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Hello, Four Quartets is TSLI's last great poem, which he began in years leading up to the

Second World War and completed while London was still being bombed, and he was a fire warden

watching at night for burning buildings.

He was writing for a wide audience in Britain and America and across four poems from

Burnt Norton to East Coker, The Dry Salvagius, The Little Gidding.

He explored the relationship between life, death and time,

and in particular the threats to his adopted England.

Some 20 years later, after his earlier great work, The Wasteland, and yet here sought the universal truths of human experience

and did that in a way that was intensely spiritual, even mystical

and also personal as well as public.

With me to discuss Four quartets R David Moody,

emeritus professor of English and American literature

of the University of York,

Fran Breton, professor of Modern Poetry

at Queens University Belfast, and Mark Ford, Professor of English and

American Literature at University College London.

Fran Brayton, let's look at T.S. L.

its reputation as a poet by the 1930s. Can you just give us a few peaks of what is written by the mid-30s?

I can, yes, and it's notable really how extraordinarily prominent Elliot is by the 1930s and how rapidly that's been achieved.

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