T. S. Eliot – Page 6 – Interesting Literature

A Short Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Little Gidding’ is the last of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, but it is also his last significant poem. What’s more, there is a sense in this poem of Eliot seeking to join the threads of his work together, to ‘set a crown upon a lifetime’s effort’, as he puts it in ‘Little Gidding’ itself. But this remains a puzzlingly abstract poem in some ways, resisting any straightforward explication or analysis. There is nothing little about ‘Little Gidding’. You can read the poem here.

A Summary and Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ was first published in 1919 in the literary magazine The Egoist. It was published in two parts, in the September and December issues. The essay was written by a young American poet named T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), who had been living in London for the last few years, and who had published his first volume of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, in 1917.

A Short Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Dry Salvages’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Air was the loose elemental theme of ‘Burnt Norton’, earth the element of ‘East Coker’. In ‘The Dry Salvages’, the third of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, we find ourselves among a different element: water. The Dry Salvages, as Eliot’s note tells us, is probably derived from the French les trois sauvages, and is a small group of rocks off Cape Ann in Massachusetts. (‘Salvages’ should be pronounced ‘sal-VAY-jiz’ rather than ‘SAL-vi-jiz’.) In this poem, Eliot further analyses and explores a number of themes including Christianity and divination, the future and the past, using water as a chief symbol. You can read ‘The Dry Salvages’ here.

We begin the first of the five sections of ‘The Dry Salvages’ with what we might style a comparative analysis of the river and the sea. The ‘strong brown’ river, the Mississippi, which is ‘untamed and intractable’, and has served as a frontier and as a conduit for commerce. But unlike the river, which is within us, the sea is all about us. The river is a ‘god’, but the sea has ‘many gods’ and ‘many voices’: a polytheistic force of nature.

A Short Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘East Coker’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘East Coker’ is the second poem in T. S. Eliot’s four-part sequence, Four Quartets. Eliot wrote ‘East Coker’ during the Second World War, and the poem was published in 1940. It became an immediate bestseller, selling 12,000 copies shortly after publication. (Characteristically, Eliot’s response was to say the poem can’t have been very good if so many people liked it.) The themes and images Eliot uses in ‘East Coker’ have been analysed and interpreted in a variety of ways.

Start with that title: as with the previous poem, ‘Burnt Norton’, the small Somerset village of East Coker is a place that Eliot had visited shortly before writing the poem. It was his ancestral home, where his namesake and distant ancestor Sir Thomas Elyot lived in the sixteenth century. Eliot will quote from Elyot’s The Boke Named the Governour (1531) in the first section of ‘East Coker’.

A Summary and Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Burnt Norton’ is the first poem in T. S. Eliot’s last great cycle of poems, Four Quartets. It was published in 1935 as a standalone poem; it would only be five years later, when Eliot wrote ‘East Coker’, that he came up with the idea of writing four poems loosely based around significant places for Eliot.