The Composition Of Four Quartets
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Edition: 2nd pr.,
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: dj: worn edges with small chip and sticker residue. Binding - remains tight. Clean and bright copy.
At the heart of twentieth-century English poetry stands T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets — a meditation on time, memory, and spiritual redemption that has captivated readers and scholars for decades — and Helen Gardner's The Composition of Four Quartets offers the most authoritative and intimate account of how this masterwork came into being. Drawing on Eliot's original drafts, worksheets, and correspondence held at the Houghton Library at Harvard, Gardner meticulously reconstructs the creative process behind each of the four poems — Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding — illuminating the revisions, abandoned lines, and pivotal decisions that shaped the final text. Gardner, one of the foremost Eliot scholars of her generation, brings both rigorous textual analysis and profound literary sensitivity to her study, situating Four Quartets within the broader context of Eliot's spiritual and artistic development. Her work is an indispensable companion to anyone who has ever wrestled with the poem's dense philosophical imagery and musical structure, revealing how a great poet transforms private doubt and wartime grief into enduring art. For devotees of modernist literature, this is the definitive backstage pass to one of poetry's most celebrated achievements — and it raises the tantalising question of what further secrets Eliot's manuscripts might yet reveal.
Author: Helen Gardner
Format: Hardback
Published: 1978, Faber and Faber
Genre: Literary theory
Edition: 2nd pr.,
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: dj: worn edges with small chip and sticker residue. Binding - remains tight. Clean and bright copy.
At the heart of twentieth-century English poetry stands T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets — a meditation on time, memory, and spiritual redemption that has captivated readers and scholars for decades — and Helen Gardner's The Composition of Four Quartets offers the most authoritative and intimate account of how this masterwork came into being. Drawing on Eliot's original drafts, worksheets, and correspondence held at the Houghton Library at Harvard, Gardner meticulously reconstructs the creative process behind each of the four poems — Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding — illuminating the revisions, abandoned lines, and pivotal decisions that shaped the final text. Gardner, one of the foremost Eliot scholars of her generation, brings both rigorous textual analysis and profound literary sensitivity to her study, situating Four Quartets within the broader context of Eliot's spiritual and artistic development. Her work is an indispensable companion to anyone who has ever wrestled with the poem's dense philosophical imagery and musical structure, revealing how a great poet transforms private doubt and wartime grief into enduring art. For devotees of modernist literature, this is the definitive backstage pass to one of poetry's most celebrated achievements — and it raises the tantalising question of what further secrets Eliot's manuscripts might yet reveal.