Burnt Norton

The concept of Burnt Norton is connected to Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral; he worked on the poem while the play was being produced during 1935.

[7] "Burnt Norton" was Eliot's only major poem to be completed during a six-year period as he turned to writing plays and continued with his work on essays.

[8] The actual Burnt Norton is a manor located near the village of Aston Subedge in Gloucestershire that Eliot visited with Emily Hale during 1934.

[11] The poem begins with two epigraphs taken from the fragments of Heraclitus: τοῦ λόγου δὲ ἐόντος ξυνοῦ ζώουσιν οἱ πολλοί ὡς ἰδίαν ἔχοντες φρόνησιν ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτήThe first may be translated, "Though wisdom is common, the many live as if they have wisdom of their own"; the second, "the way upward and the way downward is one and the same.

A spiritual "still point of the turning world" is discussed, a state of being which embodies both disruption and order; personal salvation may be found here through thorough introspection.

Images of black clouds, kingfishers, yew trees, and flowers abound, connected by the cyclical nature of eternity.

To help the individual, the poem explains that people must leave the time-bound world and look into their selves, and that poets must seek out a perfection, not bound by time in their images, to escape from the problems of language.

[citation needed] As such, there is an emphasis on the present moment as being the only time period that really matters, because the past cannot be changed and the future is unknown.

The poem emphasizes that memory must be abandoned to understand the current world, and humans must realize that the universe is based on order.

[21] Other sources include Stéphane Mallarmé's poetry, especially "Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire" and "M'introduire dans ton histoire"[22] and Augustine's Confessions.

Bernard Bergonzi argued that "it was a new departure in Eliot's poetry, and it inevitably resulted in the presence of the manipulatory will that [C. K. Stead] has observed at works in the Quartets, and in the necessity for low-pressure linking passages.

[29] She argued that its "best quality" was "in its reminders of how severe, strenuous, and practical was the poet's approach toward the present enlargement of his philosophical vision.

In particular, he argued that "Over the past quarter of a century, most serious critics—whether or not they find Christian faith impossible—have found in the Quartets the greatest twentieth-century achievements in the poetry of philosophy and religion.

Bergonzi emphasised the "beautifully controlled and suasive opening" and claimed that "It contains some of Eliot's finest poetry, a true musicalization of thought".

[34] According to Peter Ackroyd, "'Burnt Norton', in fact, gains its power and its effects from the modification, withdrawal or suspension of meaning and the only 'truth' to be discovered is the formal unity of the poem itself.