THE title Four Quartets covers the four poems Burnt Norton,
East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding, which
are discussed in that order in the following pages. It has
been pointed out that the technique of Eliot's poetry resembles
the thematic statement and development of music, and the
title is appropriate for related reasons, two of which I suggest
on page 41 and page 51 of the present essay. Another point
to which the title draws our attention has been stated by
Herbert Read in a comment on some of his own poems:

'They constitute a search for a form for the long poem which
is not merely a continuation of the same thing more or less
indefinitely (blank verse, rhymed couplets, etc.), or an
addition of identical units (a sonnet sequence), but a poem
on the analogy of the Quartet in music, with separate move-
ments, forms within the form, diversity within unity. . . .' ¹

It needs to be added that Eliot's poems constitute a search
for something more than a poetic form: the poetic form has
been found. Miss Helen Gardner has already described the
form in an essay, to which I shall refer again, called 'The
Recent Poetry of T. S. Eliot' and published by the Hogarth
Press in New Writing and Daylight, Summer, 1942.

The two Greek epigraphs to Burnt Norton are taken from
the Fragments of the early Greek philosopher Heraclitus.
I quote two versions of the first:

'Therefore it is a duty to follow the common law. But
although the Logos ("Word") is common to all, the
majority of people live as though they had an understand-
ing of their own' ( Diels: Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics).
'The law of things is a law of Reason Universal, but most
men live as though they had a wisdom of their own'
( J. M. Mitchell).

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