Sources

The works Eliot drew on or answered, and the scholarship the notes rely on. Notes paraphrase and cite; they do not quote critics or letters. A dagger in a note marks a citation whose page or section has not yet been checked against the source.

Intertexts

Heraclitus of Ephesus, Fragments (c. 500 BCE)

Pre-Socratic philosopher of flux and of the logos, the account common to all. Two of his fragments, in Greek, stand as epigraphs to Burnt Norton.

Cited in The two fragments of Heraclitus , One way, and the same

St John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel; The Dark Night (1578–1591)

Spanish Carmelite mystic and poet. His teaching that the soul reaches God through darkness, detachment and ‘nothing’ shapes the descents of Burnt Norton III and East Coker III; the paradoxes near the end of East Coker III closely follow maxims in the Ascent (Book I, chapter 13).

Cited in Descend lower: the dark night , The ten stairs , Three privations

Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (late 14th century)

Anchoress at St Julian's church, Norwich, and the first woman known to have written a book in English. Her thirteenth showing, with its assurance that all shall be well, is woven through Little Gidding III and V.

Anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing (later 14th century)

English contemplative treatise teaching that God is known by love rather than by thought. A phrase from its second chapter appears, set apart as a single line, in Little Gidding V.

Anonymous (part of the Mahabharata), Bhagavad Gita (date debated; commonly placed in the last centuries BCE)

Krishna's counsel to Arjuna before battle: act without attachment to the fruits of action. Eliot, who studied Sanskrit at Harvard, sets it at the centre of The Dry Salvages III.

Cited in The lotos

Dante Alighieri, Commedia (c. 1308–1321)

Inferno XV (Dante's meeting with his old teacher Brunetto Latini) is the model for the dawn encounter in Little Gidding II; Purgatorio XXVI supplies the refining fire; Paradiso's closing cantos supply the rose and the knot of the final lines.

Cited in Neither light nor darkness , Blown by the wind , The still point , Unmoving love

Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour (1531)

Tudor treatise on the education of rulers. Its chapter on dancing as a figure of matrimony and concord is quoted, in its old spelling, in the midsummer dance of East Coker I.

Stéphane Mallarmé, “Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe” (1876–77)

Mallarmé's sonnet praises Poe for giving ‘a purer sense to the words of the tribe’. Little Gidding II turns the phrase into English as one of the poet's tasks.

Ludwig van Beethoven, String Quartet in A minor, Op. 132, and the late quartets (1825–26)

Op. 132's slow movement is a hymn of thanksgiving in the Lydian mode. The sequence's title and five-movement form invite comparison with the late quartets, which Eliot is known to have admired.

Cited in Why “quartets”?

Nicholas Ferrar and family, The Little Gidding community (1626–1657)

A household of prayer founded by Nicholas Ferrar (1592–1637) in a remote Huntingdonshire manor, keeping hours of prayer day and night. Ferrar was a friend of George Herbert and saw The Temple through the press in 1633.

T. S. Eliot, Fire-watching in the Blitz (1940–41)

During the German bombing of London Eliot served as a fire-watcher at the Faber and Faber offices in Russell Square. Little Gidding II sets its encounter at dawn after a raid.

Mary, Queen of Scots, Motto: En ma fin est mon commencement (16th century)

The motto (‘In my end is my beginning’), which Mary is said to have had embroidered on her cloth of state, is inverted and restored at the start and close of East Coker.

John Milton, Samson Agonistes (1671)

Blind Samson's lament begins with the thrice-repeated ‘dark’ that opens East Coker III.

The Hebrew Bible, Ecclesiastes (c. 3rd century BCE (debated))

‘To every thing there is a season’: the catalogue of times in chapter 3 underlies the cycles of building and falling in East Coker I.

Cited in An argument about time

Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

The Mississippi as a living presence. Eliot, born beside the river at St Louis, later wrote an introduction to the novel.

T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral (1935)

Eliot's verse play for Canterbury. Burnt Norton grew partly from lines cut from it, and one of the poem's best-known sentences first appears in the play.

Cited in How Burnt Norton was made , “Very much reality”

T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)

Eliot's earlier long poem. Its hyacinth garden, its thrush and its fragmented voices are recalled, and answered, in the quartets.

Cited in The deceiving thrush , The heart of light

Rudyard Kipling, “They” (1904)

A short story (in Traffics and Discoveries) in which a visitor to an English country house senses the ghosts of children in its garden. Eliot admired Kipling and edited A Choice of Kipling's Verse (1941).

