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I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, Four Quartet is T.S.L. It's Last Great Perm,

which you began in the 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 perms from Burnt Norton to East Coca,

the dry salveges, the little giddling. 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 Waste Land, Elliot here sought the universal truth of human experience and did that in

a way that was intensely spiritual, even mystical and also personal as well as public.

We'd meet to discuss Four Quartet's R, David Moody, Emeritus Professor of English and

American Literature of the University of York, Fran Breden, Professor of Modern Poetry at Queen's

University, Belfast and Mark Ford, Professor of English and American Literature at University

College London. Fran Breden, let's look at T.S.L. It's 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. So from

coming over to England at the start of the First World War, the really important first book in terms

of modern poetry is Prifrock and other observations which came out in 1917 and in which in the

love song of jail, it would proofrock, although it's a Prifrisford War poem, he's seen to capture

something of that wartime and post-war sensibility. He follows that of course in 1922 with the Waste Land,

arguably the great long poem of the 20th century and then we come through Ash Wednesday in 1930,

murdering the Cathedral, the playwrights in 1935 and by 1935 he's then published a collected

...