1. History

    Burnt Norton · The whole quartet

    Burnt Norton was not planned as the first of four poems. Eliot later said that it began with passages that had to be cut from his verse play Murder in the Cathedral (1935), and it was first published as the last poem in Collected Poems 1909–1935 (1936), as a free-standing work.

    Only in 1940, with East Coker, did the idea of a set of poems with a common pattern take shape; The Dry Salvages (1941) and Little Gidding (1942) followed during the war, and the four were first published together as Four Quartets in New York in 1943 and London in 1944. Burnt Norton therefore sets a pattern the later poems choose to follow, rather than one it was written to fit.

    Established Time

    Sources Hall 1959 (locator to be verified) Gardner 1978 (locator to be verified) T. S. Eliot

    See also Why “quartets”? “Very much reality”

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