Cited in Who are “they”? , Hidden children

John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819)

The ode on a painted vase whose figures are forever in motion and forever still, and whose melodies are sweeter for being unheard.

Cited in The Chinese jar , Unheard music

John Donne, “The Extasie” (published 1633)

A metaphysical love poem in which the lovers' eye-beams twist together into a single thread. Eliot's essays did much to revive Donne's reputation.

Cited in The crossing eyebeam

Stéphane Mallarmé, “M'introduire dans ton histoire” (1886)

A late sonnet whose close pictures thunder and rubies at the hubs of a chariot's wheels; commentators trace the opening of Burnt Norton II to it.

Cited in The lyric: earth and stars , The axle-tree

William Blake, “Ah! Sun-flower” (1794)

From Songs of Experience: the sunflower, weary of time, counting the steps of the sun.

Cited in Sunflower and clematis

Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As kingfishers catch fire” (written c. 1877; published 1918)

A sonnet in which each creature, like the kingfisher flashing in the light, expresses its own nature.

Cited in The kingfisher's flash

Gustave Flaubert, La Tentation de saint Antoine (1874)

A dramatic prose work in which the desert hermit Anthony is assailed by visions; near its end the Chimera and the Sphinx converse.

Cited in The disconsolate chimera

The Bible, Authorized (King James) Version (1611)

Quoted and alluded to throughout the sequence: Ecclesiastes, the Gospels, the Pentecost of Acts 2.

Cited in The Word in the desert

Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book XII (Lambda) (4th century BCE)

Sets out the idea of an unmoved mover: an eternal first cause that moves all things as an object of love and desire, without itself moving.

Cited in Unmoving love

Scholarship and editions

T. S. Eliot (1944). Four Quartets . London: Faber and Faber.

First British edition of the collected sequence (the first American edition appeared from Harcourt, Brace in 1943).

Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (eds.) (2015). The Poems of T. S. Eliot, Volume I: Collected and Uncollected Poems . London: Faber and Faber.

The standard annotated edition; its commentary gathers sources, drafts and Eliot's own remarks.

Cited in 5 notes.

Helen Gardner (1949). The Art of T. S. Eliot . London: Cresset Press.

Early and influential account of the five-movement structure shared by the quartets.

Cited in 7 notes.

Helen Gardner (1978). The Composition of Four Quartets . London: Faber and Faber.

Drafts, sources and correspondence (notably with John Hayward) behind the sequence.

Cited in 2 notes.

Lyndall Gordon (1998). T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life . London: Vintage.

Biography; revises her Eliot's Early Years (1977) and Eliot's New Life (1988).

Cited in 4 notes.

Peter Ackroyd (1984). T. S. Eliot . London: Hamish Hamilton.

Robert Crawford (2022). Eliot After The Waste Land . London: Jonathan Cape.

Second volume of Crawford's biography; draws on the Emily Hale letters opened in 2020.

Cited in 1 note.

B. C. Southam (1994). A Student's Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot (6th edn) . London: Faber and Faber.

Cited in 2 notes.

Grover Smith (1956). T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Harry Blamires (1969). Word Unheard: A Guide Through Eliot's Four Quartets . London: Methuen.

Hugh Kenner (1959). The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot . New York: McDowell, Obolensky.

Denis Donoghue (2000). Words Alone: The Poet T. S. Eliot . New Haven: Yale University Press.

A. David Moody (ed.) (1994). The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

T. S. Eliot (1942). “The Music of Poetry” (W. P. Ker Memorial Lecture, Glasgow), reprinted in On Poetry and Poets (1957) . London: Faber and Faber.

Eliot's own discussion of recurrent themes and musical analogy in verse.

Cited in 3 notes.

T. S. Eliot (1950). “What Dante Means to Me”, reprinted in To Criticize the Critic (1965) . London: Faber and Faber.

Includes Eliot's account of imitating Dante's terza rima in Little Gidding II.

T. S. Eliot (1950). Introduction to Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . London: Cresset Press.

Eliot writes about the Mississippi of his childhood as a presence in the book.

Donald Hall (1959). “T. S. Eliot, The Art of Poetry No. 1” (interview), The Paris Review 21 .

Cited in 1 note.

Valerie Eliot, Hugh Haughton and John Haffenden (eds.) (1988–). The Letters of T. S. Eliot . London: Faber and Faber.

Princeton University Library (2020). Emily Hale Letters from T. S. Eliot (C1540), opened to readers January 2020 .

Hermann Diels (1903). Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker . Berlin: Weidmann.

The edition from which Burnt Norton's two Greek epigraphs are taken (Heraclitus, frr. 2 and 60).

Cited in 1 note.