The Composition of Four Quartets

by Helen Gardner

Shipped from UK, please allow 10 to 21 business days for arrival. Good, Reprint Faber 1978, same year as 1st Edition. Royal 8vo. viii, 239pp. Very good cean tight sound square, no bookplate, inscription or marks of any kind, clean crisp corners and edges. Bound in bright gilt lettered blue cloth together with original unclipped trademark matt Faber colour ruled dustwrapperchipped with slight loss to spine, gently rubbed to 3 corners and rubbed to lower joint with very slight surface loss. A great addition to the library of reader and collector alike. 'Dame Helen Gardners vade mecum to Eliot's last masterpiece is, quite simply, indespensible.' John Carey in the Sunday Times.

Genres: Literary Criticism, Poetry, Criticism

239 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Helen Louise Gardner, Professor of English Literature with distinguished critical work on John Donne and T.S. Eliot. First woman to hold the Merton Professor of English Literature chair at Oxford (1966-1975).
Wikipedia

Reviews

[Candy Wood]

This kind of book will not be possible for most literature now written with computers, unless poets or their early readers print and save drafts. Helen Gardner bases her account of Eliot’s composition of Four Quartets on the many manuscript fragments, typed drafts, and collections of correspondence that are preserved in various libraries. She acknowledges that Eliot, even though he donated the early versions to those libraries, might not have been comfortable with the attention to the process, but also notes that he was always willing to discuss and explain choices in later poems as he was not for earlier ones like The Waste Land. Readers who have been puzzled by Four Quartets might be skeptical, but Gardner presents a convincing argument for Eliot’s desire to be more widely understood. Gardner also intends her study to be accessible to anyone who loves the poems, but the minute details of revision as catalogued in Part 2 of the book do appeal more to a specialized reader.

[Liam Guilar · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of those books where the star rating system does not work. It's a meticulous study of the development of 4Qs from letters and drafts. If you're not interested, it's not going to be readable. If you are interested, it's fascinating.