Four Quartets

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Four Quartets, TS Eliot’s last great work which he composed, against a background of imminent and actual world war, as meditations on the relationship between time and humanity.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• David Moody No other episodes
  Emeritus Professor of English and American Literature at the University of York
• Fran Brearton 5 episodes
  Professor of Modern Poetry at Queen's University, Belfast
• Mark Ford 4 episodes
  Professor of English and American Literature at University College London

Reading list

• T. S. Eliot
  Peter Ackroyd (Simon & Schuster, 1984) Google Books →
• T. S. Eliot and the Ideology of Four Quartets
  John Xiros Cooper (Cambridge University Press, 1995) Google Books →
• Collected Poems 1909-1962
  T. S. Eliot (Faber & Faber, 2002) Google Books →
• Four Quartets
  T. S. Eliot (Faber & Faber, 2001) Google Books →
• The Composition of Four Quartets
  Helen Gardner (Faber & Faber, 1978) Google Books →
• The Imperfect Life of T. S. Eliot
  Lyndall Gordon (Virago, 2012) Google Books →
• Thomas Stearns Eliot: Poet
  A. David Moody (Cambridge University Press, 1994) Google Books →
• The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot
  A. David Moody (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 1994) Google Books →
• Tracing T. S. Eliot's Spirit. Essays on his Poetry and Thought
  A. David Moody (Cambridge University Press, 1996) Google Books →
• T. S. Eliot and Prejudice
  Christopher Ricks (Faber & Faber, 1988) Google Books →
• The Poems of T. S. Eliot: Vol. I: Collected and Uncollected Poems
  Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (eds.) (Faber & Faber, 2015)
• Eliot's Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art
  Ronald Schuchard (Oxford University Press, 1999) Google Books →

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Programme ID: b0858w43

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0858w43

Auto-category: 821.910 (English poetry)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello, Four Quartets is TS Eliot's last great poem which he 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.