Fire Transfigured in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets

Abstract

It has been fairly well established that one of the organizing principles Eliot used when he wrote Four Quartets was to equate each of the poem’s parts with one of nature’s four elements:

‘Burnt Norton’ is a poem about air, on which whispers are borne, intangible itself, but the medium of communication; ‘East Coker’ is a poem about earth, the dust of which we are made and into which we shall return;… ‘The Dry Salvages’ is a poem about water… [while] ‘Little Gidding’ is a poem about fire, the purest of the elements, by which some have thought the world would end, fire which consumes and purifies.²

the communication Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living. “Little Gidding,” I, 52–53¹