Vier Quartette / Four Quartets

The famous cycle of poems in a new translation of T. S. Eliot's epochal long poem "The Waste Land" (1922) influenced poetry throughout the Western world. It also changed Eliot himself, as the question of spiritual survival in the "wasteland" of modernity drove his work forward. The sum of his reflections is found in the "Four Quartets," the great late poetry he wrote between 1935 and 1942. The "Four Quartets" once again express the world as it is transmitted in the human spirit and is sensibly graspable in the four seasons and the four elements - air, earth, water, fire. They take us to four places from Eliot's biography: "Burnt Norton," "Little Gidding," "Dry Salvages," and finally, "East Coker" - a village in Somerset, England, from where Eliot's ancestors once emigrated to America and where the poet's ashes were interred: "In my end.".