraphs taken from Heraclitus, which frame the whole. Let us begin with these.' (Introduction)
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Last amended 15 Feb 2017 10:20:47
Eliot’s Rose-Garden : Some Phenomenology and Theology in “Burnt Norton”