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Four Quartets #1

Four Quartets

Name: Four Quartets
Rating: 4.37 (19726 reviews)
Author: T.S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot January 1, 1943

4.37 19.7k Ratings

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Synopsis

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.

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- "Harmonium"
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The only comprehensive gathering of Frost's published poetry, this affordable volume offers the entire contents of his eleven books of verse, from A Boy's Will (1913) to In the Clearing (1962). Frost scholar Lathem, who was also a close friend of the four-time Pulitzer Prize-winner, scrupulously annotated the 350-plus poems in this collection, which has been the standard edition of Frost's work since it first appeared in 1969.

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E.E. Cummings is without question one of the major poets of the 20th century, and this volume, first published in 1959, is indispensable for every lover of modern lyrical verse. It contains one hundred of Cummings’s wittiest and most profound poems, harvested from thirty-five of the most radically creative years in contemporary American poetry. These poems exhibit all the extraordinary lyricism, playfulness, technical ingenuity, and compassion for which Cummings is famous. They demonstrate beautifully his extrapolations from traditional poetic structures and his departures from them, as well as the unique synthesis of lavish imagery and acute artistic precision that has won him the adulation and respect of critics and poetry lovers everywhere.

The Waste Land and Other Poems

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Librarian Note: Also available as an Alternate Cover Edition.

“And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you
I will show you fear in a handful of dust”

When The Waste Land was published in 1922, initial reaction to the poem was decidedly negative. Critics attacked the poem's "kaleidoscopic" design, and nearly everyone disagreed furiously about its meaning. The poem was even rumored to a hoax. Eventually, though, The Waste Land went on to become what many regard as the most influential poem written in English in the twentieth century.

"In ten years' time," wrote Edmund Wilson in Axel's Castle (1931), "Elliot has left upon English poetry a mark more unmistakable than that of any other poet writing in English." In 1948, T.S. Eliot was awarded the Nobel Price "for his work as a trail-blazing pioneer of modern poetry."

In addition to the title poem, this selection includes "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Geronition," "Ash-Wednesday," and other poems from Eliot's early and middle work.

Includes:
- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
- Preludes
- Gerontion
- Sweeney Among the Nightingales
- The Waste Land:
I. The Burial of the Dead
II. A Game of Chess
III. The Fire Sermon
IV. Death by Water
V. What the Thunder Said
Notes on 'The Waste Land'
- Ash-Wednesday
-J ourney of the Magi
- Marina
- Landscapes:
I. New Hampshire
II. Virginia
III. USK
- Two Choruses from 'The Rock'

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Poems

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Dive deep into The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot anywhere you on a plane, on a mountain, in a canoe, under a tree. Or grab a flashlight and read Shmoop under the covers. Shmoop's award-winning Poetry Guides are now available on your Nook. Shmoop eBooks are like having a trusted, fun, chatty, expert poetry-tour-guide always by your side, no matter where you are (or how late it is at night).

This Shmoop Poetry Guide offers fresh analysis, a line-by-line close reading of the poem, examination of the poet's technique, form, meter, rhyme, symbolism, jaw-dropping trivia, a glossary of poetry terms, and more. Best of all, Shmoop's analysis aims to look at a topic from multiple points of view to give you the fullest understanding.

Experts and educators from top universities, including Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Harvard, have written Shmoop guides designed to engage you and to get your brain bubbling. Shmoop is here to make you a better lover (of poetry) and to help you make connections to other poems, works of literature, current events, and pop culture. For more information, check out shmoop.com/poetry

"Smart and consistently humorous." - The Academy of American Poets

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At the time of his death in 1962, E. E. Cummings was, next to Robert Frost, the most widely read poet in America. Combining Thoreau's controlled belligerence with the brash abandon of an uninhibited bohemian, Cummings, together with Pound, Eliot, and William Carlos Williams, helped bring about the twentieth-century revolution in literary expression. He is recognized on the one hand as the author of some of the most beautiful lyric poems written in the English language, and on the other as one of the most inventive American poets of his time in the worlds of Richard Kostelanetz, "the major American poet of the middle-twentieth-century."

The Waste Land

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The Waste Land, first published in 1922, is often regarded as T.S. Eliot's masterpiece, as well as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry.

The work, divided in 5 sections, juxtaposes the legend of the Holy Grail and the Fisher King, with a snapshot of early twentieth-century British society. In contemporary times, it is often read published within The Waste Land and Other Poems and has come to be Eliot's most popular poem.

T.S. Elliot
was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor. Born in 1888 in St. Louis (MO, USA), he is considered one of the 20th century's major poets, and a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry."In ten years' time," wrote Edmund Wilson in Axel's Castle (1931), "Elliot has left upon English poetry a mark more unmistakable than that of any other poet writing in English." In 1948, Eliot was awarded the Nobel Price "for his work as a trail-blazing pioneer of modern poetry."

The Cantos

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The Cantos by Ezra Pound is a long, incomplete poem in 116 sections, each of which is a canto. Most of it was written between 1915 and 1962, although much of the early work was abandoned and the early cantos, as finally published, date from 1922 onwards. It is a book-length work, widely considered to be an intense and challenging read. The Cantos is generally considered one of the most significant works of modernist poetry in the 20th century. As in Pound's prose writing, the themes of economics, governance and culture are integral to the work's content.

The most striking feature of the text, to a casual browser, is the inclusion of Chinese characters as well as quotations in European languages other than English. A close reader will normally require a scholarly commentary to help understand the text. The range of allusion to historical events is broad, and abrupt changes occur with little transition.

There is also wide geographical reference. Pound added to his earlier interests in the classical Mediterranean culture and East Asia selective topics from medieval and early modern Italy and Provence, the beginnings of the United States, England of the 17th century, and details from Africa he had obtained from Leo Frobenius. Many references in the text lack explanation. Pound initially believed that he possessed poetic and rhetorical techniques which would themselves generate significance, but as time passed he became more concerned with the messages he wished to convey.

The section he wrote at the end of World War II, begun while he was interned in American-occupied Italy, has become known as The Pisan Cantos. It was awarded the first Bollingen Prize in 1948. There were many repercussions, since this in effect honoured a poet who was under indictment for treason.

:::

Delmore Schwartz said about The Cantos, "They are one of the touchstones of modern poetry." William Carlos Williams said, "[Pound] discloses history by its odor, by the feel of it—in the words; fuses it with the words, present and past, to MAKE his Cantos. Make them."

Since the 1969 revised edition, the Italian Cantos LXXII and LXXIII (as well as a 1966 fragment concluding the work) have been added. Now appearing for the first time is Pound's recently found English translation of Italian Canto LXXII.

Four Quartets

Books similar to Four Quartets

The Collected Poems

The Poetry of Robert Frost

100 Selected Poems

The Waste Land and Other Poems

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Poems

E.E. Cummings: Complete Poems 1904-1962

The Waste Land

The Cantos

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