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T. S. EliotA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
“They Are All Gone into the World of Light” by Henry Vaughan (1655)
Henry Vaughan was a Welsh poet of the 1600s. Many of his poems feature spiritual themes and religious devotion, as well as explorations of the afterlife. In this poem, light and dark symbolize life and death as the speaker welcomes death as the truest freedom attainable by humans.
“A Clock Stopped” by Emily Dickinson
In this poem by 19th century American poet Emily Dickinson, the image of a stopped clock enables the speaker to explore the meaning of life and death. The personification of the clock, whose mechanisms cannot be restored once they pause, reveals Dickinson’s questions about the afterlife.
“Guernica” by James Johnson Sweeney (1940)
American art curator and poet James Johnson Sweeney wrote this poem in 1940 about the destruction of the Spanish Basque town of Guernica in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. The violence of its vivid war imagery communicates the senselessness of death and the misery of battle—themes echoing throughout the genre of war poetry.
"T.S. Eliot Wins the Nobel Prize" (1948)
Written in 1948, when Eliot received the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature, this entry on the Nobel Prize website illuminates Eliot’s reputation amongst his contemporaries. Because it was written at the time of the award, the brief biography and the descriptions of Eliot’s contributions to literature illuminate for readers today how Eliot was received during his lifetime.
"The “Four Quartets” on Stage" (2021)
In summer of 2021, British actor and director Ralph Fiennes performed his own theatrical conceptualization of Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” in the Theatre Royal Bath and on tour in the UK. This review of the performance in British newspaper The Guardian points out the similarities in tone between Eliot’s poems, written during wartime, and contemporary artistic works of today.
This interview with Eliot from The Paris Review was first published in 1959. Titled “The Art of Poetry, No. 1,” the interview with poet Donald Hall reveals, in Eliot’s own words, his sense of humor and thoughts regarding his early disparagement of fellow poet Ezra Pound.
Embedded in this article on Open Culture, a website full of free cultural and educational materials, is a complete recording of T.S. Eliot himself reading the “Four Quartets.”
By T. S. Eliot