T s eliot biography poems four quartets

The recording of 'The Waste Land' presented here is a particularly exciting find. It dates from , a decade earlier than the well-known and much more widely available recording. Whilst the sound quality is understandably not so good, the recording is fascinating for Eliot's faster, more energetic rendition.

The date of the recording was once thought to be , but recent scholarship has shown that this is incorrect. For those who want to know more about the recording, Richard Swigg's Quick, Said The Bird: Williams, Eliot, Moore and the Spoken Word (University of Iowa Press, ) and Jason Camlot's Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings (Stanford University Press, ) provide detailed discussion. We thank Dr Lacy Rumsey of the ENS de Lyon for providing this information.

In , Nazi Germany invaded Poland, prompting England and other countries to declare war. As Eliot monitored the sky for German warplanes during the bombing of London, he began writing a series of poems later known as the Four Quartets. Each poem&#;"Burnt Norton," "East Coker," "The Dry Salvages," and "Little Gidding"&#;was a meditation on time. The poems also each reflected one of the four seasons as well as one of the four elements. Like The Waste Land, the poems were not an easy read, drawing heavily upon mythology and Christian symbolism. Eliot considered the series his masterpiece.
In his later years, Eliot wrote more plays than poems, including the Tony Award-winning play The Cocktail Party. Though his plays were well-received, they were never as well-known as his verse. It perhaps didn't help that, with his plays, Eliot disliked giving up creative control of his words to actors. He once said (in a huff, we imagine), "The interest of a performer is almost certain to be centred in himself: a very slight acquaintance with actors and musicians will testify."¹³

Eliot also worked on other projects that showed his fun-loving side. A li

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