"ALL SHALL BE WELL, AND / ALL MANNER OF THING SHALL BE WELL": FOUR QUARTETS, THE CULMINATING WORK OF T.S. ELIOT'S LATER CAREER, INSCRIBED BY THE POET IN LITTLE GIDDING

ELIOT, T.S. Four Quartets: Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding. London: Faber and Faber, 1940-42. Four pamphlets. Octavo, original blue-green, gold, light blue and mauve paper wrappers. $17,500.

First separately published editions of each of Eliot's Four Quartets, in their original paper wrappers; "Little Gidding" inscribed by the author on the title page to his Swedish publisher: "to Mr. & Mrs. Kaj Bonnier with the author's best wishes. T.S. Eliot."

The four parts of Eliot's celebrated Four Quartets made their first appearances between 1936 and 1942. "Burnt Norton," based upon lines Eliot excised from his verse drama Murder in the Cathedral, was first published in the poet's Collected Poems (1936). Later, Eliot decided that "Burnt Norton" should not stand alone and began composing three additional "quartets," the poems aspiring to the structured, harmonious condition of music. It would be the fourth part, "Little Gidding," that would prove to be the most challenging to complete. "The difficulty was that he had started work on the poem before he had adequately prepared himself, although his haste was understandable. For the previous ten months London and the provincial cities had been bombed night after night [and although] the worst of the blitz was now over, no one knew it then, and at this perilous juncture in the war Eliot had been anxiously writing against time… he experienced the horror of the German raids: the nightly bombings, the streets blocked with rubble, the glow in the evenings as fires burned throughout the city, and the peculiarly dank smell of ruined buildings; it was this which provoked fear, precluded concentration on other things, and destroyed the will to work." His brief service as an air-raid warden provided the background of one of the greatest sequences in the poem, his meeting with a ghost-like, half-glimpsed figure "near the ending of interminable night," but his health was severely affected by his efforts and his general anxiety at the events around him, one friend noting at one point that "he seemed to be holding himself together, almost as if he were a piece of riveted china." The final part of Four Quartets "was by far the most laboriously produced of the sequence; there are some five drafts, and thirteen separate typescripts, extant." Finally, in September of 1942, he finished. "In 'Little Gidding' and Four Quartets as a whole, we see the outlines of a tradition, beautifully limned but shimmering like an hallucination before it disappears and the sirens of a catastrophic European war intrude. The ambivalence between the formal order of the poem and troubled intimations of its own fragility, between its direct eloquence and the presence of Eliot's private memories concealed beneath the surface of that eloquence, gives the poem its power" (Peter Ackroyd, T.S. Eliot). These—"East Coker," "The Dry Salvages," "Little Gidding"—appeared in the journal New English Weekly in 1940, 1941 and 1942 respectively. Faber and Faber then published each separately in pamphlet form to make the first collection of the Four Quartets as a uniform set. Although separately issued and each an individual poem, the Four Quartets as finally realized are parts of a unified work loosely based upon the scheme of the four seasons and the four elements. Named after American or English villages and landscapes, the poems are meditations upon conflict and peace, poetry and philosophy, time and eternity. The first of Eliot's poems to reach a wide public, their celebration of England and Anglicanism was seen as a unifying force in the besieged England of World War Two. "Little Gidding" is the first issue (sewn rather than wire-stitched). "East Coker" is technically the third edition, as usual, but is often referred to as the first as it is the first Faber edition and is preceded only by two extremely rare New English Weekly Supplement printings. Gallup A36c, A37, A39, A42. "Little Gidding" inscribed by Eliot to his Swedish publisher Kaj Bonnier and his wife Ulla, who hosted a dinner party for Eliot in Stockholm on the occasion of his Nobel Prize presentation. "East Coker" with inked and penciled owner inscriptions; "Dry Salvages" with penciled initials.

Wrapper edges mildly to moderately toned; "Burnt Norton" and "East Coker" with usual rusting to staples, the latter with spots of minor foxing. An extremely good set, inscribed and offering a pleasing connection to Eliot's career.